Why Your Life Is Meaningful Even When It Feels Meaningless

Our lives are meaningfully meaningless.

Yeah, I know where you want me to stick that sentence. Still, have you ever watched a newly planted field grow? Sometimes you can hear the plants stretching toward the sun, they are growing so fast. They don’t question their purpose — they live to the max.

Like the wind we can feel but can’t see, there’s a life energy that animates the world. Every seed that sprouts, every baby birthed, every creative act performed, is this energy at work.

Life in all its forms is just divinity made tangible.

So yes, our lives are meaningful. How could they not be, when being alive is what makes us part of the same energy that makes the sun shine and the flowers bloom?

This is also what makes our lives meaningless.

We may change or even save the lives of a few or many. We may change the course of human history. We may love well or poorly, we may create great and lasting art, or we may make crap. Most of us won’t earn even a footnote in history.

We are but mayflies in this vast and ancient universe, our brief lives not even measured in nanoseconds by its timescale. Meaningless.

Yet having been given the gift of life, we have a duty to live our brief lives as fully as the corn reaching for the sky does. Meaningful.

Photo credit: Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash