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“My life has no meaning. My life has no purpose. I serve no greater reason to be here.”

Depending on the tone of your thoughts, that sentiment can sound like liberation, or like the opening line to an emotional spiral at 2:07 a.m.

Absurdists, existentialists, and nihilists might all nod at it… just for very different reasons. The sheer idea that life has no inherent meaning can either loosen the tightest knots in your chest or tie and tangle them even tighter. And the difference isn’t the idea itself. It’s how you hold and interpret it.

The Freedom in Meaninglessness

Let’s start with the free version.

If one believes there is no grand cosmic script, no pre-assigned destiny, no invisible scoreboard grading your every move, then the pressure can dissipate and soften, a lot.

When you zoom out far enough, your worst embarrassment becomes microscopic. You are one human among billions, on one planet orbiting one big star in one vast galaxy among trillions. The presentation you did where you were laughing uncontrollably? The awkward text you sent? That weird bullshit you pulled? The thing you said four years ago that still keeps you up at night?

Cosmically speaking, it’s really just not that deep.

And I struggle with this. I occasionally can catch myself in a spiral over things that, in hindsight, are almost comical.

Example. A little over a year ago, someone turned left in front of me, and I nicked the back of a truck bed. No one was hurt. It was a minor accident. Insurance existed. The sun rose the next morning. But at the moment? I was genuinely distraught. I had only had my license for a few months. I could barely create coherent sentences to express what happened to the police officer because I was so overwhelmed. The worst part wasn’t even the accident; it was my inability to articulate myself. I felt incompetent and exposed.

Later, my parents reassured me: these things happen all the time. It wasn’t the end of the world.

And that’s my point, that’s the point.

At the moment, it felt like game over. But objectively? It was a blip. If a friend told me the same story, I would’ve shrugged and said, “That sucks. But you’re fine.”

We are almost always gentler with others than we are with ourselves. We are our own harshest critics, our own strictest judges, our own least compassionate companions.

Believing that life has no inherent meaning can be freeing because it dissolves the illusion that everything is a test. Not every mistake is a referendum on your worth. Not every awkward interaction is a permanent stain on your identity.

Sometimes it’s just… a thing that happened. A thing that happened among the tons of other things that happen daily. Something so minuscule that it is humorous to dwell on.

There is something deeply comforting about realizing that the universe is not personally invested in your minor inconvenience and is not watching your every move like a disappointed parent.

And in that realization, there is room to breathe.

I’ve tried to adopt the “I’m free, I don’t care” mindset more often. The problem is: I do care. A lot.

Which I suppose brings us to the other side.

The Weight of Meaninglessness

The same idea that frees you can also suffocate you.

If nothing has inherent meaning, then what stops everything from feeling pointless? If there’s no grand narrative, no ultimate purpose, no higher reason, then why try at all?

This is where meaninglessness becomes restrictive.

Without meaning, effort can feel absurd. Why work hard? Why build relationships? Why strive for growth? If it all ends the same way, if history will still forget you, if the world keeps spinning the same after you’re gone, if the stars will burn out regardless of what you do, what’s the point?

It’s easy to slide from “nothing matters, so I’m free” into “nothing matters, so why bother?”

The difference between those two statements is tiny. But emotionally, it’s massive.

When meaninglessness becomes heavy, it can stunt you. Decisions feel unimportant. Ambition feels performative. Even joy can feel fragile, because you start asking, “Is this even real? Does this even matter?”

And here’s the interesting, somewhat ironic, part: humans innately crave meaning. We are meaning-making machines. We narrate everything, turn random events into stories, assign symbolism to coincidences, and we romanticize sunsets and coffee shops. We don’t just want to exist; we want our existence to mean something. (Most of us, anyway.)

So when we conclude that there is no inherent meaning, it can feel like our efforts are futile. 

The Absurd Middle

Maybe the real freedom isn’t in believing life has no meaning.

Maybe it’s in realizing that meaning is not found or given predesigned: it’s made.

The absurdity is that we are conscious creatures in an indifferent universe. We may seek answers from a sky that does not respond… and yet, we still laugh. We still find what or who we love. We still care.

Maybe it’s all handmade. Your friendships are meaningful because you say they are. Your passions matter because you decide they matter. Your growth matters because you experience it as real.

That minor car accident? It wasn’t cosmically significant. But it was meaningful in a smaller, human way. It revealed how hard I am on myself. It showed me how quickly I spiral. And it showed me how my response was a gross overreaction to something very slight. It became a lesson in perspective.

Meaning doesn’t have to be eternal to be real. Like a joke doesn’t last forever. A meal doesn’t last forever. A sunset doesn’t last forever. And that doesn’t make them pointless.

Sometimes I think the mistake is assuming that meaning must be grand and eternal, and justify the universe itself to count. But maybe the meaning is allowed to be small. Maybe it’s allowed to exist only for a moment. Maybe it’s allowed to simply be: “I cared about this. So it mattered.”

So Which Is It?

Believing your life has no inherent meaning can free you from crippling self-importance. It can loosen the anxiety that every action is permanently defining you. It can help you laugh at yourself a little more.

But if you stop there,  if you strip away meaning without replacing it, the emptiness can harden into apathy.

The trick isn’t to decide whether life has meaning; the trick is to decide what you’re going to do with the possibility that it doesn’t. If there’s no script, you’re not doomed; you’re unscripted and better tune into your improv skills. If there’s no assigned purpose, you’re not worthless, you’re unassigned. And that may be terrifying. But it’s also wildly open and free for interpretation.

You don’t have to matter to the universe to matter to someone.

You don’t have to change history to change yourself.

You don’t have to be eternal to be important.

The universe may be indifferent.

But you aren’t.

And maybe that’s enough.

A final, somewhat unrelated, note:

I’ve always struggled to clearly express my philosophical beliefs, mainly because I don’t seem to have just one. Whenever I explore a philosophy, whether it’s nihilism, existentialism, stoicism, hedonism, rationalism, relativism, Buddhism, or anything else, I can almost always find something in it that makes sense to me. I can see the logic and understand the appeal. And more often than not, I can partially agree with it.

But that’s exactly the problem.

Because I can appreciate many different perspectives, it becomes incredibly difficult for me to commit to one. Every time I start leaning toward a particular stance, I can immediately see its limitations and the strengths of another philosophy that seems to contradict it. Instead of grounding myself in one belief system, I end up standing in the space between many of them. Sometimes I wonder if this means I lack conviction. Or maybe I’m just indecisive. But maybe it’s something else entirely. Maybe I’m not ready or “meant” to anchor myself to a single philosophy. Maybe I’m just here to explore, to learn, to understand, to gather pieces of wisdom from different ways of thinking without forcing them into a rigid identity. Instead of choosing one lens through which to see the world, perhaps my perspective is the lens itself.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post this week as I continue to experiment with topics and writing styles. This piece was fun for me to think through and write out. Hope it prompted you to deeply consider your own thoughts and feelings on this idea. See you next week!