The absence of meaning is a hunger that nothing else satisfies – neither comfort or pleasure, nor achievement or high self-esteem. This is what it looks like on an ordinary day:
You wake up and everything is in order. Nothing has gone wrong. The people you love are well, your work is there waiting. You do what you have to do – the shower, the coffee, the clothes – and you do not even notice yourself doing it. You have conversations at work and cannot remember them an hour later. The afternoon is long. There is something missing and you cannot name it. This is not grief or unhappiness – those at least feel like something. This is a day that has lost its meaning.
When days pile up into weeks, months, and years, what you have is not a mood but a condition. We hear more and more about people who seem to have lost the will to live, who have simply stopped trying. What these people have lost (or never found) is not a chemical balance or a coping strategy. It is meaning.
This is not just a private matter. Meaning (or its absence) reaches into everything: how you sustain relationships, raise children, or make decisions when things get hard. It is the difference between a life that makes sense and one that doesn’t. Here is why meaning is worth taking seriously.
What is meaning?
Let’s start with what it is not. Information is not meaning – you can read something accurate and useful and find it completely empty. Pleasure is not meaning – a life that is comfortable, entertaining, and well-fed can still feel hollow. Achievement is not meaning – the research on this is consistent enough – a career promotion, a finished project, an award produce a brief satisfaction (at best), and then – nothing or even less.
Stripped to its bare bones meaning is a way of experiencing events and actions as connected, directed, and significant. Connected: things feel like parts of a whole rather than isolated incidents. Directed: experience feels like it is going somewhere, building toward something. Significant: what happens matters beyond the immediate moment. When these three are present, life fits together. When they are absent long enough, a person eventually asks “What’s the point?!?” and finds no answer.
Why it is not optional
Most people seem to believe that meaning is at the top of some hierarchy, so first you have to secure what is needed for your physical survival – food, shelter, safety, and only then you can strive towards higher things. Meaning seems like a luxury the starving cannot afford.
However, the evidence does not support this. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, dedicated the rest of his life to studying what helped people survive the death camps. The decisive factor was one – meaning. The person who had a “why” – a reason to survive, a person to return to, a work to complete, a witness to bear – maintained dignity, purpose, and even humor in conditions designed to reduce human beings to pure animal survival behavior. Those who lost their “why” deteriorated rapidly, regardless of their physical condition and collapsed for lack of a reason to go on. Viktor Frankl not only wrote books about this but also developed a therapeutic method he called “logotherapy”, and its focus was finding meaning.
The philosopher Ernst Cassirer argued that we do not first have experiences and then decide whether they mean anything. We are already inside a framework of meaning before we begin. We are not creatures who encounter raw reality and then interpret it but creatures who can only function inside a world of symbols, language, and story. When that framework collapses, experience does not just become harder. It becomes unbearable.
Biology points in the same direction. Research tracking large populations over time has found that people with a strong sense of purpose show lower stress markers, better cardiovascular health, and longer life expectancy – regardless of income or circumstances. The brain under chronic meaninglessness behaves like a brain under chronic stress.
The outer limit of all this is visible in the historical record. In the second and third centuries, hundreds of Christians – men, women, and children – were given an explicit choice by Roman authorities: renounce your faith and live, or hold to it and die in the arena, maimed and devoured by dangerous beasts. They knew exactly what dying would involve . The accounts of these events, even the ones written by people who were neither Christian nor sympathetic, describe those who chose death not as fanatics or people seized by hysteria, but as calm. Some use the word joyful. The same pattern appears in the Soviet death camps documented by Solzhenitsyn in his book The Gulag Archipelago. People who held a meaning deep enough did not merely endure their suffering. Their relationship to it changed entirely, so it was no longer something to be endured but something to be embraced as nested inside a story that mattered absolutely.
This is the full range of what meaning does. At one end, its absence makes an ordinary morning unbearable. At the other, its presence makes an arena embraceable. It is not a luxury, something you get to once the practical matters are settled. It is a primary need – as real and as early as any other. It is present from the beginning and operating at every level of a human life. The person who has it can walk into an arena. The person who lacks it cannot get out of bed and explain why.
The narrative mode – how meaning is made
Meaning is not attached to isolated facts or moments. It is what connects them into something coherent – events that feel related, experience that feels directed, moments that feel like they matter. That kind of connection has a structure – a character wants something, something is at stake, he acts, things change. That is a story – a narrative structure, which is something truly fundamental to being human.
The psychologist Jerome Bruner argued that the mind operates in two genuinely different modes. One is the logical-scientific mode – the mode of categories, causes, rules, and abstract principles. It seeks verifiable truth. The other is the narrative mode – the mode of intentions, characters, actions, and consequences. It seeks meaning. Both are real forms of intelligence, and neither replaces the other.
Almost every distinctly human activity draws on the narrative mode. We use it when we think about who we are and what made us that way, when we try to make sense of something painful that happened to us or to understand another person (we do not analyze people as systems but rather construct stories about them). We use it in our closest relationships, which are in fact co-authored narratives – their health depends on the story the partners tell about themselves being together. We use it in how we raise children – the parent constructs a narrative about who the child is, and that narrative shapes everything: how they interpret a child’s behavior, how they respond to it, what they choose for their child.
We use it in culture – in literature, theatre, cinema, fairy tales, myth, religion, ritual, and political life. We use it in art, including in the first drawings children make, which tell stories before they tell anything else. We use it in humor – a joke is the shortest possible story. And we use it in play – specifically in the symbolic, pretend play that children begin practicing almost as soon as they can walk.
This is not a list of activities that happen to share a feature. It is a single capacity, expressed in many forms. The narrative mode is not one thing among many but the water we swim in. We notice it only when it fails – on a meaningless day, in a crushing loss, in the kind of political manipulation that works precisely because it offers a story to people who never built one of their own.
Why this matters, and where we begin
Like all capacities, the narrative mode can be cultivated or neglected. It develops through practice – through constructing stories, inhabiting characters, sequencing events, finding significance in what happens.
A child who grows up in a narrative-rich environment – who is told stories and has their own experiences narrated back to them, who plays freely in symbolic worlds of their own making, who first encounters darkness in fairy tales in a shape that can be survived, who has real conversations with adults about what happened and what it meant – that child is given something more fundamental than any specific skill. They are given the capacity for meaning itself.
The stakes are not small. The narrative mode, left uncultivated, leaves people vulnerable – to the suffering of a life that cannot be organized into anything bearable, and to manipulation by anyone willing to offer a ready-made story in place of the one that was never built. Cultivated, it is the capacity through which a person becomes not the one who controls what happens (as there are so many things out of our control) but the one who can make sense of what happens. That is what makes for a meaningful life, whatever the external circumstances turn out to be.
In the posts that follow we will look closely at how the narrative mode develops in children – through symbolic play, through storytelling, through the particular kind of encounter that happens between a child and a good book. We believe that modern parenting and education tend to undervalue all three, and we want to make the case for taking them seriously. If you have read our earlier posts on symbolic play and children’s books, you already know where we stand.