What’s the Point of Living? A Therapist’s Reflections
One question eventually emerges in almost every therapy room, sometimes loudly, sometimes silently hidden beneath symptoms:
“What is the point of living?”
At first glance, it appears like a philosophical question. But often, it is a deeply emotional one.
Many people who ask this question are not merely curious about philosophy. They are exhausted. They are carrying grief, alienation, loneliness, disappointment, monotony, emotional disconnection, or unbearable pain. Sometimes, they are simply tired of trying.
And honestly, the argument they bring forward often makes complete sense.
What can maximally happen when I die…people will cry, feel grief for a few days and get over the feeling, they will eventually forget it and carry on with their lives.
How does my dying or living even matter in the end? Since living will be so full of suffering, at least death would give me some peace. Even if I don’t know what happens after death, at least I wouldn’t have to face what I am facing every day.
What I am adding to the universe. There are billions of people. One person subtracted, how is it going to make any difference?
In the end, we are all stuck in the same game of life cycle- being born, educating ourselves, finding a nice job, starting a family, living over that and then dying. It feels like running in a rat race with a goal that I already know. If we are all stuck in some processing jar with pre-defined coding, why live life?
Even if today I start making some meaningful contribution, once I am gone, there will be someone else doing that exact same thing for the people and maybe in a much more meaningful way. How is anything unique about me in any way? Why live then ?
And if you ask me to do some great things in life for it to be meaningful, so that I am remembered after death, I can’t and don’t want to do that. Why do that for a time when I wouldn’t even be there to relish it?
The questions asked feel uncomfortable because it carries undeniable logic. It challenges every socially rehearsed response about success, positivity, ambition, and achievement. It exposes how fragile many of our explanations for life truly are. And to be honest, none of them is an irrational thought; we have to agree that it makes sense, it’s a bare truth, and it’s inevitable.
But at the same time, agreeing that something is a harsh or unavoidable reality does not automatically mean that life becomes meaningless or that one should stop living. For me, the more important question becomes: How do we choose to relate to these realities? An important question to explore here.
But strangely, when people ask these questions in therapy, they often look for a convincing answer from me, one statement that will suddenly make existence meaningful again. The younger version of me as a therapist would engage in a lot of discussions to reach to that one equation that can finally make life more meaningful.
But over the years, I have realised something important. Most existential crises are not born because a person has intellectually discovered that life is meaningless. They emerge because the emotional self has stopped feeling alive, connected, held, or significant. The emotional mind struggles to explain its pain directly. So instead, it converts emotional suffering into philosophical inquiry.
What appears as: “What is the point of life?” often hides:
“Why do I feel so disconnected from life?”
What appears as “Nothing matters” often hides:
“I no longer feel emotionally connected to what once mattered.”
And this changes everything.
Because then the answer is not merely more philosophy, more optimism, or more logic. The answer becomes emotional healing, reconnection, and the restoration of vitality.
In fact, one of the biggest mistakes we make while responding to existential pain is rushing into positivity.
When someone is deeply questioning life, saying things like:
“Everything happens for a reason,” “Stay positive,” Things will get better,” or “Just think optimistically” can feel profoundly invalidating.
Not because hope is bad — hope is essential — but because unrealistic hope feels artificial when someone is drowning in genuine suffering.
Nietzsche once wrote:
“Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
I do not completely agree with the statement. Hope, in many ways, is what keeps human beings alive. But false hope — hope disconnected from emotional reality — can become another form of avoidance and, hence, suffering.
Real hope is quieter.
It does not deny suffering. It sits beside suffering. It says: “This hurts deeply. And yet, perhaps life is still worth participating in.”
In fact, I do see hope in the very question itself. The very fact that the person noticed this pattern of thinking, questioned it and refused to participate in life where there is no meaning and chose to talk about it in his/her therapy session - is in itself a very optimistic stance for me. I assume the person already wants to work on creating a life that is valuable and meaningful to them.
I fondly remember a client during my student years who once called me “The Salesman of Life.” He preferred to call himself “The Salesman of Death.”
At first, I thought it was merely provocative humour. But then he explained:
“Just as I don’t know what lies beyond death, you don’t know what lies ahead in life. When you talk about hope, you sometimes sound like someone selling perfume — trying to convince people to buy fragrance without truly knowing whether it changes their reality.”
