The question of the meaning of life is so familiar that it has become almost a cliche, the target of jokes about computers outputting "42" and philosophers stroking their beards indefinitely. But the familiarity is deceptive. The question is genuinely difficult, and the difficulty is not merely technical. It touches the most basic structures of human motivation: why we bother getting up in the morning, what we are trying to accomplish over the arc of a life, and what we would lose if we concluded that the whole project was pointless. People who have lost a sense of meaning in their lives do not just feel mildly dissatisfied; they suffer in a particular and profound way, one that Viktor Frankl observed in the concentration camps and that subsequent research has consistently associated with depression, anxiety, poor health, and early death.
Philosophy has been asking the question for more than two millennia, and has produced several distinct families of answers. Some locate meaning in relationship to the divine -- a cosmic purpose that transcends individual existence and situates each human life within a larger narrative of creation, salvation, or liberation. Some locate meaning in the achievement of human potential -- in Aristotle's eudaimonia, the active exercise of one's best capacities in the company of friends and in service of genuine goods. Some deny that meaning is available at all -- nihilism, in various forms, holds that the universe is indifferent, that no purpose was designed into existence, and that human attempts to find meaning are either self-deception or projection. And existentialism and absurdism accept the absence of inherent meaning while drawing radically different conclusions about what to do with that fact.
What is most striking about contemporary philosophy of meaning is that it has become considerably more empirically engaged than it was even a generation ago. Philosophers including Susan Wolf, Thaddeus Metz, and Joshua Seachris have developed careful analytical theories of what meaning consists in, distinguishing the meaning of life (as a cosmic question) from meaning in life (as a question about what makes individual lives matter). And psychologists including Michael Steger, Roy Baumeister, and William Damon have generated a substantial empirical literature on what actually makes people's lives feel meaningful -- research that speaks, if not always directly, to the philosophical questions.
"The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world." -- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
Key Definitions
Nihilism: The philosophical position that life has no inherent meaning, value, or purpose. Existential nihilism holds that the universe is indifferent to human concerns and that no cosmic narrative gives significance to individual lives.
Existentialism: The philosophical movement, associated with Sartre, Beauvoir, and Heidegger, holding that existence precedes essence -- that humans have no predetermined nature or purpose and must create themselves through their choices and commitments.
Absurdism: Albert Camus's position that the tension between the human desire for meaning and the universe's silence is the fundamental condition of human existence, and that the appropriate response is neither suicide nor religious escape but revolt -- continuing to create and live in full awareness of the absurd.
Fitting fulfillment theory: Susan Wolf's account of meaning in life: a life is meaningful insofar as it involves active, engaged participation in projects of genuine objective worth -- the conjunction of subjective engagement and objective value.
Logotherapy: Viktor Frankl's meaning-centered psychotherapy, founded on the claim that the primary human motivation is the will to meaning -- the drive to find or create significance -- rather than pleasure or power.
Major Theories of Meaning Compared
| Theory | Core Claim | Key Thinker | Strength | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Theistic / cosmic meaning | Meaning comes from God or a transcendent cosmic purpose | Traditional religion, Tolstoy | Provides objective anchor for meaning | Requires contested metaphysical commitments |
| Nihilism | Life has no inherent meaning; the universe is indifferent | Nietzsche (as diagnosis), Benatar | Intellectually honest about the absence of cosmic purpose | Offers no positive account of how to live |
| Existentialism | Meaning is created through free choice and authentic commitment | Sartre, Beauvoir | Respects human agency and self-creation | Freedom without foundation can feel groundless |
| Absurdism | The tension between human desire for meaning and the universe's silence is irreducible; revolt is the response | Camus | Honest about the absurd without succumbing to despair | "Revolt" can seem vague as a practical guide |
| Eudaimonism | Meaning is found in the flourishing exercise of distinctively human capacities | Aristotle, MacIntyre | Connects meaning to human nature; empirically tractable | Requires contested account of human nature |
| Fitting fulfillment theory | Meaning requires both subjective engagement and genuine objective worth | Susan Wolf | Avoids both subjectivist and objectivist extremes | Leaves objective worth underspecified |
Nihilism and the Death of God
Nietzsche's Diagnosis
Friedrich Nietzsche did not invent nihilism, but he is its most penetrating analyst. In 'The Gay Science' (1882) and 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' (1883-1885), Nietzsche announced the 'death of God' -- not as a theological claim about divine existence but as a cultural diagnosis: the Enlightenment had undermined the metaphysical foundations on which Western civilization had based its values, and the consequences had not yet been fully absorbed. God had been the guarantor of moral order, the source of cosmic purpose, the judge who made individual suffering meaningful within a larger narrative. With that guarantor gone, the whole edifice of value was in danger of collapse.
Nietzsche took nihilism seriously as a cultural and psychological threat. He did not celebrate it. His project in the works of the 1880s -- the Umwertung aller Werte, the revaluation of all values -- was to find a way to affirm life and create new values in the absence of the old metaphysical foundations. The Ubermensch (overman) was not a fascist superman but an image of the human being who could affirm life without the crutch of otherworldly values -- who could say yes to existence in all its suffering and contingency. Amor fati, the love of fate, was the psychological stance Nietzsche held up as the alternative to nihilistic despair.
Whether Nietzsche succeeded in escaping nihilism is disputed. He explicitly held that eternal recurrence -- the thought experiment asking whether you would be willing to live your life again, identically, an infinite number of times -- was the greatest weight and the test of whether one had achieved genuine affirmation. But some readers find that his framework provides insufficient resources for grounding the new values he invokes, leaving his affirmations philosophically unstable.
Contemporary Nihilism
Academic nihilism in contemporary philosophy is associated primarily with Benatar's antinatalism (discussed in pessimistic philosophy), Zapffe's biocentrism, and various forms of moral error theory. Alex Benatar's 'Better Never to Have Been' (2006) argues that coming into existence is always a harm: non-existence involves neither the good of avoiding pain (a genuine benefit) nor the loss of pleasure (not a harm, since there is no one to be harmed). The asymmetry between absence of suffering and absence of pleasure entails that existence is always worse than non-existence. This is not mainstream academic philosophy, but it represents a rigorous working-out of certain nihilistic premises.
More moderate forms of nihilism, such as that associated with philosophers including Richard Joyce (in the context of moral philosophy) and Thomas Nagel's famous essay 'The Absurd' (1971), hold that while objective meaning is unavailable, the subjective perspective from which our lives matter to us is ineliminable and may be sufficient. Nagel argues that the absurdity of human life -- our capacity to step back and view our projects from a cosmic perspective that renders them trivial, combined with our inability to escape the first-person perspective that makes them urgent -- is not something that can or should be resolved. The human condition is to live within the tension.
Existentialism: Meaning Made, Not Found
Sartre and Radical Freedom
Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism begins with the reversal of the traditional Aristotelian view that essence precedes existence -- that things have a nature that determines their purpose. For human beings, Sartre argues in 'Existentialism Is a Humanism' (1945), existence precedes essence: we exist first, without predetermined nature or purpose, and through our choices we create whatever we become. There is no human nature fixed by God or evolution that determines what a good human life is; there is only the ongoing project of self-creation through free choice.
This generates radical freedom and radical responsibility. Because there is no external authority -- not God, not nature, not history -- that can determine what I should do or who I should be, I cannot escape responsibility for my choices by appeal to my character, my upbringing, my society, or my emotions. The person who says "I had no choice" or "That's just how I am" is practicing what Sartre calls bad faith: the denial of one's own freedom in order to evade the anxiety of radical choice.
Meaning, on Sartre's account, is not discovered but created through authentic engagement with one's projects and commitments. The authentic person chooses freely, acknowledges the groundlessness of that choice, and takes full responsibility for it. This is not comforting, but it is honest, and for Sartre, honesty about the human condition is itself a form of integrity that gives life its dignity.
Simone de Beauvoir and Relational Meaning
Simone de Beauvoir developed and deepened the existentialist account of meaning in 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' (1947) and 'The Second Sex' (1949). De Beauvoir argued that the existentialist framework Sartre developed was insufficiently attentive to the relational and social dimensions of human existence. Freedom is not purely individual; my freedom is bound up with the freedom of others, and a meaningful life requires not only authentic individual choice but genuine recognition of and commitment to others' freedom.
De Beauvoir's analysis of women's situation in 'The Second Sex' extended existentialism into feminist social critique: women had been systematically denied the conditions -- education, economic independence, political participation -- that make authentic self-creation possible. This connected the abstract existentialist framework to concrete social and political questions about the conditions that meaningful lives require.
Camus and the Absurd
Albert Camus insisted throughout his career that he was not an existentialist, and his quarrel with Sartre illustrates a genuine philosophical difference. Camus accepted the absurdity of the human condition -- the irreducible tension between the human demand for meaning and the universe's silence -- but he rejected Sartre's move of locating meaning in human freedom and project. For Camus, the existentialist solution was itself a form of philosophical flight: creating meaning through the weight of one's own freedom was not fundamentally different from creating it through belief in God. Both were attempts to escape the absurd rather than confront it.
'The Myth of Sisyphus' opens with the claim that the only serious philosophical question is suicide: if life has no meaning, why continue? Camus argues against suicide not by providing meaning but by showing that the absurd, properly understood, does not justify it. Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder up a hill for eternity only to watch it roll back down, is the image of the human condition. But Camus's conclusion is: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." The revolt against meaninglessness -- continuing to live and create in full consciousness of the absurd -- is itself a form of defiance that has a kind of dignity, if not a cosmic meaning.
Camus extended this analysis in 'The Rebel' (1951), examining the relationship between the absurd, revolt, and political violence. His disagreement with Sartre over Soviet totalitarianism -- Sartre was more sympathetic to communist revolutionary violence; Camus was not -- ended their friendship and illustrated the political stakes of the philosophical differences.
Susan Wolf and the Fitting Fulfillment Theory
Beyond Subjective and Objective Accounts
Susan Wolf's 'Meaning in Life and Why It Matters' (2010) is the most rigorous recent analytical treatment of what makes individual lives meaningful. Wolf's starting point is dissatisfaction with both purely subjective and purely objective accounts. Purely subjective accounts hold that a life is meaningful if the person living it finds it fulfilling -- that meaning is whatever matters to the person. But this seems to make the grass-counter's life (the person who spends their days counting blades of grass and finds deep fulfillment in it) as meaningful as the surgeon's or the teacher's, which most people find implausible.
Purely objective accounts hold that a life is meaningful to the extent that it involves activities that are objectively valuable, regardless of whether the person engaged in them cares about them. But this seems to miss something: the person who is raised to pursue noble activities but is alienated from them, finding them meaningless and joyless, does not seem to have a meaningful life despite their objective achievements.
Wolf's solution -- the fitting fulfillment theory -- requires both. Meaning arises when one is actively and subjectively engaged in projects of genuine objective worth. The surgeon who loves their work and helps patients, the artist who is passionately committed to their craft, the parent who is genuinely devoted to their children and to the project of raising them well: these lives combine the subjective dimension (active engagement, not passive exposure) with the objective dimension (activities that genuinely matter, not just activities one happens to value). Wolf does not provide a complete theory of objective worth, but she argues that some judgments -- that curing disease matters more than counting grass -- are reasonably robust even without a philosophical foundation.
Empirical Research on Meaning
Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have found that meaning and happiness, while correlated, come apart in important ways. Activities that are highly meaningful are not always highly pleasant: parenting is consistently associated with high meaning and lower moment-to-moment positive affect than non-parenting. Demanding work, difficult relationships, and challenging creative projects often rate high on meaning and lower on hedonic pleasure. Passive activities rate higher on immediate pleasure and lower on meaning. This empirical pattern maps closely onto the philosophical distinction between hedonism and eudaimonism.
Michael Steger's research using the Meaning in Life Questionnaire has found consistent cross-cultural evidence that the presence of meaning -- feeling that one's life matters and has direction -- predicts wellbeing, health, and longevity, independently of hedonic positive affect. The search for meaning is more complex: it predicts better outcomes when combined with existing meaning, but worse outcomes when meaning is absent and the search is experienced as futile.
Pew Research Center surveys across countries have found that family is the most consistently cited source of meaning across cultures, followed by occupation, health, and -- in more religious societies -- faith. The cross-cultural consistency of family as a meaning source is striking, and broadly consistent with Aristotelian emphasis on deep relationships as constitutive of flourishing.
