Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World
Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea,’ as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
In this post, I examine the apparent meaninglessness of life that many people experience. Paying close attention to the concepts of order, meaning, and the Absurd, I argue that the problem is not that we cannot find meaning out in the world but, instead, that we expect to find absolute meaning where there isn’t any. In other words, the primary obstacle between us and fulfillment is paradigmatic in nature—no material gain or experience will resolve it until our expectations are compatible with reality.
To be honest, I’m not very satisfied with my attempt to chip away at the problem of meaning here. I think I will elaborate on this topic, maybe next week, using some of the insights I’ve gained from Sartre’s Existentialist masterpiece, Nausea, which I recently read for the first time. That said, I hope my words are helpful for people who struggle with finding meaning in their lives or making sense of a world that seems to have none.
Order
When I was a kid, I thought the world made sense. I viewed the universe as a great puzzle, just waiting to be assembled. With each new piece, the big picture would become clearer and clearer until—finally—I would be able to see the immaculate order underlying all of existence. If I could just discover how something could come from nothing, how life began, and how to reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity—then I would know what it all means.
If you had asked me back then what the meaning of my life was, I would have told you it was a stupid question. My life had no meaning, not yet, but I thought that if I could figure out how the universe works—then I would know the meaning of my own life.
Growing up in an age of science, it seemed absurd to me to try to assign some kind of teleology or will to a mechanical universe. I would say, it’s like asking why a clock chooses to tick—what a silly question. But if we know the mechanism that causes a clock to tick, I thought, then we know the meaning of the clock.
While mine was a very scientific and materialistic view of the universe, it wasn’t so different from the Christian worldview that surrounded me. But the funny thing is I hated that Christian worldview, which seeks the meaning of life through God.
Now I understand that my pursuit of meaning through science was empty. I realize that even if I knew the exact mechanisms that cause the universe to exist and behave the way it does, my life would have no more or less meaning than it does now. And the same is true for those who believe in God.
The reason for this is a bit complex and possibly unintuitive for many people, so I hope that I can adequately explain it in the following pages. In short, however, my realization echoes that of Sartre’s Roquentin in Nausea, that “existence precedes essence.” First, we exist. Then, we define the meaning of our existence through our actions.
I read Nausea only very recently, but seeing this line was like meeting an old friend whose face I had forgotten a long time ago. Finally, I had the words to describe how I felt.
I think most people share a tendency to assume that the world makes sense—that underneath all the confusion and chaos, there’s a kind of underlying order, a universal justice, or karma. As we grow and mature as people, this ideal of order gets baked into our worldview. In fact, it may be the most fundamental belief for many of us.
Even when we aren’t able to interpret life in any coherent and meaningful way, we rest assured that the real meaning is there somewhere, just out of our reach. Someday, we tell ourselves, I’ll get there. I’ll find it.
And sometimes we do. Some people seem virtually preordained to find meaning, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in. Like moths to a lamp, these people flock to meaning and never lose sight of it.
Even so, nobody is safe from the Absurd. And when we consider all the people who can’t seem to find meaning or see order in the world, either temporarily or permanently—and who are miserable because of it—it becomes abundantly clear that the problem of meaning is worthy of discussion.
The Absurd
Although we sleepwalk through most of our lives, scarcely aware that there is any mystery or ambiguity at all, we occasionally find ourselves perched at the edge of a great abyss. Suddenly, the order we have conditioned ourselves to see everywhere is nowhere to be found.
In an instant, the dense lattice of meaning that is usually draped over all things suddenly vanishes, and we’re left all alone. Uncertainty, confusion, and pain lie before us. Chaos. This is the Absurd.
It can happen at any moment. The carefully-designed veneer that we superimpose on the world around us is really more fragile than we like to imagine.
You’re walking down the street. You’re one in a throng of thousands. Suddenly, you stop walking. You look at your feet. Your feet aren’t feet anymore—you wonder why they’re encased in the skin of another animal. You look around at all the people, concrete, and pigeons. Moments ago, it was an ordinary scene, but now it’s meaningless. Designer bags and fancy coats hang awkwardly from the hands and shoulders of oblivious passersby. Ants. You see ants all around you, pretending to be human.
