the meaning mirage: does life need meaning, or just the search for it?
For the ones who lie awake wondering what any of this is for. For the ones who ask why, even when there’s no one there to answer.
Where the Question Begins
The past couple months, I’ve been hyper-fixated on what in my life actually means something. When I get a perfect score on an exam, I feel a quick burst of satisfaction for maybe a minute before it fades into nothingness. What was it all for? If I had gotten a 90 instead of a 100… would my life feel any different?
It’s a pattern I can’t unsee. I push through exhaustion, lose sleep, skip weekend plans, meet every deadline like it’s a finish line that will finally make me feel whole—and then the moment passes, and all I feel is tired. No parade. No clarity. Just this vague sense that I’m running toward something that keeps moving farther away.
If even my proudest moments fade so fast, did they ever really matter? And if they don’t—what does? What can?
That line of thinking opens a door I try not to walk through. Because once I start asking what’s meaningful, it’s hard to stop. Suddenly, I’m questioning everything: the degree I’m pursuing, the goals I set years ago and never revisited, the people I try so hard to make proud. It all starts to feel like I’m just living for the sake of living—checking off boxes I didn’t choose, reaching for something I can’t name. There’s this growing fear that maybe there’s nothing solid beneath my feet. Maybe all of this striving leads to… nothing.
But somewhere in the middle of that spiral, I hit a wall—a thought that caught me off guard and lodged itself in my brain:
Does life really need meaning… or is it the search for meaning that proves it exists at all?
That question didn’t answer anything, but it stopped the unraveling. It made me pause. And it’s haunted me just enough that I haven’t been able to let it go. So I’m writing now—trying to give shape to the invisible things I think about late at night. Trying to say aloud what I’ve only ever whispered to myself at 2 a.m., when the world is still and everything feels loud and silent at the same time.
I don’t have answers. I’m don’t know if I’ll find any. But I think there’s something sacred in the search itself. In the act of caring enough to ask. In the hope that something I do—something any of us do—might be worth something to someone, somewhere.
So that’s what this is. An attempt. A reflection. A reaching.
The Human Compulsion: Why We Crave Meaning
From the moment we’re born, our brains are wired to seek patterns, connections, and explanations. As kids, we ask "why" relentlessly, not out of rebellion but out of instinct. Why is the sky blue? Why do people die? Why does it hurt when someone leaves? That curiosity doesn’t go away—we just get better at hiding it behind routines, deadlines, and distractions.
But even as we grow older and life gets louder, the search never really stops. We make myths, write poems, build religions, create scientific theories—not just to explain the world, but to understand our place in it. Even our dreams reflect this hunger. We dream of success, of love, of legacy—not simply for pleasure, but because those things give shape to an otherwise chaotic existence.
We want to believe things happen for something—not just because they happen. We want our suffering to mean something. We want our happiness to count. That’s not weakness. That’s humanity.
Maybe it’s biology. Maybe it’s survival. Evolutionarily speaking, assigning meaning helped us navigate the unknown. If the rustle in the bushes meant danger, we stayed alive. If a certain ritual gave us comfort, we kept doing it. But somewhere along the line, the need for meaning became more than just a tool for survival—it became a longing. A spiritual ache.
And that craving is what drives us. It’s what builds civilizations. It’s what inspires art. It’s what pushes us to write articles like this one, to spill our thoughts into the void and hope someone hears them. Even the act of questioning meaning—like I’m doing now—is a kind of proof that we need it. Or at least, we need the idea of it.
Because if meaning truly didn’t matter, we wouldn’t be so haunted by its absence. We wouldn’t ache when things feel pointless. We wouldn’t grieve when dreams fall apart. We wouldn’t search.
And yet we do. In heartbreak, in joy, in boredom, in awe—we search. Always. Because maybe the very act of searching means there’s something worth finding. Or maybe, just maybe, the search itself is the meaning we’re after.
Hot Dogs, Star Dust, and Everything In Between
A piece of media that you must reference when discussing life’s meaning is Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. There’s a reason that movie resonated with so many people, especially those of us who feel like we’re quietly unraveling under the pressure to mean something.
It takes a premise as outrageous as a multiverse where every possible version of you exists—versions that made different choices, knew different people, loved differently, failed differently—and asks the most human question of all: Which of these lives is worth living? It’s not about the sci-fi. It’s about the ache of being overwhelmed by possibility and paralyzed by it. Evelyn is bombarded with paths not taken, each one whispering, “You could’ve been more.” And who hasn’t felt that? Who hasn’t doubted if they’re living up to their full potential?
There’s this moment where Evelyn is face-to-face with her daughter, Joy, in the form of Jobu Tupaki—the embodiment of someone who’s peered into the abyss and decided that nothing matters. Joy doesn’t want to destroy the universe. She just wants to stop hurting. And she wants someone—her mother—to understand that feeling. Evelyn does. She finally sees her daughter not just as someone she’s failed or fought with, but as another soul lost in the swirl of “What does it all mean?” And in that recognition, Evelyn doesn’t fix the universe. She doesn’t find the right answer. She just chooses to stay. To keep showing up. To hold her daughter’s hand in the absurdity of it all. And maybe that is the answer.
