Is there an objective meaning to life or is it purely subjective?
This is one of philosophy's most contested questions, and the most honest answer is that the debate remains genuinely open. Purely subjectivist views — that meaning is whatever you take it to be — run into the problem that they seem to license calling anything meaningful, however trivial or harmful.
In the autumn of 1942, Viktor Frankl was deported from Vienna to Theresienstadt. He was a trained psychiatrist who had spent years developing a theory of human motivation centered not on pleasure or power but on meaning — the will to find purpose in existence. He had completed a manuscript before his arrest, the intellectual work of his professional life, and had sewn it into the lining of his coat. The manuscript was confiscated and destroyed at Dachau. He survived. His wife, his parents, and his brother did not.
What Frankl observed across three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and three other camps was the behavior of human beings in conditions of maximum constraint and minimum hope. He noticed that survival was not straightforwardly determined by physical strength, age, or medical condition. Something else was operating. Prisoners who found a reason to endure — a manuscript to rewrite from memory, a person they hoped to find, a future they could still imagine — showed a quality of psychological resistance that others did not. Those who lost all sense that their survival served any purpose, that anything worthwhile remained, underwent a collapse he described as existential rather than merely physical. In the absence of meaning, something fundamental went out in people.
This observation became the empirical foundation of logotherapy — a theory of the human psyche grounded in the primacy of meaning. It is one of the most unusual origins of any major psychological theory: forged not in a laboratory but in the most extreme laboratory history has ever created. Frankl published his account in 1946, in a short book that has since sold over sixteen million copies in more than fifty languages. Its endurance speaks to the depth of the question it addresses.
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." — Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946)
| Theory | Core Answer | Tradition |
|---|---|---|
| Hedonism | Life is meaningful through pleasure and avoiding pain | Epicurus; utilitarian |
| Desire satisfaction | Life is meaningful when you get what you want | Contemporary analytic philosophy |
| Objective list | Certain things are objectively meaningful regardless of desire | Plato; natural law; Aristotle |
| Religious meaning | Life is meaningful through relationship with God | Christianity, Islam, Hinduism |
| Existentialist authenticity | Meaning is self-created through authentic choices | Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir |
| Subjective/hybrid | Meaning arises when you engage with objectively valuable things | Susan Wolf |
Key Definitions
Eudaimonia — Aristotle's concept of flourishing or the good life, derived from living in accordance with one's highest nature and capacities. Distinguished from hedonia (simple pleasure or the absence of pain), eudaimonia involves the active exercise of virtues and the fulfillment of distinctly human capabilities. Contemporary psychologists have operationalized both dimensions and find them empirically distinct but correlated.
Hedonia — The experiential dimension of wellbeing: feeling good, experiencing positive emotions more than negative ones, being satisfied with one's life. Hedonic wellbeing is real and measurable, but research consistently finds that pursuing pleasure as a terminal goal is self-defeating, while meaning-oriented living tends to produce greater hedonic wellbeing as a byproduct.
Logotherapy — Frankl's therapeutic approach, from the Greek logos (meaning). The third Viennese school of psychotherapy after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology. Logotherapy holds that the primary human drive is the search for meaning, that suffering, guilt, and death are the three existential challenges that confront this search, and that the therapist's role is to help patients find meaning even within severe constraint.
PERMA model — Martin Seligman's five-element framework for flourishing, described in Flourish (2011): Positive emotion, Engagement (flow), Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. Meaning in this model is defined specifically as belonging to and serving something larger than the self.
Absurdism — Albert Camus's philosophical position that human life is characterized by an irresolvable confrontation between our need for meaning and the universe's silence on the matter. The appropriate response is neither religious resolution (what Camus called philosophical suicide) nor literal suicide, but revolt: passionate engagement with life in full awareness of its absurdity.
Will to meaning — Frankl's term for the primary human motivational force: the drive to find significance, purpose, and value in one's existence. Distinct from and prior to the will to pleasure (Freud) and the will to power (Adler).
Noogenic neurosis — Frankl's category for psychological distress arising specifically from existential or meaning-related conflict rather than from psychological or biological causes. Distinguished from neurotic anxiety or depression, noogenic neurosis requires meaning-focused rather than symptom-focused intervention.
Narrative identity — The theory, associated with psychologist Dan McAdams, that personal identity is constituted partly by the life story one constructs: a selective, organized, internalized narrative of one's past, present, and anticipated future that provides coherence, continuity, and meaning. The stories we tell about our lives are not merely descriptions but constitutive elements of who we are.