Or maybe you’re a mother. You’re sitting on the couch. Your two toddlers are running around the living room, and you rock your baby girl in your arms. In one moment, everything is as it always is. Your kids are happy—you feel at home. But in the next—it comes out of nowhere—you suddenly feel estranged from yourself. It’s as if you’re an actor on stage, only you don’t know the lines. You don’t even remember your role. These kids aren’t yours. You look at your little girl, but all you see is a strange lump of flesh and hair. Your husband enters the room, and you don’t recognize him. You want to scream, but you vaguely remember that you aren’t supposed to do that. Your husband kisses you. His breath stinks. You realize you don’t love him. You hide your fear behind a strained smile.
Or maybe you’re an athlete. You’re getting ready to step up to the line when your phone rings. You’re so nervous you could burst. You answer the phone. It’s your brother, and he’s saying that your dad is dead. You hang up, step up to the line, run the race. You win—it’s a personal record. Your coach hugs you, but her arms seem to choke you, and yours hang at your sides like limp noodles. You look up. Not a cloud in the sky. A beautiful day.
If we’re lucky, these episodes are brief and fleeting. They come and go, and we just shake our heads and push on. But sometimes, the episode doesn’t stop. Sometimes, the uncertainty continues for days, weeks, or even years. Or maybe the visceral experience of swimming in the Absurd subsides, but our confidence in life’s order remains irrevocably shaken. And when this happens, we resort to unhealthy coping mechanisms as a means of escape.
Coping with the Absurd
When a mere shake of the head and determination to push on no longer suffice, we may try other tactics to delay the truth from really sinking in. In my experience, these reactions employ one of three main tactics, which are denial, displacement, and despair. In order to find a solution to the problem of meaning, I think we should first take some time to understand our instinctive responses to it and why they aren’t healthy. Then, we can circle back around to the original problem and—hopefully—reach a satisfying conclusion.
Denial
When our sense of order begins to crumble, and when our reality buckles, we try desperately to reimagine the truth—or, at the very least, reinterpret it—in order to preserve the status quo of our thinking. In this way, we avoid the necessity of admitting our mistakes and adjusting our perceptions to match. Thus, it is through fantasy—through deliberate (yet often subconscious) smudging of reality—that we preserve our fragile order.
We do this because a sense of order is integral to who we think we are. Over the years, we have internalized an expectation of order, working it into the tapestry of us, of the self, and rather than accepting that this ideal is an elaborate ruse, we prefer to cling to it. We will even go to great lengths to deny our loss of order. We may selectively forget whole periods of our lives that don’t fit a certain narrative. Or we may invent and alter events, relationships, and other aspects of our past so that they conform to our present reality.
We may occasionally be willing to cede or compromise one aspect of our identity, but in doing so we tend to double down on other aspects. For example, many people who lose their belief in the Christian God remain convinced that Christian ethics are essential for a good life.
What seems like unwillingness to fully commit to a position is really a delicate balancing act carried out by a fragile ego. Shifting the goalposts in this way is a kind of redirection of denial. We maintain the status quo of our thinking through sheer force of will, all the while hoping that we don’t catch on to our own ruse.
No matter how we act on it, a powerful reluctance to see the universe for the chaotic mess that it is characterizes this first stage. It’s just too painful to admit that we were wrong.
Displacement
Eventually, we may move past a state of denial. While some might think that denial doesn’t sound too bad as long as it doesn’t end, the truth is—denial always fails eventually. On top of that, if we have to keep ourselves in a constant state of denial in order to live our lives, I think it’s pretty clear that something is wrong with our worldview. Nevertheless, when fantasy fails, we have to look elsewhere to regain our sense of order.
For most people, denial can only work for so long because it’s exhausting. We can only fool ourselves for so long, after all. And when the day comes that our self-deception collapses, we might turn instead to displacement. Rather than finding order out in the world, we create it ourselves. To do this, we use force to project our own ideal of order onto the world. We rebel against our own powerlessness over the world by exerting our will wherever and whenever we can.