The statement shook me deeply. Am I really selling hope? Or is there actually any point in living and making sense of living? Because beneath its harshness was a difficult truth: Was I genuinely helping people discover meaning? Or was I simply trying to convince them not to give up?
That conversation stayed with me for years.
And gradually, I realised something important: Meaning cannot be imposed on people. It cannot be forcefully inserted into someone’s suffering. It cannot be sold.
Meaning has to be lived, discovered, experienced, and created.
This blog is thus an attempt to present what I have understood so far in my journey as a psychotherapist about the meaning of life, not to suggest that this is the only way one should look at life, but to gently invite readers to reflect on whether any of these perspectives resonate with them.
Meaning of Life in Becoming
One of the first is the question in itself- isn’t the search for meaning a reductionist process in itself? So why do there have to be one or two formulae for a living? The very question has an answer as well! Life is so dynamic that searching for one formula is tedious and meaningless in itself. Isn’t life also about living it and understanding the many complexities woven within it? Existential questions invite a deeper inquiry and an urgent need to first emerge from dichotomous assumptions of life as good and bad. Isn't life itself is too fluid, dynamic, contradictory, and layered for a single explanation?
Carl Rogers beautifully wrote that the purpose of life is not perfection, achievement, or social approval, but the ongoing process of “becoming” becoming more fully oneself.
Not a finished product. Not a fixed identity. But a continuously evolving process.
And perhaps that is where many of us suffer.
We try to become finished versions of ourselves.
We believe life will finally make sense when we become
successful enough,
healed enough,
loved enough,
confident enough,
productive enough
Soo on..infinite
But human beings are not projects to be completed. We are processes.
A psychologically healthy person is not someone who has figured everything out. It is someone increasingly willing to engage honestly with life with uncertainty, vulnerability, contradiction, pain, joy, and change.
The problem is that modern life conditions us toward outcome-based existence.
Everything becomes: What is the result? What is the achievement? What is the final reward?
And eventually, even life itself gets evaluated like a project.
“If death is the final outcome anyway, then what is the point?”
But perhaps the point was never the final outcome.
Perhaps the point is participation.
There is a beautiful analogy one of my clients once shared with me: Life is like a train journey.
The ticket is already booked. All passengers are ultimately heading toward the same destination.
But what matters is: Did you look outside the window? Did you connect with fellow passengers? Did you experience the changing landscapes? Did you laugh?
Did you grieve? Did you remain emotionally awake during the journey?
Death may be inevitable. But inevitability does not cancel meaning.
We eat beautifully cooked food despite knowing it will eventually become waste in the digestive system.
We dress beautifully despite knowing clothes are temporary.
We decorate homes despite knowing that nothing material lasts forever.
Why?
Because experience itself matters.
Because beauty matters. Expression matters. Connection matters. Participation matters.
And perhaps meaning exists precisely in these lived moments.
The problem is that many of us are no longer living in the moment. We are constantly evaluating them. When every moment is questioned instead of experienced, joy disappears.
Gestalt Therapy took our understanding of the self a step further. Within this perspective, the self is not viewed as a fixed entity, but as a verb — a continuous process unfolding through contact between the organism and its environment in the immediate, ever-changing present moment. The self emerges in the meeting between “me” and “not me”: in the sensation of a breeze touching the skin, the warmth of seeing a familiar face, the excitement stirred by a new idea, the ache of grief, or the body’s quiet pull toward sleep.
From this lens, self is not something static that we possess; it is something we constantly experience and become. It is fluid, relational, and forever emerging. Perhaps much of our suffering comes from clinging too tightly to rigid narratives about who we are, without allowing ourselves to witness the living, changing nature of experience itself.
Yet even here, the self is understood through relationship and duality — the familiar meeting the unfamiliar, the eye meeting the flower, the hand meeting the keyboard, the dry tongue meeting cool water. We begin to realise that the self cannot exist in isolation. We are not separate from the world around us; we are continuously shaped through contact with it. We live in the world, and we are of the world.
And perhaps, in itself, that carries meaning: sentience — the simple yet profound capacity to experience, to encounter, to feel, and to participate in existence.
Living Fully in the Here and Now
And this brings us to another deeply important concept: mindfulness — not as a trendy wellness practice, but as the art of returning to direct experience.
To taste tea fully.
To watch a sunset without feeling the need to photograph it.
To sit with another human being without mentally escaping elsewhere.
To allow grief to exist without immediately trying to fix, analyse, or silence it.
