The Exhaustion of the Possible and the Invention of Life

This paper examines the structural relationship between human agency, complexity, and the generation of value in the absence of a teleological foundation of reality. It argues that the historical expansion of human capacities—understood as the increasing complexity of what can be done—has functioned as an implicit criterion of value, shaping both individual self-esteem and collective notions of progress. However, this expansion is not intrinsically self-justifying: beyond a certain threshold, the proliferation of possibilities risks dissolving their qualitative significance, leading not to fulfillment but to saturation. Against this background, the paper proposes a shift from a paradigm centered on capability expansion to one focused on the internal structure of preference and reward. Drawing on philosophical insights from Nietzsche, Spinoza, and contemporary theories of bounded rationality, it develops the concept of “economies of preference” to account for how value emerges from configurations of experience that intensify or degrade the subject’s capacity to sustain affirmative states over time. The central thesis is that the problem of meaning in contemporary life is not primarily the absence of purpose, but the absence of a sufficiently robust criterion for selecting among purposes. In a context where the field of the possible expands without a corresponding standard of value, freedom risks collapsing into indeterminacy. The paper therefore advances a non-teleological ethical framework in which high-reward experiential states—understood as dynamically integrated and sustainable forms of self-affirmation—function as the ultimate criterion for action. This framework has implications for ethics, philosophy of action, and theories of the good life, suggesting that value is neither given nor arbitrarily constructed, but emerges from the interaction between human dispositional structures, social conditions, and reflective evaluation. The “invention of life,” in this sense, names not the creation of new possibilities, but the reconfiguration of the criteria by which possibilities become meaningful.