Take the frustrated boss as an example. She feels powerless to influence the company execs, so she treats her employees like trash. Subsequently, her disgruntled employees go home and abuse their spouses, who then micromanage their kids’ lives. In turn, maybe some of these kids go on to become draconian execs, and the cycle continues. It’s a vicious cycle of powerlessness and rebellious violence, but the violence only ever flows downward.
Displacement is not healthy. It leaves us feeling empty and those around us battered. And like denial, it’s not sustainable. Everybody will, at some point, experience situations that render them completely powerless and without the means to divert this powerlessness elsewhere. These situations make clear the foolishness of any attempt at control, and they leave us with two solutions–return to denial or proceed to despair.
Despair
Finally, when our faith in the sensibility of the universe is broken, we are also broken. Despair is the final stage after meeting the Absurd for many people. That said, not everyone who experiences the Absurd makes it all the way to despair.
But for those who do make it, despair is the most painful response to the Absurd. Despair is a kind of acceptance of the meaninglessness of life paired with residual dependence on absolute meaning. Despair is what happens when we expect to find meaning out in the world but find none. It’s a profoundly unsatisfying experience—like spiritual starvation.
Despair is another vicious cycle that reinforces itself and that, if left unchecked, can and will destroy a person. Fortunately, upon closer inspection of the nature of despair, the solution to the problem of meaning reveals itself.
Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World
If despair is the consequence of looking for external meaning and finding only barren mundanity, then we should ask why we look for external meaning at all.
To give an analogy, let’s say you’re going to McDonald’s. When you walk up to the counter to order your food, however, you pull out a menu that you yourself designed. Then, you try to order one of your own menu items from the clerk, and you’re devastated that they have no idea what you’re talking about. This is clearly absurd, but it’s not so different from expecting to find meaning out in the world.
In other words, it’s like walking into a candy store, ignoring all the candy on the shelves, and then complaining that you can’t see any chocolate outside the window. For some reason, we seem determined to search for something that neither exists nor needs to exist.
We might think that the Absurd tells us that life is meaningless. What it really tells us, however, is that meaning doesn’t exist out there in the world but in our own minds and in the complex web of connections between our minds. Order, meaning, purpose—these are all concepts we invented and continue to invent every second.
In this way, life is actually full of meaning. Everything and everyone around us is drenched in it. But meaning is not separate from our conscious processing of the world. Rather, we create meaning every time we open our eyes, eat pasta, or tell somebody we love them.
This meaning isn’t somehow invalid because it’s subjective. Yes, it’s subjective—purely subjective—but we are subjective beings. There is no objective world that we can grasp objectively, and that’s okay. If meaning is a subjective phenomenon that exists as a result of consciousness, then why do we expect to find it out there in the material world? Why do we try to locate it after death, after our consciousness ceases to exist?
From this perspective, the whole problem of meaning becomes absurd. It transforms from an intractable problem into a mere artifact of our mistaken assumptions.
Final Thoughts
When we push a little further, we come across another surprising realization. That is, it doesn’t matter if there is some kind of cosmic order or divine meaning in the universe. Maybe there is meaning, but regardless, we would still have to choose to believe it. In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre gives an example: if an angel visited you today, you would still have to decide whether it was a messenger of God or a sign that you should see a psychologist. Ultimately, we have to take it on faith, regardless of which interpretation we believe.
That isn’t to say that some interpretations aren’t more reasonable than others. Even still, whether we decide to take reason as a reliable guide is up to us. There are no easy answers, and nobody can choose for us.
The realization that we are the engineers of our own significance is scary, to be sure. But it’s also exciting. It’s invigorating to know that we and we alone can save us from what Carl Sagan called “bottomless free fall.”
Yet, after all this talk about constructing our own meaning, I must confess that I do not believe in free will. If you feel despair, it’s not your fault. If you try and try but are unable to find any meaning in your life, it’s not a sign of personal failure. It’s okay to ask for help, and maybe you just need more time. You do what you can—no more and no less. And, ultimately, it’s not up to you what you can and can’t do.
At the end of the day, we live in a dark and mostly inhospitable universe. Nobody can save us from ourselves, and nothing will guide us out of the abyss of the Absurd except for our own courage. We have to justify our existence because nobody else can do it for us. I write these statements not out of despair but from the humble conviction that I can and will live a meaningful life—one full of love and compassion.