Fitting fulfillment — Susan Wolf's term for the condition under which meaning arises, from Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010). Meaning requires both subjective engagement (one must care, be drawn in, feel fulfilled) and objective worth (the activity must have genuine value beyond one's own approval of it). A life spent wholeheartedly devoted to a trivial pursuit is not fully meaningful on this view, even if it produces subjective satisfaction.
Frankl and Logotherapy: Three Sources of Meaning
Frankl's theoretical core was simple and radical: meaning is the primary human motivational force, it can be found even in extreme suffering, and its absence — not frustrated drives or repressed trauma — is the source of a distinctive category of psychological illness.
Logotherapy holds that meaning is available through three avenues, applicable even in the most severe circumstances.
Creating a Work or Doing a Deed
The most accessible source of meaning is achievement: producing something of value, contributing something that would not otherwise exist, solving a problem that matters. This is what Frankl sustained himself with through the camps by resolving to rewrite his destroyed manuscript. The work was not yet accomplished, but the intention to accomplish it organized his existence and gave him reason to survive.
This is also what Aristotle had in mind with eudaimonia in its active form: the good life is not a state of being but an activity, the exercise of capacities in pursuit of genuinely worthwhile ends. Modern positive psychology echoes this in the concept of engagement — flow states, as Csikszentmihalyi described them, in which absorption in challenging activity produces an experience of aliveness and significance that purely pleasure-seeking cannot generate.
Experiencing Something or Encountering Someone
The second source of meaning is receptive rather than productive: the experience of beauty, of nature, of art, of truth — and above all, the encounter with another person in love. Frankl described love as one of the most powerful generators of meaning available to human beings: in fully knowing and being known by another, in caring for a particular irreplaceable person, the lover participates in something that transcends the self without requiring any metaphysical guarantee.
This source of meaning is in some ways the most democratic. Creating a major work requires talent and circumstance. The capacity to love, to be moved by beauty, to be genuinely present in an encounter — these require only attention.
The Attitude Taken Toward Unavoidable Suffering
The third source is the most challenging. Frankl was not arguing that suffering is good or that one should seek it. His clinical practice was devoted to helping patients reduce unnecessary suffering. His claim was narrower: that when suffering is unavoidable — when the diagnosis is terminal, when the loss has already happened, when nothing can be changed — how one bears that suffering remains within the domain of human freedom.
He observed prisoners in the camps who chose to comfort others, who shared their last food, who maintained dignity in conditions designed to destroy it. These acts were expressions of meaning: they demonstrated that the last human freedom — the freedom of one's inner response — could not be entirely seized by any external power. The attitude taken toward unchosen suffering is itself a source of meaning, because it is the exercise of a freedom that cannot be taken.
Camus and Absurdism: Living Without Appeal
Albert Camus arrived at parallel questions by a different route. Where Frankl was a clinician interested in mental health, Camus was a novelist and philosopher interested in the ethical conditions of secular life. His 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus opens with one of philosophy's most provocative declarations: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."
Camus was not advocating for suicide. He was beginning with the logical consequence of nihilism — if life has no meaning, what is the argument for continuing? — and then showing why that conclusion is wrong.
The Absurd Gap
Camus described the human condition as characterized by an irresolvable confrontation: on one side, our inescapable hunger for clarity, purpose, and meaning; on the other, the universe's absolute silence in response to that hunger. The universe does not speak. It does not organize itself around our needs. This confrontation between human need and cosmic indifference is the absurd.
Rejecting Both Suicides
Camus identified two inadequate responses. Philosophical suicide — adopting a religious or ideological system that dissolves the absurd by asserting that meaning exists after all — he rejected as intellectual dishonesty. The existentialist philosophers he was engaging (Kierkegaard especially) had stared into the absurd and leapt to faith as a resolution. Camus regarded this as flinching. One must hold the absurd without resolution.
Literal suicide is the other capitulation: if life has no meaning, walk away. Camus rejected this as well, on the grounds that it responds to the absurd by eliminating one of the terms — the human being who creates the confrontation — rather than by living through it.
Sisyphus and Revolt
His alternative is revolt: continuing to live, to love, to create, to pursue justice — with full awareness that the universe provides no guarantee that any of this matters. The revolt is in the persistence, the passion, the commitment maintained in the face of absurdity rather than because of its absence.
