When we say "Find meaning in life," what do we mean exactly?

Finding meaning in life means having clarity and feeling conviction over how we must impact others.

That's it.

The necessary conditions to find meaning in life are knowing the high-level values you want to affect and having the required competence to affect them.

My struggle with the confusion of "meaning of life"

I don't know about you, but I was pretty confused growing up about meaning, purpose, and all of that. None of that registered in my mind.

On one hand, I didn't know exactly what it meant to have "something bigger than yourself," a common refrain when talking about purpose. Was that about community? Religion? Work?

On the other hand, I could barely care for myself, let alone something bigger than myself. I was always in survivor mode, barely living paycheck to paycheck, a day late and a dollar short.

So growing up, I was just focused on surviving, going through the motions of life and trying to get my best shot at the opportunities I had. There was no care about the "why" of life.

With enough time and much luck, my financial life took a rare turn for the better and I could then step away from constantly worrying about survival. But it was still hard.

Finding meaning in life was hard in part because there was so little guidance. Everybody I knew was struggling to find meaning in their lives too.

There was a real existential angst that I struggled to even identify in both me and others. With time, I realized it sounded like "Why am I here in this world?" and "What's the point of life, if any?"

Surprisingly, books were little help at first (although they were useful later). Viktor Frankl and Nietzche's quotes made cognitive sense. I kept nodding, but I didn't really get it – it didn't click. And I got no closer to my own life's meaning.

I didn't know how to look for meaning in life or even quite what to look for.

To make matters harder, meaning in life is a very emotional part of our lives. So it's more of a "you'll know it when you feel it" thing than a "I scribbled in a notebook and found my life's meaning." thing

And finally, there's no such thing as a single meaning of life for us, so "meaning of life" is kind of a misnomer. As the way we must impact others changes, due to changes in the world or ourselves, so does our life's meaning.

Meaning of life instead feels more like "our duty in life." They are the critical responsibilities towards others we currently have and uphold.

Laid out this way, finding meaning in life becomes much more straightforward, if still hard. There's so much ambiguity, jargon, and mixed advice out there.

I wanted to cut through the cruft and understand what's at the core of finding meaning in life.

I think I did. So let's break it down.

Feeling conviction

Our kids are an almost universal source of meaning. That's because our children are an evolutionary hardwired source of feeling something that sounds like "Here's something I know from now on: I must protect and grow and love this little person for the rest of my life."

You can't quite explain that elating feeling of motherhood and fatherhood to a person who hasn't had a kid yet, and it's hard to really persuade yourself into it by just going abstractly: "A parent's responsibility is to oversee the healthy upbringing of their offspring, yada yada"... *snore*.

We humans are emotional beings, and a lot of the guidance for decisions we make through life, as well as our motivations, are deeply grounded in how we feel. This reliance on feelings is particularly crucial for life's meaning.

This reliance on feelings means that finding your life's meaning without actually doing it and triggering those feelings is incredibly hard. Our life's meaning is out there, in your actions and pursuits, and not in here.

So, while conviction is a crucial part of having a meaning of life, it's not just about having conviction: it's about feeling it.

The conviction itself is also crucial. Having conviction means that your impact is tied to one of your highest values.

You can't feel conviction about your duty to something that isn't your highest value. That's why it's so hard to do much for any of those other kids compared to what we do for our own.

Conviction starts with values. There's gotta be something that you value so much, that's so important to you, that it really makes a huge difference to you how this value is nurtured, upheld, and preserved.

I think most of our difficulty trying to find meaning in life is a difficulty in finding our top values.

Without a top value you must uphold, you won't feel the conviction necessary to make it meaningful to your life.

So to find conviction, you must know what are the things you really, really care about, your top values. And to feel conviction, you must see it face to face, be in the trenches with it.

Once you solve this part of the puzzle, feeling conviction, comes an even more challenging part: what to do?

Knowing how to impact others

It's not enough to care about something deeply – you must be able to do something about it.

Often, we run into a dichotomy of finding meaning in that our competence doesn't match the top values we care about, making us helpless.

We often end in a situation where "the stuff we actually do, we don't really care about, and for the things we really care about, there's nothing we can do."

The way we address this part of our meaning in life is by increasing our competence.

Having nothing we can currently do for the stuff we really care about is a competence gap. We just don't have the skills, money, time, contacts, opportunity, leverage, etc. to really make a difference.

Changing what we really care about is much harder than changing what we can do about it. While our top values are often fixed and beyond our control, it's in our control to become more competent, to build more time, money, and skills to have a higher impact.

Some people are indeed stuck in a life without meaning. With no competencies that impact their highest values, and no initiative to increase their competence, they have nothing meaningful to do.

Of course, being unable to increase their competence is just a false, limiting belief. We can all build new competencies that get us closer to pursuing and nurturing our highest values.

It's just that not all of us do.

The importance of meaning

A life filled with the pursuit of meaning is rare but also fulfilling.

For many, the pursuit of meaning is superior to the pursuit of happiness.

In Viktor Frankl's notorious Man's Search for Meaning, he talks about how his Logotherapy puts the pursuit of meaning as a core part of life.

According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, [..]

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. [..]

Another statistical survey, of 7,948 students at forty-eight colleges, was conducted by social scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Their preliminary report is part of a two-year study sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. Asked what they considered “very important” to them now, 16 percent of the students checked “making a lot of money”; 78 percent said their first goal was “finding a purpose and meaning to my life.” [..]

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call “noö-dynamics,” i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it.

Frankl, Viktor E.. Man's Search for Meaning (p. 105). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

Viktor Frankl's classic beautifully displays the importance of meaning in one's life.

On the other hand, the book also shows the difficulty of talking about meaning in simple, understandable, and actionable terms.

How should you go about finding meaning in your life?

Understanding what meaning in life means is something I believe I can clarify in an article.

But finding meaning in one's life is not something I can help you do in just a few paragraphs – so the practical applications for my article will be lacking.

In any case, here is a recap and at least the map to follow to find meaning in your life:

1) Meaning is having clarity and feeling conviction over how you must impact others: The word "meaning" is an imprecise, ambiguous way to describe that, which confuses us. Another way to think about it is, "What is my duty?" which is also wrong, but at least it's less wrong and ambiguous.

2) Meaning is out there in our actions: You won't find your life's meaning while sitting at your desk, thinking. Because meaning is tied to a conviction that we feel, we need to be doing it to feel it. The psychological aspects of meaning prevent us from having it in the abstract.

3) You must know your highest values to have meaning in life: To have meaning, you must nurture your highest values, the things in life you really, really care about. Not having clarity over the highest values is probably the most frequent blocker to a meaningful life, and the widespread clarity that our kids are our highest value is one reason why kids are a common source of meaning to parents' lives.

4) You must be competent to affect your highest values: You can only have meaning in life if you can pursue and nurture your highest value through your actions. Building competencies include having time, money, skills, opportunities, contacts, and everything else necessary to impact outcomes. Building competencies to have meaning in life is in your control but takes a long time.

5) Meaning is a core part of life: Viktor Frankl defends that meaning is life's primary motivation. On the other hand, some people are stuck in a meaningless life where their competence and highest values don't overlap. You ensure you don't get stuck by breaking the limiting belief that you can't increase your competence.

That's it. I hope this helps.

So next time the question "What's the meaning of life?" comes up (which is often if you hang out with people like me), even if you can't say what the meaning of your own life is yet, at least you'll know what it means.