What is the meaning of life?
What is my purpose?
Why am I here?
After spending a large chunk of my finite time mulling over these questions — combing through countless theories and perspectives — there’s only one plausible answer for me: The meaning of life is this. Yes, this. As in, this scene in front of you, this thing you’re doing, this thought you’re thinking. The meaning of life needn’t be found, in other words. It’s already within you.
To be clear, I don’t believe life’s meaning is “whatever you want it to be.” I actually reject this answer for reasons I’ll explain later. What I’m getting at is more accurately expressed by Alan Watts:
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
Years ago, I would’ve found this answer deeply unsatisfactory. Today, I find it convincing, fulfilling, and meaningful. Here’s why.
1. The Genie’s Out of the Bottle
For most of my existence, I struggled to find meaning in life. And when I say “struggled,” I mean that I was desperate. Ironically, my quest to find life’s meaning led me into several existential crises, during which I questioned everything and everyone. I became existentially lonely.
It started when I was eight.
One day, I came home from school to watch Pokemon. But instead of Pokemon, I stumbled upon a quirky commercial break. An announcer stood before a bright yellow background, wildly gesturing with his arms. “Got questions?” he said. “We got answers! Seriously, ask us anything! Why are bananas curved? How do thunderstorms form? …”
I was just about to switch channels when he asked the big question:
“What is the meaning of life?”
Though I didn’t know it then, this question freed an irksome genie from its bottle. Except this particular genie granted me not three wishes but life-long anxieties about the purpose of humanity. And it wouldn’t stop pestering me until I found a truth that could hold up in court.
But all of that came much later.
On that day, I quickly forgot about the meaning of life. I never called the company behind the commercial; instead, I enjoyed a few episodes of Pokemon. I had no clue where the genie had gone. But many years later, it would return with a bang.
2. The Genie’s Rebellion
When I was nineteen, the genie went on the barricades. It triggered my first existential crisis.
Maybe it was because my brain had developed. Or maybe it was because I had been working an alienating engineering job, where I spent most of my time crafting complicated Excel spreadsheets. Whatever it was — I became obsessed with the meaning of life. Sometimes, I would roam up and down my tiny apartment, endlessly mulling over the big question, as if it were a complicated math problem.
Occasionally, I scribbled variations into my journal. What is it all about? What is my purpose? What does it all mean? When the thoughts became too much to handle, I would step outside and go on a long walk. Often, I only returned late at night when my mind was too tired to think, and my body craved nothing but sleep.
Part of the reason for my intense ruminations was that I didn’t buy the popular remedies to the problem. Take nihilism, for example. Sure, the idea that everything is ultimately meaningless assuaged me, but it also felt soulless and short-sighted. If everything were meaningless, then nihilism, too, would be meaningless.
Even so, I discovered a fashionable alternative to nihilism called optimistic nihilism. According to optimistic nihilism, every person can find the things that are meaningful to them, individually. One person might find meaning in dancing salsa, another one in baking croissants, and yet another person in working as an insurance salesman by day and playing video games by night. More fun, more meaning for everyone, right?
Yeah… no.
I found optimistic nihilism even more troublesome than pure nihilism — mostly because it exerted enormous pressure on me. After all, I needed to fill my life with supposedly meaningful activities to live an optimistically nihilist life. And at the time, nothing I did felt meaningful. I didn’t have any answers. I was lost.
The pressure was on.
Trying to adopt optimistic nihilism and find my personalized purpose felt not like graduating from the University of Meaning but more like coming to a final exam — unprepared, dizzy, and naked. And then, I was confronted with unanswerable questions like: What is my purpose? What am I here to do? What’s my passion? How can I be most useful to society?
Not that these questions aren’t important. But when they become the very prerequisite to living a meaningful life, they don’t just exert pressure; they can crush you. They make you feel like you’re failing at life until you have a good answer. They rob your life of meaning, rendering it meaningless, until you devise at least one convincing solution.
I was all the more surprised — exhilarated, even — when, one day, I found a meaningful activity: writing. “This could be my purpose,” I thought. “This could be my meaning of life.” But then, my brain did funny things again. I started wondering about the meaning behind the meaning. As in, What’s the point of writing? Sure, it’s fun. But then again, what’s the point of fun? Why even have fun in the first place?
Why, why, why…
Ultimately, my problem with optimistic nihilism is that it’s a bottomless pit. Judging an activity for the meaning it adds to your life is an impossible task. Whenever I found a seemingly meaningful activity, I only needed to ask myself why it was meaningful — at which point the meaning vanished again. “There must be more to this,” I kept telling myself.
Worse, whenever I found things that felt meaningful — like writing — I attached my entire life’s meaning to these things. And that was risky because whenever I didn’t enjoy writing, I abruptly felt like my life had lost meaning.
I tried to banish the genie back into its bottle…
3. Error 404: Genie Not Found
…until I realized the genie was nowhere to be found.
