Human desires, goals, hopes, and dreams serve as distractions from the absence of meaning in life. The motivations that drive individuals to rise each morning prevent them from confronting the notion that life lacks intrinsic purpose. Being exists beyond any projection of meaning. Meaning itself can be seen as a veil obscuring direct knowledge of the perfection of Being. Where meaning resides, the mind is present, and where the mind dominates, Being is obscured. As long as reality is perceived through the lens of meaning, its perfection remains hidden. Meaning forms the primary basis for the belief in duality; everything perceived is categorized according to its assumed significance, hence the duality of subject and object.
Many find it challenging to acknowledge the absence of meaning because this realization threatens one’s sense of existence as a concrete entity separate from reality. The ego perceives the absence of meaning in life in an extremely negative light. The conceptual self tends to deny the truth of meaninglessness in various ways, as the creation of meaning is fundamental to its existence. The ego derives importance through comparison with others, a process only possible through a particular lens of meaning. Moreover, admitting the absence of meaning in life reveals that the motivations behind actions are self-constructed narratives.
The Ego’s Fear of Nihilism
Meaning is a mental construct, created by each individual. Reality itself has no meaning. The attribution of meaning to reality is the mechanism through which people decide to take specific action. A common human tendency is to ascribe meaning to life out of fear of admitting that nothing has significance. Every action can be seen as a ploy to avoid confronting this truth. Few things threaten the ego more than acknowledging that nothing matters. The ego strives to make everything important, seeking to increase itself, outdo others, and prove its superiority.
There’s nothing problematic about having a purpose, acting, or pursuing goals. The issue arises when individuals are unaware that values are mental constructs. Most people haven’t consciously created their values and consider them absolute. There’s often a failure to recognize that these values are relative, mere mental constructions.
Why Do You Do What You Do?
Countless individuals adopt the values of their family and society, potentially leading to a life that isn’t truly their own, chasing dreams that may not be genuinely personal. People might find themselves living lives dictated by others, not having chosen their own path. This lack of awareness can profoundly impact lives. The definitions of success in someone’s mind may be nothing but inherited notions passed down through generations.
Someone raised with values of productivity and success might believe these values inherently exist in reality and are the “right” ones to pursue, at the expense of all others. Such individuals are puppets moved by invisible strings of others’ will. It’s common to live this way, following pre-established ideals inherited from previous generations.
Ideals are merely concepts. Pursuing an ideal means chasing the false. It’s akin to trying to satisfy hunger with a plastic sandwich. Basing happiness on satisfying pre-established ideals leads to contrasting the present with a non-existent future. Ideals lack substance and alienate individuals from the experience of Being.
Life Has No Meaning and Nothing Is Important
Are your choices conscious decisions, or are you moved by the voices of family and society? Looking inward might reveal an accumulation of others’ opinions. People often become who they were told to be. Authenticity is impossible while nurturing societal voices that hide within. What do you truly want to do? Who do you want to be? Without awareness of the motivations driving actions, one operates unconsciously. Behind these motivations lurks what we refuse to admit: life has no meaning and nothing is important.
A person’s consciousness is directly proportional to their understanding of this simple and inevitable observation. The only reason a person is able to squander their life is the will to ignore the obvious fact that nothing is really important. The realization of the insignificance of any action is irreconcilable with the tendency to live unconsciously. You haven’t really started living before understanding that life has no meaning and nothing is important. How could it be otherwise? What prevents you from finding the courage to live the life you truly desire is the fear of failure, but if nothing has meaning, what the hell do you care about failing?
Nothing Can Be Made Right Because Nothing Has Ever Been Really Wrong
The most common regret of people on their deathbed is having refused to live their life authentically. The inability to consciously construct life’s meaning often leads to passive acceptance of societally imposed purpose. Those who don’t actively choose their path find it chosen for them. Upon realizing life’s lack of meaning, many mistakenly seek a new “mission” to reinstate unconscious purpose. When confronted with existential void, the natural impulse is to grasp for any semblance of meaning. However, true inner awakening occurs only after surrendering to the death of all hope, revealing that nothing can be made right because nothing has ever been really wrong.
