This Is How To Find Meaning In Life: 4 Secrets From Philosophy

We all have times when we become disillusioned. When we feel unmoored. It can be a midlife crisis, a personal tragedy, or it might appear for no reason at all. What do you do then?

At the extreme. When you hit existential rock-bottom and life just doesn’t make sense? Who can help us here?

Well, I can think of a guy…

Albert Camus (pronounced exactly as it is not spelled) looked like he stepped out of a black-and-white noir film and into a philosophy seminar. He was a dark-roast existentialist; he felt there was no inherent meaning to life.

But Camus wasn’t about nihilism. That’s only cute when you’re 22, own a trench coat purely for aesthetic reasons, and pretend to like Joy Division.

Camus’ perspective on the seeming meaninglessness of life was much more rich and nuanced. And, believe it or not, hopeful. (There’s a reason they gave him a Nobel Prize.)

Albert Camus is the author of numerous books including The Stranger, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus. And when life doesn’t give you any answers, well, he has a few.

Let’s get to it…

 

Embrace The Absurd. And Revolt.

Camus defines “The Absurd” as the tension between the human desire for meaning and the universe’s refusal to provide any. Meaning is not waiting for you like an unclaimed bag at a sad regional airport. It’s not included in your welcome kit at birth. The universe just shrugs and says, “lol, no.”

Not exactly cheery. Feels like the philosophical equivalent of your therapist saying, “It is what it is,” and then billing you $200. Most of Western civilization had been hoping to receive purpose in the form of a talking animal, an enchanted sword, or a booming voice that sounds like Morgan Freeman.

But hold on. That’s not everything Camus had to say; it’s just where most people stop reading. Camus didn’t say, “The universe is meaningless, therefore go back to bed and watch Netflix.” He didn’t say, “Life is absurd, so nothing matters.” What he said was: “Knowing that life is absurd is where your responsibility begins, not where it ends.”

And here’s where Camus sneaks his arm around your shoulder like a warm French uncle and whispers something you didn’t expect: none of this means you should give up. In fact, it’s the opposite. The correct response is not despair, delusion, or binge-watching Murder, She Wrote (Season 7, Episode 4 notwithstanding), but a kind of stubborn, joyful defiance he called revolt: continuing to act, love, and create despite knowing the universe does not have a customer service department.

Camus isn’t telling you that life is pointless; he’s telling you that life has no given point. The point is what you do, and how honestly you do it. Camus didn’t say there is no meaning; he said there is no meaning unless you live as if there is. You have to earn it. With action. To live so deliberately, so unapologetically in the face of The Absurd that you become your own answer.

Pursue your dreams. But not because they’re “destined” or “authentic” or “aligned with your higher self,” but because you chose them. You don’t need the universe to approve your decisions. That’s the rebellion part. Not rebellion in the sexy, HBO Max sense. Revolt, as in the daily decision to show up and act without cosmic justification.

(To learn how to overcome negative thoughts with philosophy, click here.)

So if we accept this somewhat-gloomy-somewhat-badass proposition, what’s the next step?

 

Experience Freedom by Accepting Responsibility

We all love the idea of freedom. Freedom from obligations, structure, and pants. That’s until we realize what it really means: you have no excuses. You can’t blame your parents. You can’t blame society. But most of us just want the freedom to choose… as long as someone else can be held accountable for the outcome.

You might think that’s freedom. Camus thinks that’s adolescence.

Real freedom is choosing, but with no promise of success, no cosmic guarantee. It’s acting as if it matters when you know it might not. And if that makes you uncomfortable, good. That means you’re paying attention. Freedom isn’t liberation from constraints; it’s what happens when you acknowledge, without excuse, that you are the sole author of your actions. Because freedom isn’t an escape from fear. It’s choosing in spite of it. It’s stepping into the uncertainty without needing to know how it ends.

“You want me to take ownership of my life? In this economy?”

You can’t have real freedom without responsibility. Period. That’s not a philosophical opinion; it’s a structural law of being a conscious human.

But you’re looking for a guarantee. A promise that if you love someone, it won’t fall apart. That if you commit to a thing, you won’t fail at it. A clean, emotionally fulfilling, closure-delivering answer. “This is the path, go this way, wear this shirt, love this person, and you’ll be fine.”

