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We need many things in life, among them basics like food, water, and oxygen. But one of our most pressing needs is the need to feel that our life holds meaning. How can we best meet this crucial need? By reframing it as an opportunity to fashion a life that matches our personal belief system.

Instead of seeking meaning, as if it were lost, or accepting received meaning, as if other people had the answer, we boldly and gratefully treat meaning as a decision. As soon as we decide that meaning can be made and that it is in our power to make it, we discover that we can meet this vital need entirely from our own resources.    

To learn more about how to meet your profound existential needs, please listen to my show The Purpose-Centered Life on the Personal Life Media Network. And check out my Purpose-Centered Life blog, where I share research findings on meaning, present news from the worlds of skepticism, existentialism, rationalism, and atheism, and share practical tips on the art and practice of making meaning.

I make my meaning—or else I don’t. All that exists until I actively and mindfully make personal meaning is the possibility of meaning and, while I wait to get started, the experience of emptiness. There is the possibility that I will experience the next hour as meaningful, a possibility that turns into a reality only if I make a certain kind of decision and a certain kind of investment. If I don’t make that decision and that investment, I experience myself as going through the motions and wasting my precious time.

We are on the threshold of really understanding a shining idea: that each life can have meaning, even if the universe has none. Although each of us comes with appetites, defenses, genetic predispositions, and everything else that “human being” connotes, we are nevertheless free to choose what meaning we intend to make. This nature has granted us. I get to decide what will make me feel righteous and happy and you get to decide what will make you feel righteous and happy. By deciding, you turn the meaning that was waiting to be made into the meaning of your life.

I understand the extent to which people are burdened by the feeling that they and their efforts do not matter. They are plagued by two thoughts, that they are disposable throwaways in a meaningless universe and that nothing they can do can possibly alter that painful truth. These huge existential doubts must be met in the following way. You announce that meaning does not exist until you make it and then you don the mantle of meaning-maker. You let go of wondering what the universe wants of you, you let go of fearing that nothing matters, and you announce that you will make life mean exactly what you intend it to mean.

This is a glorious and triumphant announcement. The instant you realize that meaning is neither provided nor unavailable, a new world of potential opens up for you and you can set out to make your life a thing of value. You haven’t made it that thing of value yet, simply by announcing your intention, but you have aimed yourself in a brilliant direction: in the direction of your own creation.  

For more on the relationships among meaning, creativity, and depression, please see The Van Gogh Blues.

For more on the idea of passionately making meaning, please see Coaching The Artist Within.

For more on special mindfulness techniques that can support your meaning-making efforts, please visit the Ten Zen Seconds website.

All of my trainings and workshops stress the necessity of personal meaning-making. I invite you to take a look at those offerings to see if one or more of them may be of interest you.

And don’t forget to listen to my show the Purpose-Centered Life, where you’ll find useful offerings like a nine-part series called “The Art of Making Meaning.”