Nothing Means Anything Until You Say So: Creating Your Own Meaning

On the search that keeps you circling, and what happens when you stop

I injured my right hand a little while ago, which meant I could not write with it.

Around the same time I interviewed a woman who suggested I try writing with my left. Not as a workaround. As a practice. She talked about it the way you might talk about a door, and given that my dominant hand was out of action anyway, the timing felt almost arranged.

So I sat down and wrote with my left hand, slowly, badly. The letters came out uneven and oversized. It looked exactly like a child's handwriting, and something about seeing my own thoughts in that shape changed how they sounded.

Then this arrived.

None of this means anything.

It came through light. No dread underneath it, no floor giving way. It landed the way a child says something devastating at dinner without any idea they have said it. Simple, unguarded, obviously true.

I have since learned that this is not unusual. The art therapist Lucia Capacchione spent decades studying what happens when people write with their non-dominant hand, and she found it tends to produce simpler words, more direct insight, a different voice altogether. She built a whole method around it for reaching the parts of us that got quiet a long time ago. Reading that, I recognised what had happened at my kitchen table.

Because a child has not assigned the meanings yet. They are not carrying the labels. And whatever part of me was holding that pen had somehow not been informed of all the conclusions I had reached about my life.

Here is what it noticed. Everything I experience turns up without a label attached. The event happens, and then somewhere inside me a meaning gets assigned, so fast that it feels like seeing rather than deciding.

The same rainstorm ruins a wedding and saves a harvest. The same phone call is an ending or a beginning depending on who is holding it.

Which puts a strange shape on the question most of us have been asking.

The spiral of asking.

What is the meaning of life. What is the meaning of this. Why did this happen to me.

I made a friend here on Maui who asked me something that stopped me mid-sentence. Instead of what does this mean, he asked: how did I create this?

Sit with the difference. One question points outward and waits for delivery. The other turns you around to face your own part in it. That second question can go somewhere unkind if you use it to blame yourself for everything that ever happened to you, so I hold it gently. Asked well, it hands you back your participation. I have written more about that shift from blame to co-creation, so I will leave it there.

What matters here is the shape. Some questions move. Others circle.

I have spent long stretches inside the circling ones, and I know exactly how it feels. Like seeking. Like productivity. And it can continue for years while you wait for an answer the universe has never once handed to anybody.

There is research on this, and it startled me.

The psychologist Michael Steger built a measure that separates two things we usually lump together: how much meaning a person feels they already have, and how hard they are searching for it. Then he looked at how each one relates to wellbeing.

Having meaning tracks closely with life satisfaction, and moves in the opposite direction from depression and anxiety. Fair enough.

Searching for meaning goes the other way. It shows up alongside rumination, low mood, neuroticism, and a fatalistic relationship with the present. The searching itself is entangled with the suffering.

Crystal Park found something similar studying how people make sense of hard events. Meaning-making helps when it resolves. When it keeps going and never lands, it curdles into rumination, with measurable costs to body and mind.

The spiral has been sitting in the data all along. Asking harder does not get you out.

The absurd as a starting point.

Albert Camus described the gap better than anyone.

He called it the absurd: the collision between our hunger for meaning and what he called the unreasonable silence of the universe. We ask. The world declines to answer. Camus refused to soften that, and I trust him more for it.

Then he does something I find genuinely thrilling.

Nihilism hears the silence and treats it as a verdict. Nothing means anything, so nothing matters, so why bother. Camus hears the identical silence and treats it as an opening. Nothing means anything on its own, so the meaning is ours to make.

One observation, two entirely different lives.

He ends the essay with Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder uphill forever, and writes the line everybody remembers: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. The boulder never became meaningful. Sisyphus decided what the climb was going to be for him, and that decision was the one thing the gods could not reach.

Nihilism is a choice too.

I want to be fair to the other road, because it is genuinely open.

You can decide nothing means anything and live accordingly. Refuse to invest. Keep everything at arm's length. There is real safety in it, since what does not matter cannot wound you much. I have visited that place, and some seasons deposit you there without asking permission.