Existential suffering often intensifies because we become trapped in relentless intellectualisation. We try to think our way out of uncertainty, pain, emptiness, and mortality. But life cannot always be solved. Sometimes, it simply has to be lived.
This is also why connection becomes central to meaning. Human beings are fundamentally relational creatures. Wellness does not exist only in self-care routines, productivity, or personal achievement. It exists in feeling emotionally connected —
to oneself,
to other people,
to nature,
to purpose,
to moments.
Many existential crises soften not because a person suddenly discovers a perfect philosophical answer, but because they feel emotionally held again.
A conversation.
A relationship.
A sense of belonging.
A moment of being understood.
And suddenly, life feels livable again.
Martin Seligman also speaks about the importance of “savouring” experiences — the ability to fully absorb a moment through presence, memory-making, appreciation, and sharpened awareness. Meaning is not always found in grand revelations; often, it quietly emerges through our capacity to truly experience life while we are living it.
What Mindfulness Is Not
Whenever mindfulness is discussed in therapy, one misunderstanding appears repeatedly: the assumption that mindfulness is about staying positive or constantly enjoying the present moment. But mindfulness is not the denial of pain. In fact, it is equally about learning how to sit with pain without immediately running away from it.
And that is where we turn to the next section.
When Pain Becomes Part of Meaningful Life
When we think about meaning in life, our minds often move toward positive ideas, all the goods, the values we want to pursue, and a lot of creative forces such as free will, spontaneity, and vitality. But that’s half the story when it comes to the real meaning of life because life presents a good mix of times when you feel happiness, very moderate times and times when it's actively giving you pain, it looks unfair to you. A lot of suffering is felt when pain continues to define the soul of existence.
Suffering intensifies when pain begins to feel like the entire essence of existence. In those moments, people often find themselves asking:
“Am I the only one struggling like this?”
What makes the experience even heavier is the perception that others seem unaffected. While we are battling internally, the world around us appears happy, functional, successful, and emotionally stable. Social media further amplifies this illusion. Open any platform, and most people appear to be celebrating life — travelling, achieving, smiling, succeeding, moving forward effortlessly. Rarely do we witness the full emotional reality beneath those moments.
Gradually, the mind begins constructing a painful narrative:
“Everyone else is living better than me.”
“Only I am suffering?”
The “why me” question can feel psychologically crushing. It corners a person into believing they have somehow been singled out for suffering despite doing their best.
In response to this emotional discomfort, many people unconsciously turn toward comparison. Sometimes this takes the form of downward comparison — comforting ourselves by focusing on people who appear worse off than us. For a brief moment, it may reduce distress:
“At least my life is not that bad.”
But this relief is often temporary and fragile. The moment we encounter someone else’s success, happiness, beauty, achievement, or emotional stability again, the comparison returns and the emotional collapse resurfaces.
And eventually, one begins to wonder:
What are we really doing here?
Waiting for evidence that others are suffering too, so our own pain feels justified?
The logic eventually collapses under its own weight.
And more than that, I have difficulty understanding the logic behind this sort of reasoning. Isn’t it reasonably logical to assume that at any given point in your life, and in any given domain of life, there are always going to be people way ahead of you and those who are way behind you? That’s how life is. This data doesn’t mean anything. It just means people are different with different unique journeys which are not comparable.
The real question emerges: what do I do with the pain?
And easily the mind slips into perspective that since there is pain, there is suffering, what’s the point of having a life full of suffering? A single thought can lead to disappointment in life and various kinds of existential crises as well. Now, I am going to bring some of the psychological literature here, which may help one to navigate their way through pain rather than suffer. As well said by Haruki Murakami- “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ’hurt’ is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself”.
In the psychological literature, the perspective of pain has been well defined by Russ Harris as well, when describing the methods of self-compassion. He mentions that though pain may make you feel like you are the only one suffering, pain is something we have in common with all other human beings. Pain tells you that you have a heart; you care deeply for certain things in life. So, it's not a sign of any mental weakness; it just indicates that you are a loving, caring human being. This is something you have in common with every other human being on the planet. Though the mind acts quickly in these times to tell you that you shouldn’t feel that way, you should be better at handling thoughts and emotions; others are doing it better. It may belittle your pain. It may present downward comparison narratives of beggars on the streets and starving labourers having the worst of their lives, and you being a big, crying baby. Russ Harris explains that in these moments, you need to validate yourself. The way one validates oneself is by unhooking themselves with the unkind comparisons and harsh judgements, and by acknowledging that one's journey is unique, and one's responses have to be different. No other person on the planet has the same DNA, same childhood history, same situations in life, same personality factors, same physical body. Since you are the only one of these combinations of unique factors, your responses will always vary from others, and that’s totally fine.
