On The Meaning of Life

How to find it and finally stop asking the wrong questions

Image via bratispixl/ Flickr

We are living in the midst of a meaning crisis. I won’t belabor you with statistics that validate what we all feel already—we are a generation adrift. 

I, too, have been obsessed with the question, “What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose?” as many of us have, but I have finally put that question to rest. To note the obvious, I am sharing the answer I have found to be true and resonant for myself; it is not a promise that it will satisfy others.

I grew up at the tail end of new atheism, and it has recently become fashionable to criticize the new atheists for tearing down religion without providing a new structure for meaning in its place. It’s a valid, if demanding, critique. Some say that the solution is to bring back religion, that it will heal all the ailments among the youth in society. I say there is no turning back. For so many of us who have been disillusioned by religion, we simply cannot be convinced by it even if we wanted to believe—even if it was proven to make our lives materially better to believe it, we cannot suddenly feel it is true. 

A popular answer to the question of meaning from well-adjusted secularists is that we get to make our own meaning. But for those who struggle with mental illness, this answer is unsatisfying. When people ask about a personal sense of meaning, they are typically asking for an enduring and grounding sense of why they are alive and why they should continue to live, better yet, a sense of drive and motivation to create a good life, whatever good looks like for them. Not only does “making your own meaning” provide no real sense of direction, but for those who are depressed, it offers no solace. The symptoms of depression, among them exhaustion and not finding enjoyment in anything, do not permit one to engage in “meaning-making”. What depressed people are looking for when they ask about purpose and meaning is a reason that their life may have value despite their lack of productivity and motivation, and to reply that one must “make their own meaning” as if it is a joyous adventure, makes the idea of living and engaging in the world seem all the more insurmountable for a depressed person. 

It seemed the most natural thing in the world to me to ask about meaning—we all seem to have done it at one point or another. It didn’t occur to me until I encountered Buddhist scholarship to ask why I was so desperate to answer this question. For me, the answer to that is fear. I had a deep-seated fear that if I stopped looking for an objective sense of meaning or purpose and accepted that there may not be any, I would be prompted into a downward spiral of depression. 

Next, I asked, is that fear warranted? To answer this, I had to confront an uncomfortable question: why had I not killed myself yet? I wasn’t just lucky. The reason I haven’t killed myself is that I can identify that suicidal thoughts are not my own. I have learned to separate my depression from myself and that it is temporary. I know when I want to hurt myself that it is my depression speaking and that the thought will pass if I can manage not to act on it now, I won’t regret it later. I haven’t killed myself because I have chosen to look at my depression as a sort of parasite that is separate from me, and that I can trust myself not to act on every thought. I can trust myself. So maybe, whatever the answer to the question of meaning is, I can handle it. I don’t have to desire so desperately to answer the question because I will be okay. I can accept not knowing. 

Once I accepted that I may never receive an answer, the answer became at once clear. Life is outside the bounds of meaning. Humans, with our feeble and emotional animal minds, impose this question onto the series of experiences we call life. We evolutionarily search for a sense of purpose to keep us going, but life itself, when you see it clearly, is not good or bad, nor is any express experience within it. 

This is distinct from nihilism, which I previously feared. Nihilism is the belief that life is meaningless. The term meaningless implies it is devoid of meaning, but meaning is not something life does or does not have; it is something imposed on life by the human mind. It is not negative for life to “lack” meaning; it is entirely neutral. 

The universe owes us nothing. And that fact does not feel cold or harsh or disappointing to me. It feels just as much a fact as the sensation of this laptop resting on my knees or the sound of my radiator or the feeling of cool air rushing into my nostrils. Emotions that I regarded as negative, like the feeling of anxiety, I learned could be neutral. I can notice the tension in my chest, and focus my attention on it, and realize that my chest being tight with a feeling of anxiety is not inherently good or bad; it is just tight. More often than not, the simple attentiveness to it causes the feeling to dissipate. I stopped desperately searching for some abstract meaning and instead started noticing. I noticed how the sound of the pouring rain outside my window swirled a gentle curiosity and calm feeling in me. Joy isn’t something you need to venture out and search for; you need only to identify and accept it when it comes along. 

Letting go, stopping the search for meaning, is scary because I thought I would be devastated by finding the lack of some grand schema. Once I accepted my own resilience, I found I was not devastated; in fact, I was mildly liberated. Now, I am only saddened by our obsession with the question of meaning. I feel that time has been wasted and lives have been lost on a fool's errand in which we invented and imposed a question on an unconscious universe and expected some sort of answer from it. We rejected any possible answer we uncovered as not good enough (both religious and secular answers) because we had crafted a question that could never have an answer.

Clare’s Quick Guide to Finding Meaning:

1. Identify your obsession with the question.

2. Ask why you are desperate to know the answer to it. Is the reason warranted?

3. Intense desires are a cause of suffering. If you can name the emotion that underlies your desire to have knowledge, to need it, and realize that the emotion is a signal, but not a core truth about you, you can be free of the intense desire to know and the suffering it brings. You might remain curious, you might still feel a lack of direction in life, but you will accept that if you never find it, you can and will continue on.