What’s the Point?

Let’s start with something we probably all did today without thinking about it. Maybe we set an alarm to wake up early enough to feel fully awake and refreshed before we started work. Maybe we rewrote a text message two or three times before sending it. Maybe we chose the healthy salad (or we didn’t). Fill in your own examples. The point is that somewhere in these decisions is a vague sense that these choices and actions matter—that this version of us, straining to live up to standards, is building toward something meaningful. We tidied up a corner of the room that no one else will ever look at. We cared.

None of this required us to sit down and compose a personal mission statement. We didn’t need to solve the question of why we’re here before we could justify making the bed. The meaning was just . . .  running in the background. It’s the software we never installed but now can’t uninstall. Which is fine, until it isn’t.

Albert Camus addressed this possibility—the pivotal moment during an otherwise ordinary afternoon when we might suddenly look up from whatever we’re doing and think: Why on earth am I doing this?

Nothing dramatic has happened. No one died. We didn’t get fired. We simply asked why. And the routine that five minutes ago felt de rigueur might now take on a strange, almost theatrical quality, as if we’re watching ourselves from slightly outside our own bodies, doing things for reasons we no longer remember. Camus called this the beginning of philosophical consciousness. We might call this a Tuesday morning in our mid-50s.

Asking the question isn’t the problem. It’s that the model we’re running—the assumption that all of this is going somewhere, that the effort counts—has suddenly flickered off. And we don’t know how to function without it. Perhaps the search for meaning isn’t really a spiritual quest but more of a survival mechanism.

Our brains are essentially modeling engines. They’re constantly building internal representations of the world, running simulations of what’s likely to happen next, and trying to minimize the gap between what they predicted and what actually occurred. (In neuroscience it’s called the predictive brain.) Meaning—a sense of purpose, a story about why we’re doing what we’re doing—is just one of those models. It’s one way the brain provides us with a talking point when the immediate rewards of life seem to have run dry.

Perhaps the search for meaning isn’t really a spiritual quest but more of a survival mechanism.

Imagine it’s Sunday evening. The laundry is half done, dinner is leftovers we’re not excited about, and there’s a kind of flat, gray feeling hanging over everything—not bad enough to complain about but certainly not good enough to enjoy. What happens next?

If the model running in the background is something like I’m building a life that’s slowly coming together, then the laundry is fine. It’s just part of the arc. The low-energy mood is noted but doesn’t unsettle us too much.

But if, for some reason, the framing becomes, Is that all there is? I’m just going through the motions until life’s over, then the same unfinished laundry, the same dinner of leftovers suddenly can become weighty, even unbearable. The food tastes blander. Our bodies feel heavier. Nothing external changed. The prediction changed.

Existential crises can hit us at the weirdest times. Sometimes they don’t require a genuine catastrophe to occur—many of us function surprisingly well during actual emergencies, because emergencies have clear demands. But during the lulls they can sneak up on us. The Sunday evenings. The birthday where we’re supposed to feel good and, instead, feel nothing in particular. Returning home from a vacation. There’s an uncomfortable layer underneath all of this, which is that a lot of our meaning-making is really just anxious noise generated to distract us from the nagging realization that all of this will end. We’re all going to die.

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The anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that basically everything we do—build careers, raise children, curate identities, post insightful things on Instagram—is some version of the same project: I need to matter before I disappear. He called these “immortality projects.” Which sounds kind of poetic until we look at our own lives and realize, oh yeah, a lot of what we do is probably this.

The thing is, our brains can’t actually model nonexistence. We can imagine our own funeral—the flowers, the people, expressions of grief—but we cannot simulate the experience of there being no experience at all. So the brain does something exhausting instead: It keeps running loops, trying to represent internally what death means, failing, and then eventually reaching for an escape. Religion. Legacy. The idea that our work will outlast us. The conviction that our values are objectively correct and must be defended.