Practical Takeaways
Philosophy cannot tell you what to find meaningful, but it can help clarify what kind of thing meaning is and what distinguishes genuine meaning from its substitutes. Wolf's framework suggests that the question to ask is not "does this feel meaningful to me?" but "is this genuinely worth doing, and am I genuinely engaged with it?" -- a conjunction that requires both self-knowledge and some honest accounting of what activities actually have value.
Frankl's logotherapy offers the practical insight that meaning can be found even in suffering -- that the attitude one takes toward unavoidable conditions is itself a source of meaning, the last freedom that cannot be taken away. And Camus's absurdism offers the bracing reminder that meaning does not require cosmic sanction: the revolt against pointlessness, the continued creation of value in a universe that offers no guarantees, is itself a form of human dignity that survives the question.
References
- Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. Justin O'Brien. Vintage, 1991.
- Sartre, J.-P. (1945). Existentialism Is a Humanism. Trans. Carol Macomber. Yale University Press, 2007.
- Nietzsche, F. (1883). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Penguin, 1978.
- Wolf, S. (2010). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton University Press.
- Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man's Search for Meaning. Trans. Ilse Lasch. Beacon Press, 2006.
- Nagel, T. (1971). The absurd. Journal of Philosophy, 68(20), 716-727.
- Metz, T. (2013). Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. Oxford University Press.
- Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., Aaker, J. L., & Garbinsky, E. N. (2013). Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(6), 505-516.
- Steger, M. F., Frazier, P., Oishi, S., & Kaler, M. (2006). The meaning in life questionnaire. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53(1), 80-93.
- De Beauvoir, S. (1947). The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Philosophical Library, 1948.
- Kitcher, P. (2014). Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism. Yale University Press.
- Benatar, D. (2006). Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford University Press.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism?
Nihilism holds that life has no inherent meaning, value, or purpose. Strong nihilism holds not merely that there is no cosmic purpose but that human-created meanings are also ultimately groundless, leaving nothing to fill the void. Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed the cultural consequences of nihilism in 'The Will to Power' and 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra': with the 'death of God' -- the collapse of the metaphysical and theological framework that had provided Western culture with its sense of value and purpose -- a nihilistic crisis threatened to drain human existence of significance.Existentialism, associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, accepts the absence of inherent meaning but draws different conclusions. Sartre's formulation 'existence precedes essence' means that humans have no predetermined nature or purpose; we are thrown into existence and must create ourselves through our choices. Meaning is not found but made, through authentic engagement with one's projects and commitments. This creates radical freedom, but also radical responsibility: there is no external authority to blame for how one's life turns out.Absurdism, specifically Camus's position in 'The Myth of Sisyphus' (1942), is distinct from both. Camus accepts the absurd -- the tension between the human need for meaning and the universe's silence -- and rejects both religious escape ('philosophical suicide') and actual suicide. The proper response to the absurd is revolt: continuing to live and create in full knowledge that existence is without ultimate meaning. 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.'
What is Susan Wolf's theory of meaning in life?
Susan Wolf's 'Meaning in Life and Why It Matters' (2010) proposes what she calls the fitting fulfillment theory: a life is meaningful insofar as it involves active engagement in projects of worth. The theory has two components. First, the projects must be genuinely worthwhile -- they must have objective value, not merely be valued by the person pursuing them. Second, the person must be actively and subjectively engaged with those projects -- meaning is not generated by passive exposure to worthwhile things.The biconditional structure is important. Subjective engagement alone is not sufficient: Wolf gives the example of a person who finds deep fulfillment in counting blades of grass -- engaged, yes, but in a project with no objective worth. Objective worth alone is not sufficient either: being born into a noble family one resents and from which one is alienated does not make one's life meaningful, even if the family genuinely does worthwhile things.Wolf's theory attempts to navigate between subjectivism (meaning is whatever the person values) and objectivism (meaning is determined by external standards independent of the person's engagement). It explains why certain activities feel meaningful even when they involve significant effort and discomfort -- they involve active engagement with something genuinely worthwhile. And it explains why pure self-indulgence, however pleasant, feels hollow: pleasure without genuine worth fails the objective condition.The theory faces the question of who determines objective worth and on what grounds. Wolf acknowledges this but argues that some judgments of worth -- that curing disease matters more than counting grass -- are reasonably robust even without a complete theory of value.