No. The universe will not explain itself to you. It is not going to slide into your DMs with a blueprint. Stop calling it “soul-searching.” You’re not looking for your soul. You’re avoiding making a decision.

Camus says true freedom comes not when you are free from all constraints, but when you realize that no one is coming to tell you who to be. No cosmic guidance counselor is going to appear. You alone choose.

Uncomfortable? Well, here’s the part where I make you even more uncomfortable: you’re already choosing. Every day. Through action, inaction, delay, avoidance, you’re voting for the life you have. What you call limbo is just an attempt to offload authorship. Camus doesn’t want you to be comfortable. He wants you to grow up.

You were put here to do something. To choose. To engage. And now you have to decide: Are you going to act? Or are you going to wait for someone else to name your life for you?

“Okay, what should I do?”

Stop waiting for clarity. Stop demanding to know the “true path.” You decide. Without perfect knowledge. And you take responsibility for that choice. That’s where freedom lives. Not in comfort. Not in security. In the quiet, terrifying space where you say: “No one told me to do this. And I’m doing it anyway because it’s important to me.”

And in that act, that full, conscious embrace of your own power, you become free.

(To learn happiness secrets from ancient philosophy, click here.)

Now some people might say, “This sounds difficult and lonely.” To which I reply:

Well, it’s not lonely…

 

Practice Solidarity and Empathy

You might assume absurdism means “every man for himself.” But Camus didn’t advocate selfishness. He wrote The Plague to show what solidarity looks like without cosmic justification. To show you that even when the world gives you no reason to care, you can choose to care anyway. He was issuing a dare: in a world without meaning, will you still choose to care about someone other than yourself?

You: “I just don’t have the capacity to deal with other people’s problems right now.”

Camus: “But that’s when it counts.”

Because when compassion is easy, it’s not compassion. It’s image management. Solidarity in good times is PR. Solidarity when everything’s falling apart? That’s commitment.

Embracing The Absurd is not about breaking away from others. It’s about showing up for them when the universe doesn’t give you a reason to. It’s understanding that people are walking bundles of contradiction, stupid and sublime in the same breath, and loving them anyway. You choose to connect, knowing the world might break your heart again.

There’s a scene in Camus’ novel The Plague where Dr. Rieux, the main character, is asked why he keeps helping people even though the plague is probably going to kill them all anyway. And he basically says, “Because I’m a doctor. This is what I do.” It’s not heroic. It’s not even hopeful. It’s just a choice.

That’s radical. That’s punk rock. A decision to act decently in an indecent world. And man, if that isn’t the whole gig.

The world may be absurd, but your actions aren’t. That solidarity isn’t a reward for good people; it’s how you become one. In The Plague’s setting of Oran, people die. Some are saved. The plague ends, then begins again. And all that remains is what people did. Not what they believed. Just what they did. So no, Camus isn’t telling you to give up on meaning. He’s telling you to create it with others. To push against The Absurd with every useless, beautiful act of shared humanity you’ve got. Because in an indifferent universe, compassion is the last thing that makes you real.

Camus didn’t write The Plague to scare us. He wrote it to remind us of who we are, and who we could be, when we stop waiting for a reason and start being the reason.

(To learn what ancient philosophy can teach us about living a long, awesome life, click here.)

Feeling a little less dark now? Well, here’s where Camus gives another shot of espresso to your soul…

 

Live with Passion

Truth is, most of us aren’t living with passion. We’re checking our phones. We’re paying bills and putting off the dentist and trying to figure out if that noise our car is making is an “expensive noise” or just an “ignore it and see what happens” noise. We are trying, very hard, not to drown in the slow leak of meaningless tasks that make up adult life.

Camus wrote about The Absurd as a challenge. When life refuses to give you meaning, you don’t give up. Camus tells us: the only way to survive the universe’s indifference is to become stubbornly, gloriously alive anyway. He wanted us to pour ourselves into everything: love, art, work, friendship, the whole messy buffet of human existence. As if, by doing so, we might flip the bird at the void and say, “You may be empty, but this sangria isn’t.”

