The Trouble With Always Looking for Meaning

There’s a particular kind of letdown that shows up right after you get the thing you were chasing. You clear the exam, land the job, finally hit the number you’d been aiming at for years, and for a few days it feels exactly the way you’d pictured it would. Then, without much warning, it doesn’t anymore. Whatever was supposed to have arrived quietly leaves the room, and you’re back to wanting the next thing, as though the last one barely happened.

I’ve felt that enough times now to stop assuming something is wrong with me personally. It might just be how wanting works.

Growing up, life still seemed to have a fairly clear meaning attached to it, even if I couldn’t have explained what that meant at the time. I spent my early years in Shillong, later moved to Delhi for high school, then went off to boarding school, with its discipline, routines and expectations. There was always something to do, somewhere to be, something to become. Study hard. Play well. Be responsible. Get into a good college. Build a career. Become somebody. At that age, you don’t really question the structure. Meaning is just handed to you.

Then came law college in Bangalore, and life turned into internships, research, exams, more internships, building a CV, trying to work out what kind of lawyer I might even become. There was always another milestone, another thing to achieve, another definition of what success was supposed to look like. Then came work, law, investment banking, retail, a string of fairly different roles, and each stage brought its own version of meaning along with it. What mattered at twenty wasn’t quite what mattered at thirty. What felt important in one job quietly stopped mattering in the next.

Looking back, one thing has become fairly clear to me: meaning keeps changing on its own schedule, whether we ask it to or not. And that makes me wonder whether we’re actually finding meaning most of the time, or just finding new things to fill the same recurring gap.

We’re constantly told to find our purpose, find our passion, find our calling, build something that matters, leave a legacy. There’s practically an industry built around helping people work out what their life is supposed to mean. But what if that’s the wrong question to start with? What if the search for meaning is, at least some of the time, less about discovering a grand purpose and more about keeping a fairly ordinary emptiness at bay?

Psychologists have a fairly blunt name for part of this pattern: the hedonic treadmill. We get the job, and then we want the next one. We hit a certain income, and the number quietly moves. We get the thing we’d wanted for years, and within a few months it’s just furniture. The achievement doesn’t hold the feeling for very long, so we go looking for another one. Long before anyone had a name for the treadmill, the writer of Ecclesiastes was describing more or less the same loop: I denied myself nothing my eyes desired, I built houses, planted vineyards, gathered silver and gold, and then, surveying everything my hands had done, found it all came to about as much as chasing wind. That was written somewhere around two and a half thousand years ago, and it still reads like it was written last week.

The Meaning We Inherit

A lot of the meaning in our early lives isn’t really ours to begin with. It’s handed to us by the people and institutions around us. Family gives us some of it. School gives us some. Religion gives us some. Society hands over its version, and our profession eventually adds another layer on top.

For me, boarding school brought discipline, achievement, responsibility. Law college brought a different set of expectations. Internships and research made me start thinking, for the first time, about professional identity. Work, later, measured success through an entirely different set of yardsticks. None of these were necessarily wrong. They were just inherited frameworks, and we don’t usually begin life by asking what we actually value. We’re handed a template first, and only much later do we start editing it. Maybe growing older is largely the process of figuring out which parts of that template were ever really ours.

Then the Meaning Starts Moving

The strange part is that even once you start choosing for yourself, meaning still doesn’t settle down. At twenty, I might have thought a particular career milestone mattered enormously. Years later, it barely registers. Something I hardly noticed at the time turns out to matter a great deal more in hindsight. Relationships shift, priorities shift, ambitions shift, and our sense of who we even are keeps shifting along with them.

Maybe meaning was never meant to be permanent, and the discomfort comes from expecting it to be. We want one answer that holds for an entire lifetime, but we’re not the same person for the whole of that lifetime. The person who wanted a particular thing at twenty isn’t really the same person wanting things at forty. So it’s worth asking why we’d expect the meaning to stay fixed when almost nothing else about us has.

Are We Finding Meaning, or Just Filling the Void?

This is the question I keep circling back to. When we chase success, are we finding something genuinely meaningful, or just staying busy enough not to notice the alternative? When achievement starts to feel like an obsession, is that a purpose being fulfilled, or a way of avoiding the thought that there might not be a larger purpose waiting at the end of it? Building a career, collecting money, chasing recognition, worrying about status, some of that is probably meaningful. A fair amount of it might just be the ego insisting, quietly and constantly, that this has to add up to something, that I have to be somebody.

There’s something genuinely uncomfortable about the possibility that most of us are, in the end, fairly ordinary. Not unsuccessful, not insignificant, just ordinary, and the ego doesn’t seem to enjoy that idea much. We want our lives to matter in some exceptional way. We want the effort to add up to something larger than the sum of the days that went into it. Sometimes it probably does. And sometimes, I suspect, we’re really just trying to get the universe to sign off on the fact that we were here.

What Camus Called the Absurd

Albert Camus is useful here. His idea of the absurd comes from a fairly simple mismatch: human beings have an enormous appetite for meaning, order and explanation, and the universe, as far as anyone can tell, doesn’t hand any of that over. We ask why we’re here. Nothing answers. We ask again anyway, and keep asking, and most of religion, philosophy, science and ideology can be read as different attempts to fill that particular silence.

Camus didn’t think the right response was to give up simply because the universe refuses to hand over a cosmic explanation. His answer, roughly, was to notice the absurdity clearly and keep living inside it anyway, without pretending the silence isn’t there. You don’t need to solve existence before you’re allowed to take part in it.