His image is Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a boulder to the top of a mountain, watch it roll back, and repeat for eternity. There is no payoff. There is no progress. There is no end. Camus invites us to imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because his labor is rewarding in any ordinary sense, but because his passionate engagement with his fate — his refusal to require the task to be worthwhile before he does it — is itself an expression of freedom. Not consoled, not at peace, but alive and choosing.
Aristotle to Susan Wolf: Eudaimonia, Hedonia, and Fitting Fulfillment
Aristotle and the Active Life
Aristotle's answer in the Nicomachean Ethics was eudaimonia — often translated as happiness, but better understood as flourishing. Eudaimonia is not a feeling but an activity: living well and doing well. It involves the exercise of distinctly human capacities — reason, virtue, civic participation — in the pursuit of genuinely worthwhile ends. It is not about how life feels from the inside but about what kind of life one is actually living.
The hedonic counterpart — seeking pleasure and avoiding pain as the basis of the good life — was articulated by Aristippus and the Epicureans. Aristotle's objection was that a life of pure pleasure, however pleasant it feels, is the life of an animal rather than a human being. It does not exercise what is distinctly ours.
Contemporary psychology has operationalized both dimensions. Carol Ryff's model of psychological well-being distinguishes hedonic wellbeing (positive affect, life satisfaction) from eudaimonic wellbeing (purpose, personal growth, environmental mastery, autonomy, positive relations, self-acceptance). Research consistently finds that both dimensions matter for health outcomes, but they are distinct, and people can score high on one while low on the other.
Susan Wolf's Fitting Fulfillment
The contemporary philosopher who has most rigorously addressed the question of meaning in life is Susan Wolf. Her 2010 book Meaning in Life and Why It Matters argued that meaning arises at the intersection of two conditions, neither of which is sufficient alone.
The first condition is subjective engagement: you must be actively drawn in, care about, feel fulfilled by the activity. A life spent doing admirable things while feeling entirely indifferent to them is not a meaningful life in Wolf's sense.
The second condition is objective worth: the activity must have genuine value beyond your own endorsement of it. A life spent wholeheartedly devoted to counting blades of grass is not meaningful even if it produces intense subjective satisfaction. Wolf calls such cases alienated from objective value.
Meaning arises when you find your subjective engagement fitting — that is, when what engages you genuinely is worth being engaged by. This is "fitting fulfillment." It avoids the relativist collapse (anything goes as long as you care about it) and the cold objectivism (objective goods are meaningful regardless of whether anyone cares). It requires both terms: genuine worth in the world and genuine investment in the person.
The Psychology of Meaning: Steger's Measurement Revolution
One reason the psychology of meaning lagged behind the psychology of happiness for decades was measurement. How do you quantify whether a person's life feels meaningful?
Michael Steger and colleagues addressed this directly with the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006, with a final sample of 1,159 participants across four studies. The MLQ distinguishes two empirically separate dimensions: the presence of meaning (the sense that one's life has purpose and significance) and the search for meaning (active seeking for purpose). The distinction matters enormously.
Steger's research, confirmed in multiple samples across cultures, found that presence and search predict different outcomes. High presence of meaning is associated with higher life satisfaction, lower depression and anxiety, greater psychological resilience, and more secure attachment. High search for meaning, particularly when paired with low presence, is associated with greater distress, rumination, and existential anxiety. Someone actively searching but not yet finding meaning reports worse wellbeing than someone who has found it.
This finding has implications for therapeutic and educational approaches. Simply encouraging people to search for meaning — without providing the resources, relationships, or experiences through which meaning is actually constructed — may increase distress. Meaning appears to be built rather than revealed; it emerges from engaged participation in relationships, work, and community rather than from introspection alone.
The MLQ has since been used in hundreds of studies across cultures and clinical populations. A consistent cross-cultural finding is that presence of meaning is a stronger predictor of wellbeing than positive affect in many East Asian samples, suggesting the meaning-wellbeing relationship is not merely a Western artifact.
Seligman's PERMA Model: Meaning as Transcendence
Martin Seligman's PERMA model, developed in Flourish (2011), situated meaning within a broader framework of human flourishing that he argued superseded his earlier focus on happiness. The five elements — Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment — are each pursued for their own sake, each contribute to wellbeing, and each can be measured independently of the others.
Meaning, in Seligman's formulation, is defined as belonging to and serving something larger than the self. This could be a religion, a political cause, an organization, a family, a body of knowledge, or any framework that transcends individual interests and provides a context within which individual actions acquire significance. The connection to Wolf's "objective worth" is explicit: meaning requires a reference point outside the self.
