For a long time, I thought I understood what gave life meaning.
Or perhaps more accurately, I thought I understood what should give life meaning.
Like many people in North America, I unconsciously absorbed the idea that meaning was supposed to come from visible things: career, achievement, contribution, relationships, family, impact. Meaning was something you built, achieved, or demonstrated.
The problem was that none of those definitions sat particularly well with me.
Before we can talk about finding meaning, we need to clarify what we mean by it. The word itself is surprisingly slippery. For some people, meaning refers to purpose or responsibility. For others, it refers to significance, coherence, contribution, spirituality, belonging, or even vitality. Psychologist Viktor Frankl described meaning as “a concrete response to hidden potential that brings something of value to the doer and/or the world.” Other psychological models have approached meaning through concepts such as purpose, self-transcendence, goal pursuit, connection, or eudaimonic well-being.
What strikes me, however, is that many people do not experience meaning as an abstract philosophical idea. They experience it emotionally and physiologically. Meaning feels absorbing, energizing, and worth the effort. It often involves a sense of engagement that pulls us beyond repetitive self-focus and into contact with something larger than our own internal loops. This is partly why I have become increasingly interested in understanding meaning less as a final destination and more as a sustained process of beyond-the-self engagement.
In my pursuit of meaning, I have had several careers. I have been a gemologist, a long-standing university student (which absolutely becomes its own career), and eventually a psychotherapist. Yet none of those roles ever felt as though they were driven by a pursuit of meaning.
For years, I also believed meaning resided primarily in close relationships. But as a single woman with no children and a naturally introverted personality, that definition left me feeling strangely deficient, as though I had somehow missed the primary pathway toward a meaningful life.
So I started searching. Not in some dramatic Eat, Pray, Love kind of way. More quietly.
I began telling people that curiosity gave my life meaning. That answer felt closer to the truth. I have always been curious. Curious about people, psychology, development, grief, the stories we tell ourselves, and the strange ways human beings make sense of suffering.
But even that definition eventually felt incomplete.
Over the past several months, through conversations with clients and my own reflection, I began to notice something else. It was not curiosity alone that made life feel meaningful. It was something broader — it was engagement. More specifically, what I have started calling beyond-the-self engagement.
By that, I do not mean selflessness, sainthood, or abandoning one’s own needs. Lord knows I am far from sainthood. Yet, I also do not mean relationships in the narrow sense that we often use the word relational, as in relationships. I am not talking solely about marriage, children, or having a large social network.
What I mean is the experience of becoming deeply absorbed in something that draws us beyond our own constant self-referencing. Sometimes that engagement is with other people. Sometimes it is with art. Sometimes with nature. Sometimes with ideas, music, spirituality, craftsmanship, teaching, or even the quiet pursuit of understanding.
Meaning, I suspect, may be less about importance and more about sustained engagement beyond self-absorption.
That distinction matters. Because our culture tends to confuse meaning with magnitude.
We are subtly taught that if our lives are not visible, exceptional, influential, or ambitious enough, then perhaps they are not meaningful enough either. By that definition, Oprah or today’s social media stars have meaning, but the cabbie who drove them doesn’t. That doesn’t sit well with me.
I once worked with a young man who had dropped out of school and essentially given up on his future. When I asked him why, he explained that he had once wanted to become an architect. But eventually he realized he would probably never become as famous as Frank Lloyd Wright, and so he stopped trying altogether. At twenty-five, he was living with his mother and seemed to have lost any curiosity about what might exist beyond his own front gate.
What struck me at the time was not laziness or lack of intelligence. He was bright—I mean really bright. What struck me was that he had unconsciously equated meaning with global significance. If he could not be extraordinary, then why engage at all?
I think many of us quietly carry versions of that same distortion. We search for a career that will validate us. We search for a passion that will define us. We search for a purpose so impressive that it reassures us that our lives matter. And somewhere along the way, the pursuit of meaning itself becomes an externally defined “ought” goal — something we feel pressured to achieve rather than something that emerges through genuine engagement. I should know my purpose. I should feel fulfilled. I should be doing something bigger.
None of this is meant to suggest that the pursuit of achievement, ambition, or contribution is inherently shallow. Human beings are naturally drawn toward mastery, creativity, exploration, and growth. The problem arises when achievement becomes less about a person’s expression of engagement and more of a measuring stick of personal worth. When that happens, meaning quietly shifts from something lived to something constantly evaluated.
