What We Mean

When We Talk About Meaning

Good morning, philosophers.

There’s a moment I keep returning to. Someone I care about was going through a stretch of life that looked complete from the outside — work that mattered, relationships that held, a routine that kept them moving. And yet. “I just don’t feel like I have any meaning in my life,” they said.

I knew what they meant immediately. I didn’t have to ask. But while I was nodding, I kept turning over a quieter question beneath the understanding: what exactly are we looking for when we say that?

Because the way we talk about meaning — the way I’ve talked about it — sounds like we’re describing something that exists out there somewhere. A substance. A thing to be found rather than made. You go looking and if you’re lucky, you find it. If you’re not, you feel its absence the way you feel the particular quiet of a room where someone used to be.

I’ve spent real time looking for meaning that way. In work I hoped would matter, in relationships I hoped would hold weight, in the early morning hours when the rest of life is quiet and something might arrive. There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from searching for something in places it might not be. Not physical exhaustion — the kind that settles in somewhere behind the chest and eyes.

Lately I’ve been sitting with a different possibility. It started, strangely enough, with thinking about statisticians.

If you approach the human mind as an information-processing system — which, at some level, it is — then a natural question follows: what does that information look like at scale? When you plot almost any kind of data across a large enough population, you get the same shape. A bell curve. Most things cluster near the center. The outliers on both ends are real and valid, but statistically rarer by definition.

What strikes me is that this holds for human experience. The broad texture of how people move through joy, grief, connection, confusion — on aggregate, these follow recognizable patterns. Individual lives feel singular and irreducible from the inside. And they are. But from far enough away, from the vantage point of enough data, there’s a shape to it. Something that can be mapped, maybe even predicted, in broad strokes.

I want to be careful here because I know how this can land. Cold. Reductive. Like I’m suggesting that your particular experience — your loss, your joy, your 3am wondering — is just a point on someone else’s graph.

I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is something quieter.

If the brain is processing information, and that information follows patterns, then what we call meaning is also — at some level — a product of what information we’ve been given access to. The experiences we’ve had. The people who shaped us. The moments of connection we were lucky enough to stumble into, or the ones we weren’t. What we learned to notice and what we were taught to look past.

This is a soft kind of determinism. Maybe even an uncomfortable one. The person who wakes up feeling like their life has no meaning isn’t failing at some private assignment. They’re working with the material available to them. The meaning they can make is shaped, at least in part, by the information they’ve been given to work with.

But here’s where the question opens into something I can’t stop thinking about: if meaning is something the brain constructs from available information — if it’s an output, not an input — then we’ve been asking the wrong question all along.

We’ve been asking: where can I find meaning?

The better question might be: what kind of information have I been working with? And is that actually what’s making meaning hard to locate? Not a failure of effort or will or attention. A gap in the material.

I’ll go further. I think we’ve been talking about something when we say “meaning” and calling it by the right name when it might not be the right name at all. The thing we’re describing — the felt sense of significance, the weight of a moment, the reason a particular relationship changes you — might not exist the way we’ve been taught to think it exists.

It might not exist outside the mind that’s experiencing it.

That’s the idea I want to sit with — and I want you to sit with it too, uncomfortably, before we move toward what I think it actually means.

Be well.

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