Frankl, Nietzsche and the Weight of a Why

Viktor Frankl arrived at something similar from a completely different direction. As a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning after watching, at close range, which prisoners tended to keep going and which didn’t. His conclusion wasn’t that the ones who survived had it easier. It was that the ones who found some thread of meaning to hold onto, a person waiting for them, unfinished work, even just the choice of how to face suffering they couldn’t escape, tended to endure what should have been unendurable. He liked to quote Nietzsche’s line that whoever has a why to live can bear with almost any how. Frankl’s whole discipline, logotherapy, was built on a fairly direct rejection of Freud: he didn’t think pleasure was our primary drive, and he didn’t think power was either, the way Adler argued. He thought it was meaning, and that we could find it even in circumstances that offered nothing else.

Nietzsche has another idea worth sitting with here, a thought experiment he called eternal recurrence. Imagine, he says, a demon telling you that you’ll have to live this exact life again, in precisely the same order, down to every small detail, forever, on an endless loop. Would that thought crush you, or would you want it? It’s a strange, slightly unsettling way of testing whether a life is actually being lived on your own terms, or just being gotten through.

Faith, Purpose and What Comes After

Religion has always been one of the great human answers to these same questions. Why are we here. Where did we come from. What happens after death. Is there something beyond this. What counts as good and what counts as evil. For a very large number of people, faith supplies answers that philosophy on its own doesn’t quite reach. Belief in an afterlife, in karma, in heaven, in rebirth, in some larger order holding it all together, gives a life a frame that extends past its own ending.

Whether or not any particular person holds those beliefs, they point at something worth noticing about human beings generally. We don’t just want to live. We want the living to mean something. We want death to not be the whole story. Maybe that’s part of why belief systems carry so much weight across every culture that’s ever existed. They don’t only explain the universe. They also give people something to do with their own smallness inside it.

What If There’s No Final Answer?

I sometimes wonder whether the emptiness people describe comes partly from refusing to sit with uncertainty. We want a destination, a purpose, a final explanation, one sentence that makes the rest of it make sense. But what if there isn’t one? What if meaning was never meant to be permanent in the first place?

What mattered to me at fifteen doesn’t much matter at thirty. What mattered at thirty may not survive to fifty. That doesn’t necessarily mean the earlier version was false. It probably just means I changed. That might be the more honest way to look at the whole thing. We’re not fixed people hunting for one permanent answer. We’re changing people trying to make sense of a world that’s changing at roughly the same pace we are.

We Are Not as Separate as We Think

There’s another idea I keep returning to, that the whole problem might start with assuming we’re separate from everything around us. We talk about “me” and “the world” as though they’re two entirely different categories of thing. But we’re made from the same earth as everything else. We breathe air produced by a much larger ecological system, drink water that’s travelled through rivers and clouds and soil long before it reached us, and eat food that becomes, quite literally, part of our bodies before eventually returning to the same ground it came from.

There’s something humbling in that, if you actually sit with it. We spend enormous energy establishing our individual importance, while at a slightly deeper level we’re clearly part of something much larger than any one of us. The Buddhist idea of interbeing, developed further by teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, points at roughly the same thing: nothing exists entirely on its own. We exist through relationships, with other people, with the natural world, with conditions we didn’t choose and mostly don’t notice. The ego wants a separate story. Nature, as far as I can tell, isn’t particularly interested in giving it one.

Sophisticated Monkeys

There’s something almost funny about how seriously we take ourselves. We build countries, write constitutions, create financial markets, go to law school, build companies, invent entire religions and philosophies, worry endlessly about status and money and what other people think of us, and spend decades trying to become important. Underneath all of it, we’re monkeys wearing clothes. Fairly sophisticated monkeys, granted, with language and mathematics and music and extraordinary technology, but still running on some very old instincts. We want to belong. We want status. We fear rejection. We compete without always noticing we’re competing. We fall in love. We worry about dying. The clothes have gotten much better and the problems have gotten more complicated, but the monkey is still very much in there. Remembering that, oddly, tends to feel more like relief than insult. It brings the whole thing back down to a scale you can actually hold.

Maybe Meaning Is Smaller Than We Think

None of this means life has no meaning. It might just mean meaning is smaller, and far more temporary, than we’ve been taught to expect. A conversation with someone you love can matter. A good book can matter. Doing work well can matter, and so can helping someone who didn’t ask for it, walking somewhere without your phone, a decent cup of tea, watching rain fall from somewhere dry. None of that needs to become a grand philosophy to count. Maybe we don’t need one enormous purpose that explains the whole of a life. Maybe a meaningful life is just a large number of smaller things that, added together, make the whole thing worth showing up for.

What Am I Actually Looking For?

I think sometimes about the boy I was in Shillong, the student I became in Delhi and then Bangalore, the intern doing research at odd hours, and the different people I turned into across law, banking and retail. Each version was looking for something. Each one had a different idea of what would make life feel meaningful, and each one, eventually, changed its mind. I don’t think of that as failure anymore. Meaning probably changes because we change, and the trouble mostly starts when we assume we have to find one answer and hold it forever.

Maybe the search was never really about landing on the one thing that makes life meaningful. Maybe it’s closer to learning how to live without a final answer at all. There may be faith. There may be purpose. There may be an afterlife, or there may be nothing beyond this. There may be a universe we only ever understand in fragments. I don’t know, and I’m no longer convinced that saying so is a failure of meaning. It might just be where humility actually starts.

We wake up, we work, we love, we lose people, we learn, we change our minds, we start again. Most of a life is spent trying to work out who we are and why we’re here at all. Maybe we’re finding meaning. Maybe we’re filling a void. Maybe the ego simply can’t stand the idea that we’re ordinary creatures on a small planet inside an unreasonably large universe. It’s probably all of it at once, in different proportions on different days. After all, we’re monkeys with clothes. Perhaps the point was never to solve the mystery completely. Perhaps it’s just to be here, for whatever strange and limited stretch of time we get, and to live it as honestly as we can manage.