Riddle: I slip when you chase me
I grin when you ask
Demand one neat answer
I vanish in laughs
Everything around us seems to change faster than we can make sense of it. How does that affect our search for meaning? The UCLA American Freshman survey1 has been asking incoming US college students about their life goals every year since 1966. Developing a meaningful philosophy of life showed the largest decline across generations, from its position as a top value in the late 60s for more than 80% of entering freshmen to just around 45% of millennials endorsing it as a priority. In 2019, the same Freshman Survey2 revealed that half of students still endorsed developing a meaningful philosophy of life as essential, but it was strongly overshadowed by 84% of respondents reporting "being very well off financially" as the most important goal (which might be a meaning in itself ).
Trying to understand such profound changes in the quest for meaning, I went looking for someone in charge of the meaning of life, only to learn that the position has been vacant for about 2,500 years. Fortunately, there was someone closer to home to poke about it: my colleague Éva Kállay, a psychologist at Babeș-Bolyai University who studies meaning in life and psychological well-being. Hoping for a neat answer (ideally, a number), I brought her some of my questions.
Laura Visu-Petra: Why is the meaning of life such an impossible quest?
Éva Kállay: In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings commission Deep Thought, a supercomputer, to determine the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything4.
After 7.5 million years of computation, the long-awaited answer to the ultimate question finally arrives: The meaning of everything is … 42.
The response is met with astonishment and disbelief. How could the most powerful supercomputer ever built produce an answer that seems so utterly meaningless?
But Deep Thought is perplexed, too—by its creators’ reactions. The problem, it explains, is not the answer. The problem is that nobody knows the correct question: Only when you know the question will the answer make sense.
So, perhaps our real difficulty is not that we lack answers. Perhaps we have never asked the right question. And yet, this has not stopped us from looking outside ourselves for conclusive answers.
Like Beckett’s characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who wait through two acts for a Godot who never comes, we keep waiting for something that promises to make everything clear, but never quite arrives4.
Behind this seemingly futile exercise lie questions as old as humanity:
Why are we here?
Do we matter?
Why do we suffer?
What is the meaning of our lives?
For thousands of years philosophers, theologians, and more recently psychologists have wrestled to answer these questions. Yet, they remain as compelling, and elusive, as ever5. And for good reason. In what appears to be an infinite universe, whether our existence has an ultimate (or cosmic) meaning remains one of the greatest mysteries.
LVP: So, what can psychologists tell us?
EK: Fortunately, by reframing the question, psychology throws us a lifeline. Instead of asking about the grand meaning of life (traditionally the realm of philosophy and theology), it investigates how people experience, construct and ascribe meaning to their own lives. While the meaning of life remains an abstraction, meaning in life is a personal psychological experience, one that can be observed, discussed, and measured.
When we look at the details, our everyday lives become full of meaning6—we speak of meaningful memories, relationships, experiences, work, achievements.
LVP: What is a meaningful life made of?
EK: Most contemporary psychological perspectives identify three core components5,7.
Coherence is the sense that life is understandable—that events, relationships, and ideas fit together into something comprehensible, rather than a series of random events happening to us8.
Purpose is the compass and engine. It gives us both the direction and the energy to pursue what we believe matters9.
Significance is the belief that our existence matters, and that our absence would make a difference10.
So, a meaningful life is different from a collection of meaningful moments. It is the experience that those moments belong to a life story that makes sense, that is going somewhere, and is worth something.
Philosophy Essential Reads
LVP: Does it really matter whether life feels meaningful?
EK: The answer is surprisingly straightforward. Decades of research consistently show that people who experience their lives as meaningful report better physical, psychological, and social well-being11. A recent meta-analysis combining data from nearly half a million people, some followed for more than 30 years, found that a stronger sense of purpose predicted a substantially lower risk of dying over the study period12.
But the absence of meaning in life is equally revealing.
LVP: Why? What happens when life stops making sense?
EK: Most of us carry an implicit and rarely examined narrative of how the world works: We are taught to believe that good deeds are rewarded and bad ones punished, that people are broadly trustworthy, and that bad things do not happen to good people. Traumatic experiences can break the coherence of that account. When reality no longer fits the story we have lived by, we are forced to rewrite it. If we cannot, a sense of meaninglessness may set in, accompanied by anxiety, depression, or hopelessness13.
After the tragic loss of his teenage son, musical artist Nick Cave created heart-wrenching songs about how meaning is lost and replaced by a whirlpool of repetitiveness to cope with the pain:
I knew the world it would stop spinning now since you’ve been gone
I used to think that when you died you kind of wandered the world
In a slumber till you crumbled, were absorbed into the earth
Well I don’t think that anymore, the phone it rings no more
The song the song it spins it spins now since 1984
The song the song the song it spins its been spinning now
Research has mainly asked whether meaning in life is present or absent. But there is also a third dimension, in which people actively search for (a new) meaning14. The search for meaning is not characterized by serene reflection, but by an intense effort to find meaning that would make everything comprehensible again. Searching for renewed meaning is not comfortable. It comes with anxiety and rumination15, a restlessness that is not incidental but part of the process through which we rebuild our understanding of the world16.
LVP: And where does this meaning come from?
EK: One line of research has mapped the domains we draw on. Schnell17 identified 26 sources of meaning, grouped in higher-order dimensions: self-transcendence (e.g., religiosity, spirituality), self-actualization (e.g., development, freedom), order (e.g., tradition, morality), well-being, and relatedness (e.g., relationships, love, community).
A second line of research asks what strengthens the experience of meaning in life5. Positive affect, social belonging, religious faith, and routine were all found to play an important role in these processes. Meaning seems to be supplied less by grand certainties than by small regularities: how we shape our everyday lives and how we mark our holidays.
LVP: How do we find our sources of meaning?
EK: Modern life is full of competing, often conflicting, and sometimes supposedly scientific prescriptions about how we should live18.
So, just like the American Freshmen study revealed, we look for meaning in (financial) success, status, relationships, recognition, personal growth, and countless other pursuits. Yet this abundance of possible sources can itself become paralyzing19, leaving us uncertain which of them truly matters to us or defines our quest. It also raises a difficult question: Are we on a path that is genuinely our own?
The risk is that, under the pressure of cultural expectations and constant comparisons, we may adopt meanings that are socially valued but personally hollow. The “Choose life” monologue from the movie Trainspotting (1996) shows Renton reciting a long list of the conventional goals society offers (career, family, appliances, mortgage) and mocking them as a package deal people sign up for without thinking.
LVP: So, if we put the borrowed goals aside, the quest for meaning might become itself confusing. Was Deep Thought onto something?
EK: Deep Thought was right about one thing: If you do not know the question, there is little point in contemplating the answer. Psychology’s contribution may lie not in providing answers to our big existential question, but in helping us ask better, if smaller questions that ultimately might have to be asked in the first person:
What holds my life together?
To whom does my life matter?
Where is my life going?
Takeaway
Eva's answers make me understand that the active quest for meaning is not pointless. After all, engaging freely and creatively with all questions sent by his fellow human beings has helped artists like Nick Cave go through grief, and share that "there is a way out" in moving towards new meanings. He describes it vividly in his response from the Red Hand Files to the direct question sent by one of his readers: "What is the point in life?":20
We are capable of the greatest atrocities and the deepest sufferings, all culminating in a vast, collective grief. This is our shared condition. […] This is where meaning establishes itself, within the connectedness, nested in our shared suffering.
I believe we are meaning-seeking creatures, and these feelings of meaning, relational and connective, are almost always located within kindness. Kindness is the force that draws us together […] despite our collective state of loss, and our potential for evil, there exists a great network of goodness, knitted together by countless everyday human kindnesses.
Through kindness we slant, shockingly and miraculously, toward meaning. We discover, in that smallest gesture of goodwill laid at the feet of our mutual and monumental loss, the point.”
Riddle answer: Meaning