In fact, I strongly believe that everyone’s pain is unique and incomparable to others. A child may have the pain of losing a toy while an adult may be pained by the loss of a loved one. The pain of losing a toy from a child’s eye would be as deep as losing a person to an adult. One can belittle the loss others go through, but for that person, the loss is equally heavy as any other person’s. Let us not compare our pain. Thus, Russ Harris emphasises the role of acceptance of pain.
When I say acceptance of pain, it just doesn’t mean passively accepting life situations as it is. Acceptance, in the words of Russ Harris, means to open up, make room for our thoughts and feelings, without fighting them, without running away from them or being controlled by them. The whole idea of acceptance appears scary and too fancy to many people. I have been asked in many sessions, “Doctor, this looks like a fancy idea, a very distant and non-practical concept, robotic in nature, does it even apply to anyone, looks mechanical?” The doubt about the very process is obvious because I am asking you to stay with the pain, while most (and your own mind) would obviously ask you to move away from it.
Have you encountered these conversations, where the minute you start explaining the deeper issues of life, you would often get a reply like, Why are you so emotional? Just move on, don’t worry, don’t take tension, everything will be good, you just overthink everything, and at times, you end up getting labelled for having these emotions in the first place. And our lives are full of these escape alternatives to deal with pain, for example, having alcohol, smoking, mindless eating, sleeping, zoning out in front of the TV, social isolation, self-harm or even suicidality. These are quick fixes that appear to be helping that moment, but actually never help. So often I have heard this concept of “mitti dallo baton pe aur aagebadho”, “khaali dimaag shaitaan ka ghar hota hai, just immerse yourself into something and your mind will forget it”.
So, it's like actually telling people to put everything under the carpet and just smile. Definitely, this can work for a while, but how long? Emotions don’t go anywhere. It remains. Human beings don’t have the superpower of deleting painful memories. In fact, the more you try to do that, the more attention you pay to those events and hence it stays even longer.
Thus, allowing and accepting that pain is an integral part of life, it may come in some form or another. We need to be kind to ourselves to experience them. Initially, this may appear as mechanical, but as you start embracing pain, it cannot become bigger than you; it may engulf you, but only for a while, and gradually, if you allow it to stay with you, it comes, becomes overwhelming, and gradually passes by, and you emerge with it.
Mind the word “with it” rather than “from it” because once you come out of pain, the pain still remains, but you become better at handling it. You don't have to leave them far behind. That is a fuller and more meaningful life.
The discussion on pain and the meaning of life would be incomplete without Victor Frankl’s perspective here, who is the forefather of the humanistic and existential school of psychology. For those who don’t know him, Dr Frankl was a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna medical school. He has also been a holocaust survivor during World War II. He has written a very famous book called “Man’s Search for Meaning in Life”, where he journaled his experiences as a prisoner and developed his own therapy called logotherapy, which focuses on the meaning of human existence. One of the primary ways in which man can find meaning in life is by giving meaning to the unavoidable suffering he experiences.
He vividly quotes in the book his case study, where one of his patients with severe depression reported immense pain over the loss of his spouse. Meaningful discussion between them lead to the perspective that if he would have died before her, it would have been even more painful for the wife. Thus, the client actually spared the suffering of his wife, and this happened at the price of mourning for her now. The very meaning changed his perspective and relieved him of all the burden of emotions he was carrying. Thus, he strongly contends that suffering ceases to be suffering in the moment it finds meaning. In my clinical reflection and personal life, finding perspectives on pain has always helped.
I realised this deeply during my own grief. The grief shattered me. And during those moments, philosophical ideas were not immediately comforting. Meaning did not erase pain.
I still cried. I still questioned. I still felt broken.
But over time, different meanings slowly helped me hold the suffering differently: medical explanations, philosophical perspectives, shared stories from my peers, conversations with loved ones, religious textbooks..
Meaning did not remove pain. But it made the pain more bearable.
Victor Frankl wrote that suffering ceases to be suffering when it finds meaning.