PERMA-based interventions, studied by researchers including Margaret Kern and Lea Waters across organizational and educational settings, find that structured activities targeting all five elements produce wellbeing gains beyond those produced by targeting any single element alone, consistent with the model's claim that the elements are distinct and additive.
Purpose and Health: What the Longitudinal Studies Show
Perhaps the most striking finding in the science of meaning is that it is not merely a philosophical or psychological concern but a biological one.
The MIDUS Study: 6,000 Adults, 14 Years
Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano's 2014 analysis of data from the MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) longitudinal dataset examined 6,163 adults across a 14-year follow-up. After controlling for age, health status at baseline, socioeconomic factors, and other wellbeing measures, people who scored higher on purpose in life had a 15% lower mortality rate over the follow-up period. The effect held across adult age groups, including younger adults in whom mortality is rarer, suggesting it was not simply a late-life phenomenon. The finding was published in Psychological Science (doi: 10.1177/0956797614531799) and has since been replicated in multiple independent datasets.
Cardiovascular and Inflammatory Pathways
Eric Kim and colleagues, working primarily with MIDUS and Health and Retirement Study data, found that higher purpose was associated with lower risk of heart attack, stroke, and sleep disturbances. Behaviorally, people with a stronger sense of purpose engage in more health-protective behavior — they exercise more, maintain regular health screenings, eat better, and sleep more consistently. At the physiological level, purpose is associated with lower inflammatory markers (including interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein) and more stable HPA axis functioning under stress. The stress response system is organized, in part, by the meaning-making system.
Cognitive Protection in Late Life
The Rush Memory and Aging Project, a prospective cohort study of community-dwelling older adults in Chicago, found that higher purpose in life was associated with slower rates of cognitive decline and substantially lower rates of Alzheimer's disease diagnosis over follow-up. The effect held after controlling for depressive symptoms, chronic health conditions, and cognitive activity. Purpose appears to provide a form of cognitive reserve — the brain of a purposeful person may be more resilient to the pathological changes underlying neurodegeneration, or the behavioral habits of purposeful people delay its clinical expression.
Post-Traumatic Growth: Suffering as a Source of Meaning
The relationship between suffering and meaning is not simply adversarial. Some of the most important work on meaning has emerged from studying people who reported positive psychological transformation following severe trauma.
Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun named this post-traumatic growth (PTG) and introduced it formally in 1996. Their foundational paper established the Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory and identified five domains of reported positive change: new possibilities, relating to others, personal strength, appreciation for life, and spiritual or existential change. Their initial research and subsequent studies across diverse trauma populations found that approximately half of trauma survivors reported significant positive changes across one or more of these domains — a proportion substantially higher than models focused exclusively on pathology had predicted.
The connection to meaning is direct. Severe trauma disrupts existing meaning structures: the assumptions about the world and the self that had organized a person's life become suddenly inadequate. This disorientation is painful, but it also creates an opportunity — sometimes a forced one — to construct a more complex or more deeply considered set of meanings. People who complete this reconstruction often describe their lives as more meaningful than before the trauma, not despite their struggle but because of what the struggle compelled them to examine.
This is consistent with Frankl's third source of meaning: the attitude taken toward unavoidable suffering. Post-traumatic growth does not redeem suffering or make it worthwhile. It describes what some people do with it.
For related science on psychological resilience, see what is resilience. For existential and philosophical dimensions of mortality awareness, see why we fear death. For religious and spiritual frameworks of meaning, see why humans are religious.
References
- Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press (English translation, 1959).
- Wolf, S. (2010). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton University Press.
- Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Free Press.
- Hill, P. L., & Turiano, N. A. (2014). Purpose in life as a predictor of mortality across adulthood. Psychological Science, 25(7), 1482–1486. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614531799
- Steger, M. F., Frazier, P., Oishi, S., & Kaler, M. (2006). The Meaning in Life Questionnaire: Assessing the presence of and search for meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(1), 165–180. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.1.165
- Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455–471. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490090305
- Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069
- Kim, E. S., Sun, J. K., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2013). Purpose in life and reduced incidence of stroke in older adults. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 74(5), 427–432. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2013.01.013
- Boyle, P. A., Buchman, A. S., Barnes, L. L., & Bennett, D. A. (2010). Effect of a purpose in life on risk of incident Alzheimer disease and mild cognitive impairment in community-dwelling older persons. Archives of General Psychiatry, 67(3), 304–310. https://doi.org/10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2009.208
- Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus. Gallimard (English translation by Justin O'Brien, 1955).