Reality, in its essence, is perfection – it is the divine. Any notion contradicting this serves as a defense mechanism, a way to avoid confronting a truth that strips away every constructed motivation and meaning. A mystic can be seen as a nihilist who has fully traversed the path of nihilism, discovering mysticism beyond. At humanity’s core lies a fear of the Infinite in which we’re immersed. Rather than acknowledging the Infinite’s existence, we opt to live with fear. Every action becomes infused with this fear; we resemble puppets animated by our own fear. At the root of every fear lies the terror of non-existence – the dissolution of the protagonist with whom we’ve identified.
Breaking Free from Family and Societal Expectations
The main rule of the race in which we all participate is not to stop and contemplate, because the senselessness of our efforts is evident, even when conducting a superficial investigation. Many choose unfulfilling lives, shy away from risks, and never embark on their personal hero’s journey, all due to fear of failure. They opt for the illusion of security over the uncertainty of authentic living, clinging to the belief that life possesses specific meaning and never questioning inherited teachings. The first revolutionary act for anyone seeking conscious living involves breaking free from the ingrained precepts of their birth society and family. It’s remarkable how many fail this fundamental task, resigning themselves to lives that aren’t truly their own.
In a sense, before emancipating your mind, you were never really born. What is reality? This is the main question that each of us has the task of answering before committing to living our own life. If you refuse to honestly analyze the human situation, you will have to face disastrous consequences. It is impossible to live a conscious life without, first of all, having understood what the hell this thing we call life is. The risk you run is to reach the end of your days and finally understand what the real purpose of life is, realizing that you have squandered the most precious asset you had: your very life.
Refusing to honestly analyze the human condition inevitably leads to dire consequences. Living consciously necessitates a deep understanding of life’s nature. The risk lies in reaching life’s end only to realize its true purpose, having squandered one’s most precious asset: life itself. Life offers us the opportunity to experience the infinite from a limited point of view, it offers us the opportunity to live adventures compared to which the stories of the best fantasy writers are opaque replicas, and we choose to waste all this because of fear. Life is a dream, and you are free to dream whatever you want.
Why Settling for a Life That’s Not Yours Leads to Unfulfillment
Following a predetermined path laid out by family and society epitomizes unconscious living. Essential questions often go unasked: What do you truly desire? What holds genuine importance for you? Why do you want what you want? These inquiries form the foundation of conscious living, yet most people overlook them.
The word “consciousness” holds paramount importance in one’s life: Are you authentically yourself, aware of your choices, or merely a puppet controlled by societal voices? Working in a family business for decades is fine if done consciously; the issue arises when one never exercises free will, blindly following a preset path. True peace comes from conscious choice, regardless of the specific path chosen.
Why do people settle for comfortable yet unfulfilling lives? Why engage in soul-eroding work? Why acquire unnecessary possessions? Why remain with unloved partners? The answer often boils down to fear. Life resembles a game, characterized by adventure, unknowns, surprises, and the possibility of loss. Guaranteed victory would strip any game of its appeal. Life isn’t meant for wasting in familiar comfort, but for experiencing the exhilaration of surpassing limits, achieving the seemingly impossible. It exists to offer the thrill of facing and overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges, to experience wonder, amazement, and love.
How Realizing Life’s Meaninglessness Threatens the Ego
Believing in life’s ultimate importance or meaning often leads to approaching it as a competition, resulting in suffering, anxiety, stress, and neurosis. Reflect on your happiest memories: one of the common characteristics of every happy memory is the carefree nature that distinguishes them. The ego, however, tends to treat everything as life-or-death matters. It resists admitting that importance, value, and meaning are mental constructs because, without these, it couldn’t differentiate itself from others. The ego comprises a set of perceived differences; without these, it would lose its foundation.
Much of one’s identity stems from comparison with others. Discovering that importance, value, and meaning are mere projections would threaten this identity. The fear of losing the ability to compare oneself with others often prevents individuals from embracing this truth. From a divine perspective, nothing holds importance, yet paradoxically, everything becomes equally significant.
The depression that often accompanies this realization stems from recognizing that all beliefs, convictions, and motivations are illusions born from the fear of non-existence.
When Nothing Matters, Everything Holds Equal Value in Existence
Ultimately, every motivation proves false as it implies that Being can be improved. Yet Being already embodies Absolute Truth; it cannot become more Absolute. Every conviction labeling you a failure or success resides solely in imagination. No conditions need fulfillment to achieve happiness.