What does Viktor Frankl's experience in the concentration camps tell us about meaning?
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and founder of logotherapy (meaning-centered psychotherapy) before his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944. His experiences in the concentration camps, described in 'Man's Search for Meaning' (1946), profoundly shaped his theory of human motivation and resilience.Frankl observed that some prisoners maintained psychological integrity while others deteriorated rapidly, and that the determining factor was not physical condition but the presence or absence of a sense of meaning. Those who retained a sense of purpose -- who had something to live for, a person to return to, a work to complete, a task to fulfill -- demonstrated greater resilience. He adapted Nietzsche's formulation: 'He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.'Frankl's logotherapy holds that the primary human motivation is not pleasure (Freud) or power (Adler) but the will to meaning -- the drive to find or create significance in one's existence. Meaning can be found through creative work (what one gives to the world), through experiential values (what one receives from the world -- beauty, love, truth), and through attitudinal values (the stance one takes toward unavoidable suffering). The last of these is the most profound: even in situations of radical suffering where all external freedom is removed, the freedom to choose one's attitude remains.Frankl's work has been criticized for romanticizing suffering and for insufficient attention to structural factors, but its core insight -- that meaning is a powerful psychological resource independent of circumstances -- has been broadly confirmed by subsequent research on post-traumatic growth and resilience.
Do religious answers to the meaning of life hold up philosophically?
Religious frameworks offer the most comprehensive and psychologically compelling answers to questions of meaning: life has the meaning given to it by its divine creator, whose purposes extend beyond human comprehension but are ultimately oriented toward human flourishing. The particular articulations differ: the Abrahamic traditions generally locate meaning in relationship with God, obedience to divine command, and participation in a narrative of salvation or redemption; Buddhist and Hindu traditions locate it differently, involving liberation from suffering and the cycle of rebirth.Philosophically, theistic answers face a version of the Euthyphro dilemma from Plato: is life meaningful because God says it is, or does God say it is because it is? If the former, meaning is arbitrary -- God could equally have ordained a life of pointless suffering as meaningful. If the latter, meaning has an independent ground that does not require God to be authoritative.Atheist philosophers including Julian Baggini have argued that secular meaning is not second-best meaning but the only honest kind -- that the task of finding meaning within a finite human life, without appealing to a cosmic purpose that cannot be verified, is both more honest and more fully human than borrowing meaning from a metaphysical narrative. Philip Kitcher's 'Life After Faith' (2014) makes a similar argument for 'secular humanism' as a framework capable of generating genuine meaning, community, and ethical commitment without theistic foundations.The empirical literature on meaning finds that religious practice is a consistent predictor of reported meaning, but also that atheists and agnostics can and do report high levels of meaning derived from relationships, work, and personal projects -- suggesting that religious frameworks are one route to meaning, not the only one.
What does research tell us about what makes life feel meaningful?
Michael Steger, a psychologist at Colorado State University, has developed some of the most systematic empirical measures of meaning in life, distinguishing between the presence of meaning (feeling that one's life has meaning) and the search for meaning (actively seeking it). Research using these measures has found that the presence of meaning is positively correlated with wellbeing, life satisfaction, and physical health, and negatively correlated with depression and anxiety. Importantly, the search for meaning is not straightforwardly positive: it is associated with better outcomes when one has already found some meaning, but with worse outcomes when combined with low presence of meaning.Pew Research surveys across dozens of countries have found that the most commonly cited sources of meaning are family (cited by a majority of respondents across most cultures), occupation, material wellbeing, friends and community, and -- less frequently in secular Western countries -- religion and spirituality. In South Korean data, materialism was more prominent; in African samples, religion was highly salient.Roy Baumeister's research distinguishes meaning (a sense of purpose and mattering) from happiness (feeling good). The two are correlated but distinct: parenting, for instance, is associated with high meaning and lower moment-to-moment happiness than non-parenting. Difficult or demanding activities often rate high on meaning and lower on hedonic pleasure, while passive activities rate higher on immediate pleasure and lower on meaning -- a pattern that connects empirical research to philosophical distinctions between hedonism and eudaimonism.