Notice, though, that this is still a decision. Declaring the world meaningless is itself an act of meaning-making, and it costs the same energy as the alternative. You remain the author. You are simply writing a shorter book.

So there is no neutral. Every day we assign weight to things, and mostly we do it without looking.

There is a word for assigning weight without looking. Judgement. It decides what something should be before the thing has finished arriving, and it tends to find what it went in expecting.

There is another word for doing it on purpose. Discernment, from the Latin discernere, to sift, to separate one thing from another. Discernment looks at what is actually in front of it. It can say this is not for me without needing to add and therefore it is bad. The heart stays open while the line still gets drawn.

Judgement says you are wrong, so I am closing. Discernment says I see you clearly, and I am choosing.

We are always assigning meaning. The only real question is whether we are awake while we do it.

Creating your own meaning starts where the searching ends.

So how does any of this square with being called toward something?

I have written before about finding your calling, about the sense that life asks something of us rather than the other way round. Set beside what I am saying now, the two look like they cancel each other out. Either meaning comes from out there, or I manufacture it in here.

I no longer think I have to pick. I wrote recently about holding both truths at once, and this may be the clearest case I have found.

Something does move toward you. Certain things pull and will not let up. AND you are the one who decides what to do with the pull.

Think of sitting on a board in the ocean. You did not make the swell. It gathered far out, shaped by weather that has nothing to do with you, and it arrives whether or not you are ready. Another one is always coming. None of that is yours.

Whether you turn and paddle is yours.

The calling is the swell. The meaning is whether you ride it.

Here is where I want to be careful, because for a long time I treated my own searching as wasted years. It was not. You have to paddle out. You have to spend the hours reading the water, learning where the break forms, missing set after set and feeling foolish. Nobody arrives at the ocean already knowing. The abundance only becomes visible to somebody who went looking and stayed out long enough to stop counting.

The searching does its work. Then it finishes, and if you stay in it, the same motion becomes circling. That is the part that catches people, because circling and seeking feel identical from the inside. Same paddling. Same conviction that the answer is just past the next horizon.

Every contemplative tradition seems to describe this shape. The seeker goes looking in order to discover there was never anything missing, and the going is how the seeing gets built.

The stage nobody warns you about.

You searched. You learned to read the water. You finally understand that the waves keep coming, that there is no scarcity here, that another set is already forming.

And now you sit out there weighing them. Was that one better. Should I hold out for something cleaner. Is this the right one for me.

Abundance turns into its own paralysis, and it does a very good impression of wisdom. You tell yourself you are being discerning. Sometimes true. Sometimes you are just refusing to get wet.

Barry Schwartz studied this for years and sorted people into two groups. Maximisers hunt for the best available option. Satisficers work out what actually matters to them, take something that meets it, and commit. His finding is uncomfortable: maximisers often land objectively better outcomes while being reliably less happy. Having surveyed every option, they are haunted by the ones they let go. He also found that people who know a decision cannot be undone make peace with it faster than people who left the door propped open.

The surfing detail is what stays with me. You cannot tell whether a wave is any good until you have already committed to it. You turn, you paddle hard, you stand, and only then does it show you what it is. Certainty was never on offer beforehand. The wave reveals itself to whoever is already riding.

So participate. Standing up is the only way to find out, and the water is full of chances to be wrong.

Some of it only makes sense at the end.

One caveat before I go further, because a lot of meaning arrives late.

Kierkegaard put it in his journal in 1843. Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. You do not get to understand first and then live accordingly. You live, largely blind, while the understanding assembles itself behind you.

Which means you are allowed to not know what this chapter is for while you are standing in the middle of it.

And rarely alone.

I nearly left this out, which would have made the whole piece lonelier than the truth.

I have written all of this as though meaning-making happens inside one head. It mostly does not.

The meanings I carry were handed to me by a family, a language, a place, a pile of stories I absorbed long before I could assess them. And the ones I have managed to change, I almost never changed by myself. It took a friend who would not let a sentence slide. A conversation that reframed something I had held one way for ten years. Somebody reflecting back a version of me I had no way of seeing from where I was standing.

