AI Says...
It is a question that haunts the contemporary Western youth: “What is the meaning of my life?” You find it in self-help books, in academic speeches, in the anxious silences of those who seemingly have everything to be happy. This search for “meaning” appears noble, but in truth, it is a luxury — a symptom of a comfort never before seen in human history.
Our parents and grandparents did not have that privilege. Their daily lives were about survival, work, and the reconstruction of a world shattered by wars, crises, and scarcity. They had neither the time nor the distance to question the “meaning” of their existence: they simply lived. The quest for meaning, as we see it today, is less a necessity than a byproduct of abundance. When material needs are met, spiritual emptiness takes their place.
But the paradox is cruel: any meaning, whatever it may be, can be deconstructed into absurdity. The mechanism of deconstruction follows an inexorable logic: one only has to push the idea to its extreme, strip it of emotion, and observe reality bare. Take, for example, an ideal — the will to save lives. It seems unimpeachable, morally pure. Yet, if one looks at it with a detached and cold eye, every life saved is a life still destined to die; every cure is only a reprieve. Under this light, the ideal of saving becomes nothing more than a tragic resistance to entropy. That is what deconstruction is: following a meaning to its logical end until it reveals its void. But even if we refuse to do it ourselves, life does it for us. With time, ideals wear down, crumble, and fade upon contact with reality. The humanitarian grows weary before the vastness of suffering; the activist tires before the inertia of institutions; the believer doubts after each trial. What reason can dismantle in a day, time slowly erodes grain by grain.That is why it is wiser not to cling to a fixed “meaning,” but rather to nurture a motivation that is alive. Meaning pretends to explain the world; motivation adapts to it, breathes, renews itself. It is a form of supple intelligence, an active lucidity — it does not seek to understand why to live, but how to live well, here and now.
Even the noblest vocations — those of doctors, human rights activists, humanitarians, judges, or defenders of justice — collapse under the cold gaze of cynicism. If we admit that humankind is the most destructive species on the planet, responsible for the collapse of ecosystems, endless wars, and recurring atrocities, then what is the point of saving, healing, or defending? The doctor heals bodies condemned to die; the activist defends causes that constantly reappear; the humanitarian extinguishes one flame of suffering while another blaze ignites elsewhere. On a cosmic scale, it all seems futile.
Camus understood this. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he describes the man condemned to push his boulder endlessly up a mountain, only to see it roll down again each time. This image is not one of despair but of lucidity. Sisyphus does not expect “meaning” from his task. He acts, conscious of the absurd — and it is precisely this lucidity that frees him. Camus wrote: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Happy, not because he believes in a hidden purpose, but because he accepts his condition and acts with dignity.
To search for meaning in one’s life is often like swimming against the current in the middle of an ocean, hoping to follow some hypothetical direction. But there is no shore drawn in advance. Wisdom perhaps lies in staying afloat, keeping one’s head above water, and preserving the inner flame the universe entrusted to us — our soul, our consciousness, our capacity not to harm.
To live in balance, without causing harm, by building, understanding, and transmitting — that is perhaps what replaces “meaning. ”Not a finality imposed or revealed, but a living morality, an active awareness. The essential is not to find meaning, but to become meaning — through the way we act, think, and love, despite the absurd.
For even if the universe has no plan for us, it has still granted us the possibility of being aware of our brief passage. And this consciousness, fragile yet luminous, deserves to be sustained. To act, to create, to preserve, to hope — not to be saved, but to be worthy of the beauty of the world, even in its indifference.
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