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“What does it all mean? What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose here?”(These are the) great pseudo questions of religion and philosophy. We need not ask them.(They refer to) an imaginary problem, a pure confection of thought.
Sam Harris 1
Thinking and Suffering
How might attempts to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” amplify anxiety and dissatisfaction?
Such questions encourage a style of thinking that draws attention away from present experience. Rather than engaging with what is happening here and now, the mind can search for abstract answers in reaction to some aspect of immediate experience that feels uncomfortable. Concerns that relate to meaning tend to emerge in the context of negative mood states and do little to alleviate such suffering because they dilute the capacity for engagement.
A second problem concerns the nature of thought itself. One thought gives rise to another, and another after that, often under circumstances where there is little awareness that this process is occurring. If someone suddenly asks, “What are you thinking?” we can usually reconstruct our train of thought. Yet we may simultaneously recognize that, until interrupted, we were scarcely aware that we had been thinking at all.
Most of us spend a considerable portion of our lives “lost in thought.” As Harris observes, we are often at the mercy of whatever thoughts happen to arise—and those thoughts frequently have a negative character.
If:
- the content of thinking tends to be negative, and
- most thinking occurs in the absence of awareness that we are thinking, and
- thinking about meaning reflects these same tendencies,
does it follow that reflecting on meaning entails unnecessary suffering?
Thinking and Flourishing
Those who find meaning in life find good enough reasons to be deeply immersed in the present moment. And to create and discover new and interesting things and ideas. And to connect with the people around us.
Sam Harris²
Here Harris acknowledges that there are beneficial ways to think about meaning.
Productive reflection culminates in narratives that situate experience within a context that one finds satisfying and intelligible. Such narratives foster psychological states characterized by engagement.
Some personal narratives reinforce suffering. Others encourage such deep involvement in work, relationships, creativity, or service such that questions about the “meaning of life” tend not to arise.
Being Here Now
The question of how to live a meaningful life is fairly simple to answer. In each moment we have an opportunity to connect with the contents of consciousness—to connect with the sounds, sensations, and ideas that constitute the actual character of our lives.
Sam Harris3
At first glance Harris seems inconsistent. On the one hand, he dismisses the search for meaning as a source of needless suffering. On the other, he celebrates opportunities to live meaningfully.
The apparent contradiction disappears once we recognize that people who experience meaningful lives have typically internalized narratives that
- encourages deep engagement in worthwhile activity, and
- enables them to make sense of both pleasure and suffering.
If narratives that involve meaning conduce to engagement and coherence, why should creating and internalizing them not be enormously valuable?
What Do We Mean by Meaning?
Rivka Weinberg4 resolves the apparent contradiction.
Questions about the “meaning of life” rarely distinguish among the many senses of the word meaning. Are we asking about Explanation? Purpose? Value? Significance? Impact? Point? Coherence? Until these possibilities are separated, discussions of meaning become hopelessly muddled.
When Harris rejects the search for meaning, he is referring to one specific sense of meaning: the search for an ultimate or cosmic purpose.
Understood in this way, asking about the “meaning of life” is not simply asking a difficult question—it is asking what Harris regards as a pseudo-question.
Harris is not claiming that life and work lacks value, significance, purpose, impact or coherence. Rather, he denies that experience requires an overarching metaphysical explanation to be worthwhile.
On this point Weinberg and Harris agree.
Aligning Concepts with Experience
Weinberg approaches meaning through conceptual analysis. She asks us to clarify what we mean by the word meaning before attempting to answer questions that employ the term.
Harris asks what experience is like before it becomes entangled in abstract thought about meaning.
Harris and Weinberg would advise against asking whether our work and our lives fulfill some cosmic purpose imposed by the universe.
If, however, we are asking whether our work can possesses value, significance, purpose, coherence, positive impact, or a point within human life, both thinkers would answer emphatically in the affirmative.
Life offers countless opportunities to pursue activities that matter in the everyday sense.
Our lives may be rich in everyday meaning even if the search for ultimate or cosmic meaning may prove futile.
What’s It All Mean?
Having in this way examined their minds for thoughts that strive for meaningless things, the courageous should hold their minds steady by applying remedial forces.
Shantideva5
For Everyday Meaning, it is important to aim high, try to fulfill rather than waste one’s human potential, engage with objectively … valuable projects, efforts and pursuits, and avoid excessive or extensive failure. Easy? Probably not. Worthwhile? If you are interested in a life with meaning, yes. Barring a miracle…it is probably the only way.
Rivka Weinberg6
Questions about the meaning of work or life may sometimes signal psychological distress. They often arise when a person feels detached and disengaged with work or life.
The underlying assumption driving a search for meaning might present like this:
“Unless I can identify an ultimate explanation for existence, my life cannot genuinely matter.”
Harris argues that this assumption is mistaken. Meaning is not discovered by solving an abstract metaphysical puzzle. It emerges through attentive living—in relationships, creative work, ethical action, care, curiosity, appreciation for beauty, and presence.
People who experience their lives as meaningful tend to do so not because they have solved the question “What does it all mean?” but because they are deeply engaged in activities that matter to them and to others.
Reflection on meaning becomes genuinely helpful when it
- Identifies beneficial activity to pursue within everyday life
- Facilitates deep engagement in such activity.
Conversely, searching for an ultimate “point” to the grand enterprise of leading a life is unlikely to prove helpful, as such a search “can cast a pall over the pursuits within (life) that seem otherwise valuable or purposeful.” 7
Notes:
1. Sam Harris, “Mindfulness & Meaning,” Waking Up app.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Rivka Weinberg. The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death and Time. Oxford University Press. 2026. For a summary of her conceptual analysis, see The Meaning of “Meaning”: A Working Definition is a Definition that Works.
5. Śāntideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, trans. Stephen Batchelor (Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1979).
6. Weinberg, The Meaning of It All, 66.
7. Ibid., 38.
Further Reading:
For work to be experienced as meaningful, it should contribute to or connect positively with something of value that has its source outside of oneself.
See
Regarding the Job System’s incapacity to render good judgments about what human endeavor should entail, in general, and the kinds of activity that we should be working at, see:
The concept of the “bullshit job” (advanced by David Graeber) reminds us that the problem of insufficient meaning can only arise in a situation where a significant amount of work activity is felt to be irrelevant or antithetical to the survival or flourishing of society. See:
Workosophy 