Reason for Living: A Rational Approach to Living Your Best Life by Thomas Walker-Werth (Review)
Reason for Living offers a powerful set of tools for anyone seeking to live a life full of meaning, purpose, and happiness.
Thomas Walker-Werth, the managing editor of this journal, has written a clear, practical guide for living a wonderful life.
(Full disclosure: I not only employ Walker-Werth at both The Objective Standard and Objective Standard Institute; he is also a dear friend. Nevertheless, this review expresses my objective assessment of his book.)
Eschewing the vagueness and nonsense that pervade today’s $44 billion self-help industry, Reason for Living: A Rational Approach to Living Your Best Life provides an integrated, observation-based system of principles, straightforward advice, and helpful diagrams and worksheets for building a life you will love. Each chapter and section builds logically on the prior ones, culminating in a system of ideas that will help any adult or teenager think more clearly and live more fully.
Chapter 1, “Looking for Help in All the Wrong Places,” surveys the shenanigans, pseudo-science, and charlatanism that are rampant in the self-help industry. Walker-Werth highlights streams of nonsense from Peter Sage, platitudes from Tony Robbins, gibberish from Jordan Peterson, and the mysticism and shortcomings (sometimes the outright fraud) of various other popular figures in this sphere. This chapter shows the desperate need for a rational alternative.
Chapter 2, “The Rational Alternative,” begins the process of identifying the power of reason to know what is true and to guide our lives so we can thrive. Here, Walker-Werth touches on the importance of choosing your own path in life, the role of your mind in flourishing, the importance of being curious, how to leverage the law of cause and effect, and how to create an environment of rationality around yourself.
Chapter 3, “What Reason Is and Isn’t,” elaborates on the nature and power of reason, contrasting it with faith (acceptance of ideas unsupported by evidence), rationalization (making excuses via evasion), rationalism (the use of ideas disconnected from reality), and skepticism (rejection of the possibility of knowledge). “Reason,” Walker-Werth writes, “is the non-contradictory integration of experiences” (50). It rests on certain philosophic fundamentals, including the fact that there is a world independent of our minds, that things are what they are, and that the proper role of our minds is to understand the world and our needs so that we can live and love life. This is the most philosophic chapter in the book, yet, like the others, it is written in clear, simple English.
Chapter 4, “Reason and Emotion,” shows what emotions are, how they relate to reason, and how these two mental faculties can and should be a unified team “in harmony for happiness” (55).
Chapter 5, “How to Identify Your Rational Values,” highlights the basic and universal human values that Ayn Rand identified (reason, purpose, and self-esteem), as well as the importance of thoughtfully choosing and pursuing your own personal values, such as a productive career, recreational activities, friends, and romantic relationships. Here, Walker-Werth shows in detail how you can organize your values with respect to their relative importance and thus make decisions that will best advance your life and happiness.
Chapter 6, “How to Achieve Your Values,” is a detailed discussion of virtues (principled actions) including rationality, productiveness, independence, and justice—and how these and related virtues are essential to building a life you will love.
Chapter 7, “Discovering How to Love Work,” elaborates on the importance and central role of a productive career in one’s life, showing how to think through the countless alternatives and choose a path that brings you great meaning and joy.
Chapter 8, “Building Rational Relationships,” focuses on the trader principle (the idea that all healthy relationships are mutually beneficial) and how it applies to business relationships, friendships, romantic partners, and family.
Chapter 9, “Rational Art, Hobbies, and Entertainment,” discusses the importance of these aspects of life and includes thoughtful reflections on each. Here, Walker-Werth tells personal stories of how, earlier in life, he watched television series that had bleak, deterministic themes and listened to dark, angry music—and how these negatively affected his state of mind and emotional well-being—until he consciously chose to engage with more life-affirming art. Here’s a passage that indicates the kind of thoughtful analysis and clear writing you’ll find throughout the book:
One of the worst ways in which art and media can be bad for your life is by fostering depression and nihilism through bleak stories that convey negative worldviews. This has been a particularly bad problem since the mid-2000s, when terrorism was on everyone’s minds and the bright, upbeat, generally heroic film and TV of the 1990s gave way to darker stories emphasizing fear and anger, such as Lost and the Justice League films. A standout example of this is the 2003 reboot of Battlestar Galactica. The 1970s original depicted a group of survivors of an apocalyptic attack by the alien Cylons defiantly fighting to survive and to find a new home far from their destroyed homeworlds. The 2003 version made the Cylons rebellious robots from the protagonists’ own civilization and the survivors’ voyage a hellish endurance test of pain, anger, and suffering, all culminating in a despair- laden fourth season about the supposed inevitability of destroying ourselves with our own technology. I watched the show during a dark period in my own life, and I had to consciously mix in more upbeat sci-fi shows like Stargate SG1 to avoid falling into even worse depression. Battlestar nearly tainted my love of space and science with feelings of misery and hopelessness, and the show’s deterministic worldview—conveying the idea that we’re stuck on a path of destruction no matter what we do—started to threaten my rational belief that technology is good and that we have control over our future.
Another form of art and media that can have a powerful effect on your mental state is music. When I was an angsty, depressed teenager, the angry music of System of a Down, Slipknot, and Rage Against the Machine gave me a great outlet for those emotions—or so I thought. Little did I realize that every time I used these bands for musical therapy, I was adding to and encouraging anger and negativity in my mind. I still love heavy music— bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Avenged Sevenfold still make up a sizable chunk of my listening—but I now look for artists whose music conveys positive ideas while still delivering the power and speed I like in rock and metal music. Iron Maiden’s songs feature all sorts of references to history and art that have helped to expand my mind, and their former singer Blaze Bayley’s subsequent solo work includes a lot of songs about staying positive in the face of loneliness and adversity. It’s music that not only says “I know what you’re going through” but also says “A better tomorrow is possible.”
I’m certainly not saying that you should avoid dark or angry art and media entirely. In some cases, dark stories can convey excellent, life-serving themes. Consider dystopian fiction like George Orwell’s 1984, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, or the excellent Half-Life video game series, which show us bleak worlds to help us identify signs of totalitarianism and to inspire us to fight for freedom. Or consider movies like Schindler’s List and The Killing Fields that deal with horrific historical events to tell a story about the power of individuals to fight and overcome such tragedies as the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide.
There are perfectly good reasons for art to be dark, but I recommend paying special attention to two things when consuming dark art: that you consume it in moderation to protect your mental health, and that you take care to identify the fundamental ideas and sense of life that the work is conveying. Dark art and media can integrate with our efforts to live flourishing lives as long as we make it a secondary part of a “diet” rich in optimistic, life-affirming content.
Along these lines, Walker-Werth weaves personal stories and anecdotes into practically every section of the book, bringing the material to life and keeping the abstract ideas grounded in their use value to the reader.
Finally, chapter 10, “Principles to Help You on Your Way,” provides a concise summary of the prior chapters, along with a few final words on measuring success, dealing with failure, and aiming high.
The book also has three helpful appendixes: a glossary of terms; a list of recommended books, courses, TV series, and movies; and a set of tables for working through various exercises described in the chapters.
The most valuable aspect of Reason for Living is the respect it shows for the reader’s mind. The book is an unapologetic appeal to independence and intelligence. Walker-Werth doesn’t ask or expect anyone to take his word for anything. Rather, he repeatedly urges readers to ask, “Why?,” to challenge assumptions, and to test ideas against their own observations, experiences, and logic.
Reason for Living offers a powerful set of tools for anyone seeking to live a life full of meaning, purpose, and happiness. I highly recommend it.
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.