I would modify that slightly from my own experience: Meaning does not erase suffering. But it prevents suffering from becoming empty. And perhaps that is enough.
Martin Seligman, in his work on authentic happiness, emphasised that meaningful lives are not necessarily happy lives. A meaningful life may include:
pain,
responsibility,
uncertainty,
grief,
sacrifice,
and struggle.
Yet it still feels worthwhile.
And perhaps that is an important shift.
Maybe the purpose of life is not permanent happiness.
Maybe the purpose is DEPTH
To feel deeply.
To connect deeply.
To love deeply.
To create deeply.
To grieve deeply.
To participate deeply.
A Meaningful Life Is a Valued Life
One of the most meaningful ideas I encountered through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is this: a meaningful life is not necessarily a pain-free life, a successful life, or even a constantly happy life. A meaningful life is a valued life.
Values are not goals that we “complete.” They are directions we choose to move toward, again and again. They reflect the kind of person we want to be and what deeply matters to us at the core of our existence. Compassion, honesty, curiosity, courage, connection, creativity, presence, growth, love, contribution — these are examples of values.
Many people spend years waiting for one grand meaningful event to arrive: the perfect career, the perfect relationship, the perfect purpose. But meaning is rarely created through a single extraordinary moment. More often, it is built quietly through small, repeated acts of living in alignment with our values.
This is why identifying our values becomes so important. When we pause and ask ourselves — What truly matters to me? Who do I want to be in this world? How do I want people to experience me? — We begin to create an inner compass. And once we know that direction, we can start building small, achievable actions around it in everyday life.
If you value connection, perhaps meaning exists in one genuine conversation today.
If you value kindness, perhaps it exists in the way you speak to yourself when you are struggling.
If you value growth, perhaps it exists in trying again despite fear.
If you value presence, perhaps it exists in fully witnessing a quiet evening with your family instead of rushing past it mentally.
A valued life is not lived occasionally. It is practised daily.
And perhaps that is the deeper invitation: do not wait for life to suddenly feel meaningful before you begin living meaningfully. Instead, sprinkle your values into ordinary moments as often as possible. Let them shape your routines, your relationships, your choices, your conversations, and even the way you sit with pain.
Over time, meaning is not something you find somewhere outside yourself. It is something you slowly create by becoming, day by day, a closer version of who you truly are.
The Human Need for Both Roots and Wings
Human beings need both freedom and grounding. We need moments where we feel expansive — where life feels open, possible, and not entirely predetermined by fear, failure, or past limitations. There is something deeply liberating about believing, even briefly, that change is possible, that new beginnings can emerge, and that we are not permanently trapped by our current circumstances.
This sense of psychological limitlessness can be healing. It allows creativity, hope, courage, imagination, and growth. It helps people step beyond rigid identities and old narratives of “This is just who I am” or “Nothing can change.” Sometimes, healing begins the moment a person realises that their life still contains possibilities they had stopped noticing.
But like all powerful ideas, limitlessness without grounding can also become dangerous. When detached from reality, it may slowly turn into avoidance, denial, or fantasy. I have seen individuals cope with pain by escaping entirely into imagined versions of life, endless planning without action, idealised futures without engagement in the present. For example, one client coped with every stressor by retreating into fantasy and imagining futures so extensively that they gradually lost touch with the practical and emotional realities of their life. The imagination that once protected them eventually began disconnecting them from living itself.
This is why a meaningful life requires both openness and structure. We need the courage to dream while also remaining anchored in the realities, responsibilities, and limitations of our circumstances. Psychological flexibility is not about pretending limitations do not exist; it is about learning how to move meaningfully despite them.
Perhaps life asks us to hold both truths together:
I am limited. And yet, I am still capable of movement, growth, choice, and becoming.
It is like moving through life with fear resting heavily on your shoulders, yet still choosing to walk forward with the quiet strength of courage. Courage is not the absence of limitation or uncertainty. It is the willingness to keep engaging with life despite them.
I often think of this balance like building a house. Every house needs a basic structure — a foundation strong enough to hold it together. In human life, these foundations are often our values, our emotional anchors, our sense of integrity, compassion, connection, or purpose. Without some grounding, we begin to feel psychologically scattered and unstable.
But a house is never only its foundation. Over time, we decorate it, renovate it, expand rooms, open windows, repaint walls, and adapt it to changing needs. In the same way, there are aspects of the self that continue evolving throughout life. Our interests change, our identities shift, our capacities deepen, and our understanding of ourselves keeps growing.
We need both:
roots and expansion,
stability and movement,
structure and possibility.
This also means freeing ourselves from rigid ways of defining who we must be. Many people spend years emotionally boxed into identities created by family expectations, past experiences, labels, failures, or social roles. While structure and identity can provide stability, becoming overly attached to fixed definitions of the self can suffocate growth. A meaningful life does not require you to perfectly fit into one box forever. Human beings are more fluid than that. We evolve, contradict ourselves, discover new values, outgrow old versions of ourselves, and continue becoming across different phases of life.
Perhaps the goal is not complete limitlessness, nor complete control. It is learning how to live in the space between imagination and reality, freedom and responsibility, acceptance and change — with enough grounding to stay connected to life, and enough openness to keep growing within it.
Embracing Holistic Self
One of the most common patterns I observe in therapy is that people often reduce themselves to one painful aspect of their lives. A person experiencing failure begins to see themselves only as unsuccessful. Someone struggling emotionally starts believing they are “too sensitive” or “broken.” Over time, human beings begin relating to themselves through labels rather than through the fullness of their existence. But psychologically, no human being can ever be understood through one dimension alone.
Carl Roger, one of the forefathers of the humanistic psychology approach, described two forms of self: the real self and the ideal self. The obvious meaning is that our self is a combination of who we are actually and who we think we should be. He explained that the more congruent you are with your idealised self-image, the better you feel and vice-versa. The proposition makes a lot of sense because, at any given point, the satisfaction with life is going to be derived from the integration of both images and hence it would be very meaningful to take a journey into understanding who we are and what we want to become.
This understanding of the self was further expanded by Erich Fromm in The Fear of Freedom. Fromm argued that self-realisation is not achieved merely through thinking or intellectual understanding, but through the active expression of one’s total personality — emotions, creativity, thoughts, values, and intellectual potentialities. He believed that these potentialities exist within every individual, but they become psychologically “real” only when they are genuinely expressed and lived.
Gradually, our understanding begins to move from viewing the self as a singular entity to recognising it as something far more holistic and dynamic. From a Gestalt perspective, the self cannot be reduced to isolated fragments. It is not merely thoughts, emotions, behaviours, achievements, or roles in separation. Rather, the self is an integrated whole comprising our real and ideal selves, emotions, beliefs, attitudes, values, strengths, vulnerabilities, limitations, memories, relationships, and lived experiences.
Human beings are holistic by nature. We cannot be fully understood in fragments alone. We are far more than a diagnosis, an emotion, a thought, a behaviour, or a painful chapter of life. The self is fluid, evolving, layered, and continuously emerging through our engagement with the world around us.
Meaning in Becoming Fully Yourself
And if the self is holistic, it naturally seeks expression. It seeks space, movement, spontaneity, and freedom to exist fully. This expression of the whole personality through free will is what we may call spontaneity.
Spontaneity is not limited to dramatic actions or creative performances; often, it quietly appears in ordinary moments of authenticity. It can be seen in the innocence of children — in the way they feel, think, laugh, cry, and express themselves without excessive self-consciousness.
Perhaps this is why spontaneity and innocence feel so deeply alive and meaningful to us. If you pause and introspect, you would probably recall moments where you experienced this spontaneous expression of self — the way you watch rain from the window, repeatedly return to sunsets, write something impulsively from the heart, sing loudly while driving, run marathons, nurture plants, or express love in deeply personal ways.
To an outsider, these moments may appear ordinary, repetitive, or even meaningless. But internally, they carry a feeling of authenticity. They feel congruent with who you are. And the more deeply we engage in such moments, the more psychologically alive we begin to feel.
Perhaps this is similar to the way we approach food, clothing, music, or art. Technically, food only needs to nourish the body. Clothing merely needs to cover us. Yet human beings constantly seek flavour, beauty, creativity, expression, and individuality within these ordinary acts. We cook differently, decorate food beautifully, dress uniquely, and create artful experiences not because survival demands it, but because expression itself feels meaningful. There is a certain irreplaceable vitality in experiencing life fully while we are alive. And yet, if we zoom out far enough, the outcomes of life remain universally similar. Every human being eventually dies. Every generation eventually passes. The greatest historians, scientists, activists, emperors, philosophers, and artists are no longer physically present. But what continues beyond them are their expressions, contributions, relationships, values, creations, and the ways in which they touched human life. Perhaps meaning, then, does not emerge from escaping mortality, but from participating authentically in the experience of being alive while we are here. In many ways, embracing the holistic self is also about accepting that we are not fixed entities. We are continuously becoming. A meaningful life, therefore, may not lie in reaching some perfect final version of ourselves, but in remaining open to growth, connection, expression, vulnerability, and the evolving process of becoming more fully who we truly are.
Befriending Boredom & Untying Meaning from Constant Excitement
One of the quiet struggles of modern life is that we have gradually lost our tolerance for boredom. We live in a world built around stimulation, speed, and instant gratification. We want things quickly, effortlessly, and continuously engaging. Social media further amplifies this pattern. Even music is often consumed in fragments — the catchy lyric, the emotional punch, the “best part” of the song. Rarely do we sit through the slower, quieter moments anymore. Over time, the mind begins expecting life itself to function like a highlight reel.
As a result, ordinary moments start feeling empty. Patience decreases. Persistence weakens. Anything repetitive, slow, or mundane begins to appear meaningless.
Many people imagine an ideal life as one that is constantly exciting, pleasurable, easy, and free from discomfort. But real life does not sustain itself on peaks alone. Most meaningful achievements — building relationships, mastering a skill, raising a child, healing emotionally, writing a book, or creating something valuable — involve long stretches of repetition, uncertainty, and monotony. Almost every important human accomplishment has required the ability to remain present through periods that felt uneventful.
This is why learning to tolerate boredom is psychologically important. As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, growth often belongs to those who learn to “be comfortable with being bored.” They continue showing up even after motivation fades and novelty disappears.
Psychologist Angela Duckworth describes this capacity through the concept of grit — the ability to sustain passion and perseverance toward long-term goals despite difficulty, repetition, or slow progress. Grit is not about constantly feeling inspired. It is about remaining committed even when the work becomes ordinary, tiring, or emotionally unrewarding for a while. Much of human growth depends less on intensity of motivation and more on consistency of engagement.
Similarly, Martin Seligman, one of the pioneers of positive psychology, distinguishes between immediate pleasure and deeper forms of fulfillment. He explains that while pleasure gives temporary satisfaction, a more enduring sense of well-being often emerges through engagement, meaning, mastery, and investing oneself deeply in activities over time. The richest forms of fulfillment are rarely instant. They are cultivated gradually through patience, practice, effort, and emotional investment.
Meaning cannot survive if it depends entirely on excitement.
Even pleasure itself loses its essence when consumed excessively. Chocolate tastes wonderful partly because it is occasional. If eaten at every meal, even sweetness eventually becomes dull. The mind adapts quickly to constant stimulation. This is the paradox of immediate gratification: the more relentlessly we chase pleasure, the flatter and emptier life can begin to feel.
The famous Stanford marshmallow experiment highlighted an important psychological insight — the ability to delay immediate rewards is closely connected to long-term resilience, discipline, and emotional well-being. Human fulfillment often grows not from endlessly consuming pleasurable moments, but from staying engaged with processes that unfold slowly over time.
Perhaps the goal, then, is not to eliminate boredom entirely, but to build a healthier relationship with it. Boredom is not always a sign that life is meaningless. Sometimes, it is simply the space between moments of intensity — the quiet background against which meaningful living slowly unfolds.
A Final Reflection in Meaning of Life
This is simply my understanding of life so far — not a final conclusion, not an ultimate truth. I am still learning every day: from books, from different schools of psychology, but far more deeply from people and their lived experiences.
Perhaps if I rewrite this piece a few years from now, some of these perspectives may evolve. Maybe certain ideas will deepen, soften, or completely change. And I think that is part of being human too — we continue becoming through experience.
So I do not offer this essay as an answer sheet to existence. I simply place these reflections before you and invite you to sit with them for a while. Perhaps something here resonates with your own journey. Perhaps it does not. Both are okay.
And perhaps that is where I have arrived, at least for now:
Maybe nobody truly has life completely figured out.
Perhaps the meaning of life is not hidden somewhere far away, waiting to be discovered once and for all. Perhaps meaning slowly emerges in the way we participate in life — through loving, grieving, creating, connecting, healing, expressing, and continuing despite uncertainty.
Death may be inevitable. But so is the human capacity to begin again.
And maybe, for now, that is enough.