Many approach life as if it were a buffet to be plundered as quickly as possible, failing to realize the infinite nature of available experiences. Life isn’t an enemy to conquer but a fruit to savor. It serves no purpose beyond its own existence. Attributing meaning to life proves superfluous, akin to claiming a bird’s song holds specific meaning.
As Alan Watts eloquently stated,
“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.”
The ego fixates on gain and subjective pleasure. Understanding that the value of desires stems from mental projections can liberate one from attachments preventing enjoyment of the eternal present. The mistake lies not in wanting but in feeling attached to desires. When nothing is important, everything is equally important, everything assumes the same value simply because it is Existence.
People often tell themselves they’ll find happiness upon reaching a specific destination or achieving certain goals. Yet, this proves illusory without cultivating the consciousness to appreciate reality as it is. If you can’t live in the present now, what makes you believe you’ll manage it after achieving your goals? Upon reaching them, nothing fundamentally changes: you’ll find yourself back in the present, unable to appreciate it without developed consciousness.
Living in a world of mental abstractions strips reality of its magic. Attributing value or meaning to reality involves labeling it, leading to a life within mental constructs rather than reality itself.
How to Overcome Nihilism: Escaping the Prison of Meaninglessness
This understanding may initially spark depression, but it’s crucial not to stop at the realization of life’s meaninglessness. One must press on, continuing the journey beyond this realization. To illustrate this process, consider the powerful analogy from “The Shawshank Redemption.” In the film, Andy, unjustly imprisoned, decides to dig a tunnel to escape. Using a small hammer, he works tirelessly, disposing of debris during his daily outdoor time to avoid detection. This tunnel represents an exit from the ego’s cell, while the discarded debris symbolizes falsehoods shed along the way.
Upon completing the tunnel, Andy faces a harrowing journey through the prison’s sewers – a sea of excrement representing nihilism. The common mistake many make is to remain in these sewers, to stop at nihilism rather than completing the journey to freedom. Don’t stop in the sewers; don’t let nihilism be your final destination. Instead, complete your journey. Emerge from the prison entirely, just as Andy does in the film.
A few years ago, I was on a bus, and I was pondering this question: “What is the meaning of life?”. It was a cool spring day, it had just stopped raining and the sun had come out. While meditating on this question, I looked out the window and saw a dog running euphorically on a field, all wet and muddy from the rain. After seeing this dog running crazy with joy, I instantly understood the meaning of life. The meaning of life is life itself, there is no meaning beyond existence. The meaning of life is a dog running crazy with joy and rolling in the mud after a spring storm.
While the realization of life’s inherent meaninglessness can be initially distressing, it’s merely a step in a larger journey. The goal isn’t to remain in a state of nihilistic despair, but to move through it, emerging into a state of liberated consciousness where life’s lack of inherent meaning becomes a source of freedom rather than despair.
How To Rediscover Life’s Wonder: The Freedom of Meaninglessness
Once you realize that life is, in essence, a game – that its meaning lies simply in being alive and its primary aspect is purely playful – a profound shift occurs. You will have no fear of failing. Moreover, you will act with detachment, because you will be aware that what you do doesn’t really matter. You will understand that your life is not a competition, you don’t have to outdo anyone, you don’t have to prove anything to anyone, and your victory or your failure have no real importance.
I often receive questions from people who are afraid to start following their real ambitions. In this case, my invitation is always the same: understand that life has absolutely no meaning, that everything you do is not important. If life has no meaning, why not do what you really want to do? There are no winners or losers in this cosmic play. The reason you might fear starting anew is the fear of failure, but failure has no meaning, nor does victory.
From the divine point of view, nothing is important, and precisely for this reason, everything is important. At this moment, you might not appreciate the magic of life because you attribute fixed meanings to things. This leads to discriminating reality rather than unconditionally loving the present.
How Life’s Meaninglessness Can Empower Your Journey
Why don’t you pursue the particular ways in which the divine seeks to express itself through you? Since life has no meaning, why don’t you do everything you want to do? If what you’ve read so far makes you feel depressed, you haven’t fully understood these teachings. The realization of the lack of meaning in life should not make you depressed; it should make you the freest person in the world. You can shape your life into anything you desire. There is no failure. There is no victory. There is only your life, and you can decide to start living it now.
“Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.” – Joseph Campbell
Fear of failure often confines people to stagnant lives, but growth requires discomfort. Evolution, both inner and outer, demands facing challenges. Every story that has ever been told, every life worth remembering is proof of this. The expectations of the family and society in which you were born are expectations that you yourself have decided to accept. You can free yourself from them at any moment; you can stop playing the role assigned to you and get off the stage. This understanding is what differentiates a conscious person from an unconscious one. What we are doing is literally a game: we pretend that there is something to do, to achieve, but there is nothing to do. Heaven is already here, existence exists.
Finding Purpose After Realizing Life Has No Meaning
If you’ve always dreamed of working as a bartender on a tropical beach, why not do it? If you’ve always dreamed of becoming a painter, why not do it? Within life, there is no constraint; your life is your dream, you can do what you desire. What are your genuine desires, what do you really want to do and create? Not because you’ll be accepted and the existence of your ego will be confirmed by others, but because you really want to express the peculiar colors of your soul.
The difference between success and failure exists only in your mind. After such a realization, your actions can no longer be motivated by superficial reasons, but must be based on much deeper spiritual principles.
Many are willing to live lives that don’t belong to them, to squander their time, because they believe life has a specific, predefined meaning. It’s like signing a pact with the devil, even at the cost of personal happiness. Some prefer to metaphorically burn in hell and exist as an ego, rather than let go of the belief in separation and realize heaven.
The main clause of this unwritten contract with society is the mandatory respect for the continuous projection of meaning, from which arises the illusory imperfection of reality. Meaning, in this context, is imperfection; without it, perfection would be revealed as the natural state of reality.
By embracing life’s inherent meaninglessness, you free yourself from these constraints. You open the door to authentic living, where your actions align with your true self rather than societal expectations. This understanding doesn’t lead to nihilism, but to a profound sense of freedom and purpose – one that you define for yourself.
Reframing Life’s Absence of Meaning: Why It’s Not a Negative Truth
The belief that you must meet certain requirements to have value, be happy, accepted, or loved is a poison that can derail the course of your life. Many spend their entire existence chasing the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, trying to meet societal requirements to find peace with themselves. Yet, they often fail to realize that what they’re seeking has always been right before their eyes.
After coming into contact with these teachings, the mistake that many make is to attribute a negative meaning to the lack of meaning in life, but doing so is nothing but attributing a further label to reality. The ego naturally perceives this understanding negatively because the absence of meaning in life is like acid that corrodes everything false about the ego – and the ego is entirely false. Don’t make the mistake of giving a negative meaning to the fact that life has no meaning. Notice that labeling the absence of meaning as a negative fact is just another projection of your mind. Life has no meaning, and this truth means nothing.
I must admit that I too, in the past, made this mistake. In fact, I remember that after realizing the absence of meaning in life, I spent two weeks in bed, with no desire to do anything. The fact that life has no meaning is only one side of the coin; the other is that you are free to live your life for the first time, free to live life as it was intended: as if it were a game.
Discovering Meaning in the Act of Being Itself
It doesn’t take much contemplation of existence to understand that the purpose of life is not the achievement of some utilitarian end. Nature has no goal to achieve; the reasons behind existence go beyond normal human thought tendencies. Often, we struggle to understand the meaning of life because it’s so immediate and direct that it eludes the mind’s efforts to grasp it through symbolic representations.
As Alan Watts beautifully put it:
“All the stars you see in the sky are a fireworks display. The universe is a celebration. It’s a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is.”
Life has no meaning or purpose, or we can say that the meaning of life is inherent in Being itself. The meaning of a bird’s song is the song itself; the meaning of a dog’s joyful run is the run itself. Existence is nothing but an immense celebration of the very fact of Being; existence has no purpose or meaning, and that’s precisely what makes it wonderful.
The only way to grasp the meaning of Being is by stepping out of your mind, abandoning habitual human behavior. When you do this, you might find that the absence of meaning in life is not a cause for despair, but a source of ultimate freedom. It allows you to create your own meaning, to live authentically, and to appreciate the sheer wonder of existence without the burden of predetermined purpose.
Remember, you’re not just observing this cosmic celebration – you’re an integral part of it. Your very being, your consciousness, your experiences are all part of this grand dance of existence.