The problem with “ought goals” is that they are rarely satisfying for long. Because they are externally referenced, they keep us evaluating ourselves against shifting standards that can never fully be met. Therefore, the pursuit of meaning becomes less about engagement and more about self-monitoring. Instead of asking, “What draws me into engaging with life?” we begin asking, “Am I doing enough?” The result is often not inspiration, but chronic self-evaluation, comparison, and cyclical anxiety.
As a psychologist, I found this fascinating because years ago I became interested in the psychology of rumination — the cyclical mental looping that often develops when people become preoccupied with unresolved goals and chronic self-evaluation. One theory that particularly influenced me was Martin and Tesser’s goal progress theory of rumination, which suggests that rumination increases when important goals feel blocked or unresolved. If meaning is mistakenly treated as a problem to solve or an achievement to unlock, it is no surprise that we spend hours ruminating on why we feel unfulfilled and how to fix it. If meaning itself becomes a goal — especially an externally defined one — then no wonder so many people become stuck in chronic existential rumination.
Am I meaningful yet? Am I doing enough? What if this isn’t my real purpose? What if I’m wasting my life?
The mind loops endlessly because the goal itself is vague, comparison-driven, and impossible to fully resolve.
But what if meaning is not actually a destination?
What if it is not something we finally arrive at once we become successful enough, healed enough, spiritual enough, or recognized enough? What if meaning is better understood as an ongoing pattern of engagement?
This shift in perspective helped me understand something about my own life.
Years ago, when I lived in the mountains of Colorado, I would occasionally see mountain men come down from the wilderness to trade furs and supplies in town. They lived almost entirely off-grid. Their interactions with society seemed minimal and practical, almost transactional. They would come into town, obtain what they needed, and disappear back into the mountains. According to our culture’s usual definitions of meaning, these mountain folks should have seemed disconnected, isolated, or empty. Yet, they persisted in living.
What struck me was not loneliness.
It was reverence.
Even now, nearly forty years later, I still remember the feeling. These men did not appear organized around status, comparison, social visibility, or ambition. Their lives seemed anchored elsewhere — in the land, the seasons, survival, solitude, rhythm, and a sustained engagement with nature. Their meaning appeared to emerge from something beyond the self. I remember sensing something almost spiritual about them.
At the time, I did not have the language to explain why those encounters affected me so deeply. Now I think I do. Those men’s lives possessed coherence. Not because they were important in the cultural sense. But because they were deeply engaged.
Viktor Frankl wrote that meaning could be found through our response to suffering, through responsibility, and through encounters with beauty, love, and nature. More recently, writers such as John O’Donohue have expanded this idea of beauty beyond aesthetics, describing it instead as a way of perceiving depth, connection, and presence within ordinary life. Both perspectives suggest that meaning is not simply achieved through accomplishment but encountered through the quality of our engagement with the world around us.
Modern culture, however, often narrows meaning into something performative and achievement-oriented.
Perhaps meaning was never supposed to be chased directly.
Perhaps it emerges indirectly, through sustained engagement with something that pulls us beyond ourselves.
For some people, that may be parenting. For others, art. For others, scholarship, caregiving, gardening, spirituality, wilderness, teaching, music, or quiet acts of contribution that may never receive public recognition.
And perhaps that is enough.
One of the most important realizations I have had in recent years is that impact does not need to be loud in order to be real. Years ago, in one of my graduate acknowledgements, I thanked my Aunt Carolyn for quietly nurturing my academic curiosity. Until she read those words, she had no idea she had shaped my life so profoundly. Her impact was not smaller because it was quiet; it was simply quiet. Maybe meaning works the same way.
Perhaps the problem is not that our lives lack meaning, but that we have been taught to look for meaning only in places where it performs loudly enough for the world to notice.
And perhaps the more useful question is not:
“What is my purpose?”
But rather:
“What draws me into sustained engagement beyond myself?”
References and Influences
- Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. – Self-regulation and control theory
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. – Flow, absorption, and optimal experience
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. – Self-Determination Theory and intrinsic motivation
- Emmons, R. A. – Personal strivings, spirituality, and goal systems
- Frankl, V. E. – Logotherapy, suffering, and existential meaning
- Higgins, E. T. – Self-discrepancy theory and “ought” selves
- Martin, L. L., & Tesser, A. – Goal progress theory of rumination
- O’Donohue, J. – Beauty, perception, and the emotional texture of meaning
- Ryff, C. D. – Eudaimonic well-being and psychological flourishing
A Taylor'd Life 