We make meaning together, in conversation and in the retelling. Nobody workshops the meaning of their life alone inside their own head.

Which is the lineup, really. You paddle out and there are others already sitting there, and everybody is waiting on their own wave. Somebody shouts that this one is yours. Somebody tells you the tide is about to turn. Between sets you talk, or you do not, and either way you are less alone out there than you were on the beach. Each of you rides separately. None of you sits separately.

And I would not leave nature out of this. Not every mirror is a person. The ocean has taught me more about patience and timing and my own resistance than most conversations have. Standing under trees older than my whole family line rearranges something about scale. Some of the most useful reframes I have ever received arrived from a place that was not speaking to me at all, and had no opinion about me whatsoever.

Two kinds of intention.

The practical end of this is much smaller than the philosophy makes it sound.

Meaning does not get decided once, in a shaft of clarity, after which your life is sorted. It happens in how you make your coffee. In whether this conversation is an interruption or the reason you are here. In the energy you carry into a room, which is already a meaning assigned before anybody speaks.

Terry Eagleton said it plainly: the meaning of life is not handed to you, it is something you construct. Construction is daily, unglamorous work, and no amount of seeking produces it as a revelation at the end.

But I want to separate two things that both go by the name intention, because I have practised both and they feel nothing alike.

There is the intention that grips. It has a picture of how this should go and it manages the room toward that picture. It calls itself commitment while it is really control, and you can feel it in your jaw. Everything it touches has to justify itself.

Then there is the intention that opens. Same attention, same care, no grip. It sets a direction and stays curious about what actually arrives, including the parts that were not in the picture.

Alan Watts spent his life pointing at the second one. He described existence as lila, the Hindu word for divine play, the universe hiding from itself in ten thousand forms so it can have the pleasure of being found again. You are the universe awake for a little while, pretending to be a person. Held that way, life stops being a problem to solve and becomes something more like a game you are already inside.

Which reframes intention entirely. Something is already moving. The work is being willing to be moved by it.

That willingness is easy to say and difficult to do, because it asks you to act with real conviction toward something you cannot prove. There is an old line, usually pinned on Nietzsche without much evidence, that the people dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music. I keep it anyway, because the image is exact. The dancers were not performing. They heard something, and they let it move them, and from outside it looked like nonsense.

Faith of that kind is not a belief about outcomes. It is a willingness to move before the music is audible to anybody else.

The days I feel most alive are never the days I understood something. They are the days I showed up on purpose and then let the day have its own ideas. Identical hours. Different weight assigned.

The good news underneath.

I understand why none of this means anything sounds like the floor giving way.

For me it did the opposite. If nothing carries built-in meaning, then no experience is permanently fixed. The chapter I filed under failure is not sealed as failure. The thing I decided was too late is only too late because I said so, usually at some point when I was young and frightened and not choosing carefully.

Which means it can be reassigned.

The label was never welded to the object. A hand placed it there, and a hand can move it. Sometimes, it turns out, the other hand.

And to be clear, none of this means you owe the world a meaning for your worst thing. Some losses stay losses. If you are in the middle of something heavy right now, you are not required to have made sense of it yet, and nobody gets to hand you that homework while you are still carrying the weight. Reassigning happens when it happens, or it does not, and you are not doing anything wrong either way.

Nothing means anything until you say so.

So when you are ready, say something.

What is one thing in your life you have been carrying an old meaning about? And what would it look like to assign a new one? I would love to hear.

Some meanings loosen the moment you notice you assigned them. Others were set down so early, and so deep, that noticing is not enough on its own. That deeper inner shift is the work I do in 1:1 hypno coaching, meeting the beliefs underneath the ones you can see, gently and without force.

Further reading:

• Albert Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus

• Terry Eagleton — The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction

• Susan Wolf — Meaning in Life and Why It Matters

• Alan Watts — The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

• Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning