Meaning Is Not Found. But It's Not Made, Either.
What a concentration camp survivor, the existentialists, and a grieving mother all understood about the work no one can do for you.
Second of three essays on loss and the meaning we make of it. The first, “Pain is not a gift, but it can be fertile ground,” is found here.
My great-grandmother once rode a bus for the better part of a day with her dying son in her arms, and then, a few days later, rode the same bus home with his cold body wrapped in a quilt she’d stitched by hand.
I’ve written elsewhere about what that loss was and, importantly, was not. It was not a gift, and it was was not a plan, but was fertile ground for growth and purpose. I flesh out the distinction here. But the question I’m more interested in unpacking is whether a senseless thing can still be meaningful. And if it can, does it matter where that meaning comes from?
Humans have wrestled with where meaning comes from for as long as we’ve been burying our dead. But the last century sharpened it into a genuine standoff: is meaning something we discover, already woven into the world, or something we invent, with no help from the cosmos at all? It’s worth knowing the sides, because we all take one, whether we announce it or keep it to ourselves.
The great writer and philosopher Camus called the universe absurd. Not evil or cruel, just silent and indifferent to our very human need for it to make sense. He would not pretend the silence was secretly speaking; that, he said, is the “leap of faith,” smuggling a reason back in. Nor would he let the silence win. Meaning, for Camus, does not lie in the event itself like an old copper penny found in a field. It is made, asserted, like a personal revolt, in the face of a cosmos that does not care about you.
Sartre, his contemporary, put the same knife to the same bone: existence precedes essence, he famously wrote, which is another way of saying that no experience arrives stamped with meaning or purpose. We are, in his unlovely but liberating phrase, condemned to be free; condemned, that is, to author our own meaning out of whatever pain visits us across a lifetime.
That is meaning as the existentialists saw it: made, not found. And it is not, by design, very comforting, though it is where I take the most comfort from, ironically. Most of the world’s wisdom traditions answer the other way. They say that meaning is discovered rather than invented, though they disagree about where it waits.
The Stoics placed it not in the event but in your bearing toward it: a mother cannot govern the fever that takes her child — only what she does in its wake — and that last unassailable freedom is where a life is built.
Taoism declines the question outright. The farmer whose horse runs off, whose son then breaks his leg on that very horse, but who then escapes conscription into war (as the parable goes), cannot yet say what is fortune and what is ruin, because the story is never over: good luck, bad luck, who knows?
Buddhism calls the loss neither random nor purposed but caused, arising from conditions, so that peace comes not from explaining the death but from loosening the grip that demands it mean anything at all.
And the Abrahamic faiths hold that the meaning is real and already there, kept in a mind larger than ours even when it stays hidden: that no one is ever truly lost, only known, and held, and kept.
These are the great answers — made or found, invented or waiting — and for a long time I thought choosing between them was the task. Then I read Frankl, a man who had tested all of it in a crucible none would have chosen.
While Camus and Sartre theorized the absurd from cafés and lamplit studies, Viktor Frankl watched meaning keep human beings alive in the death camps of Nazi Germany. By rights his testimony should have settled the argument. And in a way, I suppose, it did, just not in the direction you’d expect.
Frankl came down with the traditionalists: meaning, he insisted, already exists in the world, waiting to be discovered rather than invented. And yet the man who most believed meaning was found agreed with the men who believed it was made on the one point that turned out to matter more than the whole dispute: that the meaning is never in the suffering itself. Only ever in the response to it. Though I was raised in the church and studied the wisdom traditions of the world in college, even considering (for a hot minute that is) divinity school or a major in World Religions, I ultimately chose to become a writer because that way, I’d never have to pick — existentialist or Buddhist or pagan — I could pry open every tradition’s oyster and rob it of its pearls.
I’ve made a career out of thinking deeply about these kinds of questions, and on this particular point I’ve decided that the argument about made or discovered, bestowed or authored is, well, besides the point. Found or made, discovered or invented, handed down by some God or asserted in private revolt, it changes nothing about what is actually required of you. Because every one of these traditions and philosophies, however far apart, asks the sufferer for the identical thing in the end.
The Stoic must work his response. The Buddhist must work his release. The believer must work her surrender. The existentialist must work his revolution. The meaning — whether it was lying in the field all along or had to be forged in the dark — stays inert until a living hand picks it up and does something with it. And this is the part that no tradition or worldview can spare us of.
It took me years, and a fair amount of pawing my way through the dark of my own wreckage, to understand what that hand was reaching for. I’d gone looking in theology and philosophy — the study of the answers — when the thing that finally moved anything in me was actually far more ordinary.
I simply wrote it down.
Not to feel better...exactly. But because putting the losses into words was how I stopped being written by them.A loss you refuse to work does not sit quietly in your mind; it narrates like a Victorian novelist paid by the word. It decides who you are now. It replays on its own schedule. It drafts your future on its own terms. The work is how you take the pen back, not to erase what happened, but to become, once again, the author of what happens next. And notice: it makes no difference whether you believe the pen was placed in your hand or you picked it up yourself. Either way, nothing gets written, or rewritten, until you write it.
This is why we should stop arguing about which tradition is right. You do not have to settle whether your suffering was authored by God, or physics, or The Fates, before you are allowed to begin. You do not have to know where meaning comes from to start making it. The philosophers can keep the question because the rest of us have work to do.
You might be curious: how does the work actually work? On that, at least, the science is far less coy than the philosophers, and it turns out the difference between a loss that breaks you and a loss that builds you is measurable, specific, and almost disappointingly ordinary. That’s where we go next.
But before we go there, tell me, dear reader: when something senseless happened to you, did you decide the meaning was found or made, and did the answer change what you chose to do next?
Comment below. I read every one.
Next in this series: the neuroscience of what “the work” actually is and why the wound itself (contrary to popular belief) is not the thing that makes you stronger.