Is There a Deeper Meaning to Life, or None at All?
Aristotle thought he had the answer. A morning drive made me wonder.
On an ordinary morning I find myself looking out of the car window on my drive to work, captivated by the shape of a cloud or the mist lying over the fields, in awe of the sheer magnificence of being alive. And I ask myself, surely there is more to this than what we can see and touch and hear?
Then a little further down the road someone cuts in front of me as though they are far more important than I am — as though getting to wherever they are going matters more than whether I arrive at all. And I am reminded that perhaps we are not as elevated, or as different from the rest of the animals, as we like to think.
This conflict has plagued me most of my life. One minute certain there is a purpose to my being here, that the things I live through mean something. The next, gripped by the dread that there is nothing of the kind. That we are born by accident, we live, and then it ends — a series of things we do and things that happen to us, and nothing more. And if that is all it is, then it is hard to see where the meaning could possibly come from.
So — is there meaning in a life, or is it just a series of events?
What the Greeks Meant by a Good Life
Long before I asked the question on that morning drive, the Greeks were asking their own version of it. Not quite "is life meaningful?" — that anxious, modern phrasing would have puzzled them. They asked something firmer: what is a good life, and what is it for?
Aristotle gave the answer I keep returning to. He called it eudaimonia, a word we usually translate as happiness, though that hardly does it justice. It doesn't mean feeling good. It means something closer to flourishing — a life going well as a whole, lived in accordance with reason and virtue, judged not by any single afternoon but across its full length.
I wrote about this in my first book, How Did I Get Here?, because it draws such a sharp line between real happiness and the kind we are sold now. Aristotle had little patience for the life of instant gratification. The people who chase it, he says, appear "completely slavish, since the life they decide on is a life for grazing animals."
A life for grazing animals. I think of that line often, and I thought of it on the drive — the man cutting in front of me, chasing his next thing, head down, taking whatever was in front of him. Not living toward anything. Just grazing. And it is worth being honest that most of modern life is built to keep us there, at the trough. The next purchase, the next scroll, the next small hit of pleasure that fades before we have finished having it. None of it is wicked. It is simply grazing, and Aristotle's word for it stings because it is accurate. A life spent taking what is in front of us is a life lived at the level of appetite, and some part of us knows the difference, even when we cannot name it.
What Aristotle understood, and what we have largely forgotten, is that meaning was never meant to be something we go looking for out in the cosmos, waiting to be verified like a fact. It is enacted. It lives in the how of a life — in living it well, with purpose, over time. The dread I described, the fear that life is just a series of events and nothing more, is really the fear of a life without that. A life that happens to you rather than one you are living toward something.
The Greeks had a word for the missing thing: telos, the end a thing is for. An acorn has a telos — it is built to become an oak. A knife has one — it is for cutting, and a knife that will not cut has lost the point of being a knife. Aristotle believed a human life has a telos too, that we are here to become something, to flourish in the particular way a human being can. Strip that out and you are left with exactly the emptiness I feel in traffic. Not a life going somewhere, but a sequence of things done and things endured, one after another, going nowhere. The dread is not really about death. It is about direction. It is the fear that there was never anything the whole thing was for.
For a long time, that answer was enough for me. Perhaps it is enough for you.
Sartre and the Freedom of Making Your Own Meaning
But there is another answer, and it belongs to our own age more than to the Greeks.
Aristotle believed each of us arrives with a telos folded in. Much of the modern world no longer believes that, and the philosopher who stared hardest at what follows was Jean-Paul Sartre. He began from a stark premise. There is no design, no author, no purpose handed down from above. We simply arrive, without instructions, and then we exist. His famous phrase for it was that existence precedes essence. We are here first, and what we make of ourselves comes after — decided not by nature or God, but by us.
At first this sounds like the very dread I described on that morning drive. If nothing gives my life meaning, then surely it has none. But Sartre drew the opposite conclusion, and this is what makes him worth listening to. If no meaning is handed to us, then we are free — radically, almost unbearably free — to create it. Nobody wrote your purpose, which means nobody but you gets to. You are not discovered. You are invented, by every choice you make, over a whole life.
There is something bracing in this, and I do not want to dismiss it, because for a certain kind of person at a certain moment it is exactly the right medicine. If you have spent years feeling that life happened to you — the marriage, the divorce, the redundancy, the collapse of the plan — Sartre arrives like cold water. He tells you that you are not the sum of what befell you. You are the sum of what you choose next. The meaning is not out there refusing to reveal itself. It is yours to make, starting now.
For a long time I found this the more honest of the two answers. It asks nothing of the universe. It does not require you to believe in a design you cannot see. It puts the whole weight on you, which is frightening, but also dignifying. You are the author. Begin writing.
And yet.
Nietzsche, and the Fear That It Was All for Nothing
And yet the man who took Sartre's premise furthest could not leave it there.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw, earlier and more clearly than almost anyone, what it would mean to lose the old guarantees. When he wrote that God is dead, he was not celebrating. He was naming a wound. He understood that once we stop believing the universe was built with us in mind, we are left standing over an abyss, and he did not pretend the abyss was comfortable. The dread I feel on that morning drive, the fear that it was all for nothing, that we are born by accident and then it simply ends, is the same abyss Nietzsche looked into. He took it more seriously than the cheerful make-your-own-meaning philosophies that came after him, because he knew how far the drop went.