What makes EEAAO so powerful in the context of searching for meaning is not that it offered a grand, all-encompassing answer, but because it doesn’t. It simply mirrors the disorientation so many of us feel—and shows someone choosing to care anyway. It reflects the panic of having too many options, the despair of not knowing which path to follow, and the quiet bravery of choosing one anyway.
It reminds us that in a world where nothing is guaranteed and everything is temporary, the most radical thing we can do is choose to love, to laugh, to keep going. To do the laundry. To pay attention. To keep searching even when the meaning feels slippery, fragile, or altogether absent.
A quote that I feel perfectly describes this idea is when Evelyn says,
“You are not unlovable. There is always something to love. Even in a stupid, stupid universe where we have hot dogs for fingers, we get very good with our feet.”
It sounds ridiculous—but that’s the point. Because in a reality that refuses to make sense—where identity fractures, where choice becomes overwhelming, where meaning slips through our fingers—this line reminds us that love still makes sense. The hot dog universe, bizarre as it is, becomes a metaphor for resilience: for how we adapt, how we care, and how we find tenderness in the places we least expect it. We don’t get to choose the rules of existence, but we do get to choose how we meet them. That’s what Evelyn learns. That’s what we’re all learning.
So maybe, like Evelyn, we won’t find a single, clean answer to what gives life meaning. Maybe the answer isn’t in mastering every version of ourselves or chasing perfection across infinite paths. Maybe the meaning lies in choosing to care, even when nothing is certain. In showing up for one another. In holding hands in the chaos.
EEAAO doesn’t answer the question of what gives life meaning, because maybe there isn’t one answer. Maybe the question is the answer. Maybe the act of looking, of loving, of choosing softness instead of nihilism, is the meaning.
And then there’s Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, the image my junior year physics teacher would never shut up about—also known as the image of Earth taken from nearly 4 billion miles away. Sagan wrote,
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” In the grand cosmic scale, Earth is nothing more than a speck. Every war, every heartbreak, every triumph has unfolded on this tiny stage.”
It should make everything feel meaningless. And yet—Sagan’s tone is reverent. Because within that speck is everyone we’ve ever loved, every act of kindness, every moment of beauty. The smallness doesn’t diminish us; it dignifies us. It’s precisely because we are so small that what we do here matters.
It offers the opposite concept of EEAAO’s multiverse chaos. Instead of infinite paths, we’re reminded we have only one—just this. Just now. And maybe that’s why it matters so much. Because there’s no do-over. No parallel version of you living a better or more successful life. Just you. Here. Breathing. Trying.
Sagan doesn’t try to fill the silence of space with comforting lies. He simply shows us how small we are, and then invites us to sit with it. And in that smallness, there’s something sacred. Because if Earth is just a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” then everything we do here—every moment of love, grief, art, progress, failure—is made even more meaningful because we created it in the middle of so much nothingness.
There’s no promise in Sagan’s universe. No grand reward for being good. No script laid out for us. But in that emptiness, he finds dignity. The fact that we choose to care, that we build lives and stories and societies on a tiny rock in an indifferent cosmos—that’s not meaningless. That’s miraculous. The search for meaning, then, becomes an act of hope, even in the face of the void. A way of saying: “We’re here. We’re small. And we’re still trying.”
But What If We Never Find It? (We Keep Looking Anyway)
So what if we never land on the one true purpose of our lives? What if the universe never gives us clarity, never answers back? What if there is no ultimate meaning waiting at the end of the tunnel?
It’s terrifying to imagine that there might not be an answer. That we might spend our whole lives searching and never find what we’re looking for. But maybe the meaning isn’t something we find—it’s something we create along the way. Maybe it’s not an answer etched in stone, but a question we keep returning to. Not a destination, but the motion itself.
Even the act of asking—that quiet, stubborn hope that there’s something more—that’s evidence of something deeply human. Because if we truly believed there was nothing to be found, we wouldn’t keep looking. We wouldn’t build art out of grief or write poems about stars or fall in love even when we know it might end. We wouldn’t ache the way we do if nothing mattered.
So maybe the search is the answer. Not certainty, but yearning. Not the story, but our insistence on telling one anyway. To keep making something out of the chaos, even if it never quite resolves.
Because the truth is: we do keep going. We love people who will eventually leave. We build sandcastles that will be washed away. We sing songs in empty rooms and cry over sunsets no one else sees. And we do it not because we’ve found the meaning, but because on some level, we believe it’s there—maybe just out of reach, maybe in plain sight, maybe in each other.
Everything Everywhere All At Once tells us it’s okay not to understand the universe. That meaning can exist even in a world that doesn’t make sense. Pale Blue Dot reminds us that even in our smallness, our choices echo. That it’s precisely because we’re brief, because we’re fragile, that what we do here carries weight.
In one version of the universe, maybe you’ve already found all the answers. In another, you’ve stopped looking. But in this one—this exact, singular, fleeting version—you’re still here. You’re still reaching. You’re still asking the question.
And maybe that’s enough.
We look. We ask. We reach.
And somehow, that becomes meaning.