This happened years later when I gave up the prospect of a flourishing engineering career and started studying philosophy. During my first semester, I spent an unreasonable amount of time with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Reading this book verges on self-torture, and yet it offered me deep insights into human nature and the meaning of life.
I’ll try to explain.
Kant’s core idea is that the human mind has certain operating conditions. Much like a camera can only capture a defined frame and color spectrum, the mind can only understand limited aspects of the world. The inevitable consequence is that we can never perceive the true nature of things. Human reason is restricted.
One of the mind’s inherent operating conditions is causality. We are fundamentally causal-thinking creatures. When we see puddles on the street, we can’t help but think that it has rained. Whatever we perceive in the world or the mind, we can’t help but ask, “Why?”
Of course, this also applies to life. When we perceive life, we think there must be a profound reason, an elaborate explanation of why this is happening. But no. Just because the mind asks a question doesn’t imply that there’s an answer. Again, Kant wanted us to understand that we are conditional creatures. Our thinking is limited. When we try to solve problems that our minds aren’t equipped to solve, our thinking ceases to function.
Using the human mind to decipher life’s meaning is like asking a camera to capture scents.
4. ‘This’ Is the Genie
Ironically enough, I slipped into a deep existential crisis after my first semester of philosophy. I’d tried to befriend the genie, but now it had ghosted me.
I found comfort in the philosophy of language. One soothing insight was that a word’s meaning is not found in a dictionary but in the real world. Definitions are flawed. Words don’t embody words — experiences do. For example, I wouldn’t expect you to grasp what I mean if I told you about a round fruit that typically has thin red or green skin and crisp flesh.
If you know what I meant, that’s because you’ve understood what an apple is — by real-life experience. You’ve seen it, felt it, tasted it.
Similarly, we can figure out the meaning of life by asking a simple question: What does the word “life” refer to in the real world? Well, if you ask me, the answer is whatever you experience here and now. I really meant it when I said it earlier: This is the meaning of life. Whatever “this” might be. Life is the baby crawling out of a mother’s womb. Life is crowds of people shuffling on Times Square. Life is a widower slurping coffee in Addis Ababa.
Life is this. And this. And this.
It sounds simple enough. Yet, for most of my life, I assumed the exact opposite. I mistook life’s meaning for a game of Wordle. I thought that if I just tried enough combinations, the correct solution would appear. But the whole point of it, I learned, is not to think, not to cling to the rails of language, and not to deploy the force of reason. No — the point is deceivingly simple:
You are life, and whatever you do is the meaning of your life.
Turns out, the genie didn’t ghost me. Quite the opposite: it had always accompanied me, waving its arms, trying to get my attention. It’s just that I was too occupied to see it.
5. The Genie Is Dead, Long Live the Genie!
The philosophical answers I found quieted my mind for some time. But for some reason — and I know this may sound strange after everything I’ve said — my life didn’t feel meaningful on a deeper level. It felt kind of empty. Though I rationally understood that the mind can’t explain the meaning of life and that life is whatever is appearing, I couldn’t grasp these answers spiritually.
It wasn’t until last year that I stumbled upon a few passages that transformed this messy puzzle I’d been grappling with into one marvelous mosaic. Some of the most beautiful pieces I found came from reading poems by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Here’s one passage from The Keeper of Sheep V that hit me like a double shot of exquisite espresso:
’The inner constitution of things….”
“The inner meaning of the Universe….”
All of it’s false, all of it doesn’t mean a thing.
Incredible that such things can be thought about.
It’s like thinking of whys and wherefores
When morning daylight breaks through the trees
A misty golden lustre forces the dark to vanish
Half a year later, I read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, in which I found a passage that filled me with lightness, complementing everything I’d been pondering thus far.
When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and the book of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion. I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened.
I think this is the perfect metaphor: Wondering about the meaning of life is like over-interpreting a book’s formatting. “Why did they put a comma here?” one might ask. Or: “Why did they use the word perilous rather than dangerous?”
But when you immerse yourself in the book of life and simply start reading, these doubts crumble away. As the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris says: “When your attention is truly free — in the present — the question of meaning doesn’t arise.”
Accepting that the meaning of life is just to be alive is not something you do; it’s something you stop doing. Nothing needs to become meaningful because everything is already meaningful.
Of course, I still doubt the meaning of life occasionally. On some days, I wake up with utter existential dread, and my core fills with a sense of emptiness. But these feelings — the doubt, the emptiness, the dread — are just more proof of life’s meaning.
During all my existential crises, I longed to return to my childhood, call that guy on the quirky commercial, ask him about the meaning of life, accept his answer, and be done with it. This would’ve escorted the genie back to its bottle, where it belonged.
Or so I thought.
What I didn’t realize was that the genie had never resided in a bottle. It has always resided within my consciousness. The truth is, I don’t need to hear the commercial guy’s answer to the meaning of life. His answer was already implied in the question. “What is the meaning of life?” — whoever utters these words proves that they are, in fact, meaningfully alive.
When you truly feel this aliveness, there’s no need to construct meaning around it.
The aliveness is the meaning. This is the meaning.