Someone close to me is dying. I’m not going to make this about that, but it’s kind of a trigger for big thoughts. I’m going to share some of those thoughts.
Let’s keep it simple. Let’s talk about the meaning of life.
Life vs. Consciousness
Most people, authors, opinionated folk, discuss life as a characteristic of the individual. A property, so to speak. A frog is alive, a rock isn’t. A chair isn’t alive, a jellyfish is.
If you take the jellyfish, or the frog, or a human for that matter, and wait long enough or treat them badly enough, that specific, individual life will stop.
Except no, I don’t actually buy into that narrative. Hear me out.
There’s only one “Life” that has been going on non-stop for billions of years. Life sustains itself through reproduction, and that’s how it stays, well, alive. From the perspective of Life, there is no “individual.”
If I scratch my knee, the cells leaving my body die, of course. But that doesn’t mean I die. It’s not their life. They’re part of me.
The same applies one level up: you can lose a whole arm and nobody mourns the arm. You can be sorry for the individual losing the arm, but not for the arm itself.
Similarly, you can lose an individual and it doesn’t matter to “Life”. It’s always the same Life. But, it matters to us.
So what’s the deal? Well, the focus on the individual needs to be framed around consciousness.
When someone dies we mourn the loss of the individual consciousness, not their biological life. I propose to consider “death” as the end of any specific individual consciousness.
For example, that explains why we accept brain death as actual death even when the body persists: the consciousness is gone. Keeping someone on life support feels way more tragic than the loss of a limb: in the former case, the biological life continues, but the individual consciousness we knew has ended.
That’s what I mean by “death”. The end of a specific individual consciousness.
For this post, when I say “life,” I mean that: individual consciousness, not biological life.
What I actually want to talk about instead is: what makes your life, as temporary and subjective as it is, meaningful? Why does it exist? What is it for?
Sources of Meaning
We are time-bound beings. We are tied, as much as we can find that disturbing, to a specific, tiny slice of time in the universe.
I have come to the conclusion that the connection to time is central in this discussion.
The past, the present, and the future.
The Past Builds Who You Are
When you were born, you were all potential. Now, you’re somewhere along a journey transforming potential into experience and outcomes.
You can do that because you aren’t a fixed thing: you’re built by your experiences and behaviours and choices and events.
Every thing that happened to you, every lesson learned, every memory formed shapes you. Literally.
This is why staying too comfortable and static feels meaningless, like throwing your life away. You’re not wasting your life, you’re stopping its growth, so you stall instead of evolving.
Meaning comes from deliberately building yourself: reading that book, having that hard conversation, learning that skill, making that choice.
The first path to meaning is to make the most out of your time to grow and shape yourself.
The Present Exists Only Because You Will Die
I hope I’m not giving you too much of a spoiler, but one day you will die.
Here’s a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien: “If you really come down to any large story that interests people – holds the attention for a considerable time … human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death.”
We’re drawn to stories about mortality because we recognize ourselves in them.
Without death, life would have no meaning because it would never end. There would be no stakes, no urgency, no reason for anything to matter.
There would be no risk, and I’m convinced that some degree of risk is a source of meaning.
We are wired to find meaning in doing difficult things. Difficult things are, by definition, dangerous. At least they feel dangerous.
Climbing mountains, giving birth, skydiving, going to war. Most activities forcing you to face the fact that you’re temporary and you could end any moment give us meaning.
Of course, this isn’t about seeking danger for its own sake, and you can have risks that aren’t really deadly.
But fully engaging with intense experiences gives life meaning: your consciousness is temporary, so use it now. Feel it now. Live it now.
The second path to meaning is to live fully and take risks in order to have every day a present that matters to you.
The Future Makes You Immortal
For example, I have children. I strongly believe that my children are not just continuation of biological life (they are, of course), but also continuation of consciousness. They take my ideas, my values, my way of seeing things, and they remix, evolve, and make them their own.
This applies in the same way with anyone you’ve taught, mentored, influenced.
They’re not copies of you. Far from it. But they carry something forward that wouldn’t exist without your consciousness having touched theirs. And that, to me, is hugely meaningful.
Also, the things you create, the code you wrote, the ideas you shared, the systems you built, these outlast you. You can influence people who were not even born when you die. Some people are impactful thousands of years after their death. That’s also meaningful.
The third path to meaning is not by preserving yourself (you can’t), but through what you contributed that continues after it ends.
The Bottom Line
Biological life has no meaning. It just is. It’s been going for billions of years and will keep going.
But your consciousness, the impermanent, individual awareness you have right now as you read this, that can have meaning.
You give it meaning three ways: by building yourself, by engaging with your mortality, and by extending your reach beyond you.
Not by asking what it all means. But by making your brief consciousness mean something.