There’s actually a study on this. In 1989, researchers asked municipal court judges to set bail for a hypothetical case involving a sex worker. Half the judges had been subtly prompted to think about their own mortality beforehand—just a short questionnaire with questions about death buried in it. The judges who had been reminded of death set bail at an average of $450. The ones who hadn’t: $50. Same case. Nine times the bail.

The facts didn’t change—the internal pressure did. When death comes to mind, the brain can tighten around moral certainty and the need to uphold a pristine legacy. Punishing someone who breaks the rules reinforces the idea “I stand for what’s right.” It’s simply self-protection, an attempt to leave behind a holier-than-thou reputation.

When we’re reminded we’re going to die, we grip our worldviews harder. We become more judgmental, more reactive, more certain that our particular way of doing things is the right one. The brain is essentially saying: If I know what life means, I can steer toward something permanent. Something that survives me. It’s not irrational. It’s just incredibly tiring.

Arthur Schopenhauer—who was, let’s be honest, not a fun person to be around—made an observation about this that’s hard to argue with. He said that human existence bounces back and forth between two disheartening states: suffering when we don’t have what we want, and boredom when we get it.

We want the thing. We research the thing, we anticipate the thing, we finally acquire the thing—and for a few hours, maybe a few days, it delivers. And then it’s just a thing we own and we’re back to the low hum of dissatisfaction, scanning the horizon for the next acquisition. The laptop that felt transformative is now just our laptop. The relationship that was going to complete us is now just our relationship, with all of its ordinary textures and frustrations and Wednesday evenings.

The really insidious part—though where it gets existentially funny—is that meaning itself is caught in this same loop. “My career will give my life meaning.” Great, and then it does, for a while, and then it’s just our job and we’re still us, and the question is still there. “Having a child will give me purpose.” And it does, profoundly, and then we’re also just tired parents wondering what happened to our sense of self.

We keep trying to solve the meaning problem with better content. A better project, a better relationship, a better answer to the question. But the question is structural. We can’t fill a hole with things when the hole is the shape of the question itself.

Perhaps the answer isn’t to find better meaning but to loosen the grip on the whole project.

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The Buddhist framing, and we’re using it loosely here, not trying to recruit anyone, is that the goal isn’t to win the game of meaning. It’s to stop being compulsively driven by the belief that there has to be one. Not through nihilism, which is just anxiety wearing a leather jacket. But through something more like . . . relaxing the urgency.

We already get glimpses of this without trying. Sitting quietly at the end of a long day, when nothing needs to be solved. Walking somewhere without headphones, not optimizing the time. Finishing a meal and not immediately reaching for the phone. Watching a film and getting genuinely absorbed in it. Looking at something beautiful and not needing to caption it or post it or even understand it.

In those moments, something softens. The question “What does this all mean?” gets less daunting—not because it’s been answered but because it’s temporarily lost its urgency. The system isn’t chasing. It’s just here. These moments aren’t enlightenment. They’re not even particularly special. They’re just the ordinary experience of not being in an argument with existence.

When we’re reminded we’re going to die, we grip our worldviews harder.

So does life have a point? Honestly? We don’t know. Nobody does. Anyone who tells you they do is either selling something or hasn’t thought about it hard enough. But here’s what’s actually kind of freeing about that: The question might be malformed. “What is the meaning of life?” might be like asking “What does the color blue weigh?”—a grammatically correct question that doesn’t correspond to anything real.

What we can realize is that the pursuit of a watertight meaning for life tends to generate more anxiety than it resolves. And the moments that feel most like being alive—really alive, present, and unguarded—are usually the ones where we’ve stopped asking.

The alarm clock, the revised text message, the slightly healthier lunch: These aren’t evidence of a grand cosmic purpose. They’re just us, taking ourselves seriously enough to act as if tomorrow matters. And maybe that’s enough. Not as a philosophical position we’ve reasoned our way into. Just as a thing we notice ourselves doing, quietly, all the time. Nothing missing. Nothing to resolve. Nothing that needs to mean anything.