But here is what makes Nietzsche worth staying with. He looked into that void and did not conclude that life was meaningless. He concluded something stranger and more demanding. If there is no meaning handed to us, then the task is not to invent one out of nothing, as Sartre thought. The task is to become what you are.
That phrase is his, and it is older than him too, borrowed from the Greek poet Pindar. Become what you are. It is a curious instruction when you sit with it. Not become whatever you decide, the way Sartre would have it. Not manufacture a self from scratch. Become what you already, in some sense, are. As though there is a self waiting there to be grown into, and the work of a life is not to invent it but to draw it out.
This is a different thing from making, and a different thing from finding, and yet it contains both. You have to do the becoming. Nobody does it for you, and it does not happen by accident. That is the making. But there is a what you are to become, something already yours, seeded before you started choosing. That is the finding. Nietzsche, of all people, the great destroyer of comfortable illusions, ends up describing meaning as a kind of cultivation. Not lying around out in the world waiting to be discovered. Not conjured from nothing by an act of will. Drawn out, over a lifetime, from what was there all along.
He asked one more thing of us, and it is the hardest of all. Amor fati, he called it, the love of one's fate. Not resignation, not gritted teeth, but the willingness to look at your one actual life, with all its wrong turns and losses, and want it, exactly as it was. It is easy to underestimate how much that asks. It means turning to the divorce, the redundancy, the years that did not go as planned, and saying not merely I accept this but I would have it again. To live in such a way that if you were told you must repeat this exact life, every loss included, endlessly, you could say yes and mean it. I do not know that I am there. Most days I am not. But I understand why Nietzsche thought it was the summit, because the person who could truly say yes to their whole life would have nothing left to be afraid of. That is a long way from the man cutting in front of me in traffic, taking whatever is in front of him. And it is a long way, too, from simply choosing a meaning off the shelf because we are free to.
Why Meaning Starts to Feel More Like Finding
I have gone back and forth on this question my whole life. I have held more than one answer, lived inside more than one way of seeing it, and I am writing a book about that search — where it took me, and what I did not expect to find there.
For a long time the making view was the one I trusted. It asked nothing of the universe, and there is a kind of pride in that, in standing on your own ground and refusing the comfort of a story you cannot prove. If life is an accident, so be it. I would make my own meaning and need nobody's permission.
But something happens as the years go on, and I suspect I am not the only one it happens to.
The making starts to run out. When you are young, making your own meaning feels not just possible but obvious, because you are busy building — a career, a family, a life. You are the author, and the pen is in your hand. Then later life arrives, and for many of us it arrives as a falling away. The marriage ends. The career loses its hold. The plan you were writing turns out not to be yours to finish. And in the rubble of all that making, you notice something you could not see while you were still busy constructing. The meaning that is still standing is the meaning you did not make.
The awe on that morning drive is not something I built. I did not decide to be moved by the mist over the fields. It arrives unbidden, and it arrives most strongly now, at this age, when so much of what I did build has already come and gone. It came again last week, absurdly, over nothing — a blackbird on the fence in the early light, singing as though the whole business of being alive were obvious and glad. I stood at the window longer than I meant to. And the view that says it was all an accident — that the awe is a trick of chemistry, a story the brain tells itself — has simply stopped convincing me. Not because the other view is more comforting. I distrust comfort. But because the accident-story cannot account for the thing I feel most surely of all. It explains everything except the one experience that will not go away.
And I have started to wonder whether the finding is simpler, and stranger, than I once thought. Whether the thing we are looking for, when we ask if life has any meaning, is not out there in the world at all. Whether it might be the self — our own true self, the one underneath the roles and the performing and the building. Not a treasure the universe is withholding, but a recognition. To come home to who we actually are, after so many years of being who we were supposed to be. I cannot prove that is what meaning is. But it is the possibility I find myself returning to.
It is also, if I am honest, why I built freedominlaterlife. We are told that ageing is a narrowing, a slow loss of what we had when we were young. I have come to suspect almost the opposite. The young are often too busy building the self they think they should be to know what they actually are underneath it. It is later, when the building slows and some of it falls away, that we get the chance — and perhaps, at last, the willingness — to find out. Maybe ageing does not stop us becoming who we are. Maybe it is the first time we are truly able to.
And if there is something to that, then the question I started with looks different. Perhaps life is not just a series of events, and not a meaning we have to manufacture either, but the long slow work of becoming known to ourselves. T.S. Eliot put it better than I can, at the end of the Four Quartets — that the end of all our exploring "will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." That is what the exploring has felt like. All the reading, all the searching, the years spent going out to look for meaning, and the strange arrival back at an ordinary morning that was in front of me the whole time.
Because that is where it returns me, every time. Not to a proof. Not to an answer I could write down and hand to you. Just to the car window, and the mist over the fields, and the shape of a cloud — and the feeling, against all my reasoning, that surely there is more to this than what we can see and touch and hold.
If this is the kind of question you find yourself turning over, I write about it every week — meaning, purpose, and what a good life looks like in its second half. One honest email each Thursday. You can join here.