Love someone so hard it makes your skin itch. Volunteer. Bake. Paint. Text “I miss you” even if you might not hear back. Tell your friend you love them even though you’re both emotionally stunted and bad at eye contact. Write something honest even if no one reads it but a confused stranger on the Internet.

Just pick something. Do it like it’s meaningful. Not because it cosmically is. But because you decided it is. Camus isn’t asking you to save the world. He’s asking if you’ll bother showing up to it.

Most of our lives won’t be remembered long after we’re gone. But maybe, if we’re lucky, someone will remember the way we made them laugh until they cried, or the way we kissed them in the kitchen while the pasta boiled over, or the way we cared, stupidly and stubbornly, about something that didn’t matter to anyone but us.

The moments I remember most, the ones that feel lit from within, aren’t the logical ones. They aren’t efficient or strategic. They’re messy. They’re stupid. But they’re passionate. They’re the arguments that ended in laughter, the friendships that started with confessions, the blog posts that somehow arrived at clarity through sheer stubborn intensity. So yes, let’s live with passion. Let’s love like idiots, work like maniacs, and create like children with crayons and no concern for staying inside the lines.

It’s easier, of course, to detach. To call things meaningless and retreat into irony or intellect or whatever shield we’ve built to keep the world at a distance. But nothing grows in that space. To live with passion is to risk being broken. But it’s also the only way to be whole.

(To learn the focus and productivity secrets of medieval monks, click here.)

Okay, time to round it all up and learn about the truly hopeful thing Camus had for us…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to find meaning in life…

• Embrace the Absurd. And Revolt: The universe does not care about your daily Wordle streak and the search for inherent meaning can be a trap. Meaning is a verb, not a noun. Want a meaningful life? It’s a spiritual DIY project. Build it. And revolt.
• Experience Freedom by Accepting Responsibility: Answers aren’t coming. Upside: you’re free. The price? You must make the choices yourself and take responsibility for them. Yeah, I know: sounds emotionally expensive. But responsibility is the final boss battle of freedom.
• Practice Solidarity and Empathy: The fact that life doesn’t come pre-packaged with meaning is what makes our efforts to love, create, connect, and care actually matter. To be able to say, “Ideology didn’t make me care. I care because I choose to.” It’s not easy, it’s not glamorous, and it won’t make you rich (unless you figure out a way to monetize existential difficulty, in which case, please email me immediately.)
• Live with Passion: Just because inherent meaning does not exist doesn’t mean life is one long Fiona Apple ballad. You can still engage and be passionate. Do not resign yourself to the quiet fatigue of living a life you haven’t quite chosen but haven’t refused, either.

Camus once said, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

It’s the kind of thing that sounds pretentious on a throw pillow but hits different when you’re sitting alone in your living room at midnight, wondering if you’re going to be okay.

Camus’ “summer” is resilience.

No, the universe doesn’t respond to our questions. And more than that, it doesn’t even notice we’re asking. But that’s not where it ends.

Once you stop expecting answers, you can do anything. I think about that now, when I find myself slipping back into the habit of waiting. Waiting for things to resolve, for people to return, for feelings to clarify themselves into something clean. But life doesn’t work like that. People disappear without ceremony. Things end while you’re in the middle of them.

A while back, during a particularly grim stretch of what I call “my life”, I thought the lesson was detachment. I thought Camus was saying nothing matters, so don’t get too close. But I was wrong. He wasn’t asking us to step back. He was daring us to step closer. To love anyway. To create anyway.

There’s no epiphany. Just small, stubborn acts. A soft defiance. You love people who might not love you back. To be kind, even when kindness feels futile. To forgive someone who doesn’t say sorry. To write something no one will ever read, or plant something you might not live to see bloom. Because you’re free. The only meaning is the meaning we make.

Accept the responsibility. Enjoy the companionship of friends. Feel the passion in those moments that forge memories. And, if we embrace these things, it’s more than worth it. Life isn’t meaningless; it’s just a blank canvas upon which we paint.

Let’s see the world as it is: messy, indifferent, occasionally beautiful, filled with both disappointments and joys.

The Absurd doesn’t go away. But if you live with passion, you stop needing it to.