Does life have to mean something?

Faith in Jesus can give an entire life its meaning. Precisely because heaven comes after death, and because Jesus is not someone you can meet for coffee tomorrow afternoon, the goal is distant enough. A person can believe in it for a lifetime, wait for it for a lifetime, and build an entire life around it.

Many so-called “life goals” have a similar structure. Becoming the richest person in the world, setting foot on Mars, becoming president: part of what makes these goals feel so grand is that they are so far away. They are far enough away that we can spend years chasing them without having to face one question too soon: if you actually get there, then what?

Imagine Jesus really did appear in front of you one day and say, “I’m Jesus. This is what heaven is like.” What comes next? If you really became the richest person in the world, really became president, really stood on the surface of Mars, what would you do with the rest of your life?

Maybe those examples are too remote. For most people, the goal may simply be paying off the mortgage, saving enough to retire, finding a partner, raising the kids, or moving into the house they have always wanted. We tend to believe that when that day finally comes, something will settle. Then I can relax. Then I will be free. Then my real life can begin.

Before we get it

About ten years ago, when I was still in college, a friend and I played an online poker tournament together. It was a tournament I found fairly easy at the time. I felt as if I had X-ray vision: hand after hand, I could read almost exactly what my opponents were thinking. For hours we stayed intensely wired, and in the end we really did win the tournament. Not long after it ended, my friend suddenly said to me, “Now that we’ve actually won, it feels kind of empty.”

Later I noticed something: many things seem most exciting not after we get them, but before. Before a trip, we browse hotels, search for restaurants, map out routes, and live through the trip many times in our imagination. Before buying something, we can spend days researching it, comparing options, and picturing what life will feel like once it is ours.

Of course getting what we want can make us happy. It just rarely lasts as long as we imagined. Something we wanted for months becomes just another object in the house after a few days. We finally visit a place we have wanted to see for years, and after a few days there we are already thinking about the next destination. Even a number that once seemed impossibly far away can, once it actually shows up in our bank account, become just another number after we have looked at it long enough.

As my wealth grew over the past few years, there was almost nothing material I genuinely wanted but could not have. That made the pattern easier to see. Get one thing, and before long I want the next. Finish one trip, and I start thinking about another. Getting what I wanted did not end the wanting; it simply gave the wanting a new object.

Maybe that is why we are so drawn to the feeling of a fresh start. A new house, a new car, a new city, a new relationship. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. But sometimes what we really want to replace is not the house, the car, or the person beside us. It is the “now” that has become too familiar. The moment uncertainty returns, something in us seems to come alive again.

But once we arrive, the “future” becomes “now.” A new house eventually just becomes home. A new city becomes familiar. A new relationship settles into everyday life. Things that once glowed in our imagination lose that glow once they become part of ordinary life. And so we begin creating the next future.

When a cycle looks like progress

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. You finish it, break it apart, then put the same puzzle together again. Finish it, break it apart, repeat. Most of us would not need many rounds before we became bored. The cycle is too small and too obvious. We do not have to think very hard to see that we are simply repeating the same thing.

But if we make the cycle larger, it becomes harder to notice. After finishing the first puzzle, instead of breaking it apart, we buy a new one. New picture, new difficulty, new anticipation. That can feel exciting again. Finish the second, buy the third, then the fourth. On the surface every puzzle is different, but step back a little and it still looks like the same cycle: find something we do not have, anticipate it, get it, get used to it, then go looking for the next thing.

The only difference is that the first cycle is so short we recognize it immediately. The second depends on each person’s capacity for insight. Some notice it within months, some need decades, and some spend an entire lifetime mistaking the cycle for progress.

I used to live in a neighborhood filled with supercars. The parking garage could look like an auto show. One neighbor was a VIP in a supercar owners’ club and seemed to buy a new car every few months. “Buy a supercar, enjoy the rush of the new car, get used to it, sell it, buy the next one” is a cycle too, just slower than the puzzle. “Get a job, get promoted, get bored, switch jobs” can have the same shape. So can “buy a house, work harder, buy a better house.” Finish one thing, then use the next thing to begin again.

When a cycle stretches out long enough, we stop calling it repetition and start calling it life.

In college, I started a student group and later launched a company with a few friends who shared the same ambitions. My goal was clear: sell the company as early as possible, become financially independent, and stop working. At the time I hardly questioned the logic. The point of working was to reach the day I no longer had to work. The point of making money was to reach the day I no longer had to make money for money’s sake.

But once work and money were no longer necessities, the cycle did not disappear. It changed form. Work and wealth gave way to possessions, travel, and experiences. For some people, the cycle moves on to citizenship and identity, almost as if the next game is seeing how many passports one person can collect in a lifetime. The objects keep changing, but “what’s next” is always there.

Within roughly a decade, Linus Pauling won both the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize. Afterward, he became fixated on winning another Nobel and hoped to win one in medicine. I cannot be sure whether medicine itself was what truly interested him, but he went on to promote a number of unconventional medical claims in an effort to make a name in the field. Many of those claims were later discredited, and mainstream medicine came to treat him as something of a crank. Even a scientific genius who had already won two Nobel Prizes could find himself caught in the cycle of pursuing the highest possible recognition.

I have also personally watched extraordinarily gifted traders turn $10 into $1 million in a matter of days, and others turn a few thousand dollars into hundreds of millions. If the original purpose of trading was simply to make money, you would think the game should have ended long before that point. Yet some became addicted to the stimulation of trading itself, kept making trades that bordered on gambling, and eventually lost everything they had made. Start from zero, get it, lose it, then start again.

The real power of a cycle is that it does not have to make us do exactly the same thing forever. Change the name, change the object, change the level of difficulty, and it becomes easy to believe that this time is different.

When the cycle stops

In Buddhism, the ending of the cycle is called nirvana, the cessation of suffering. Christianity describes a final return to God, an entry into heaven. They are not the same concept, of course, but the comparison made me wonder: why do so many major spiritual traditions, across so much of history, point in some way toward a kind of “stopping”?

By “stopping,” I do not mean the heart stops beating and we dissolve into blank nothingness. Nor do I mean becoming so passive that we would watch a bully hurt a child without stepping in, or see an elderly woman about to be hit by a car and not reach out to pull her back. What actually stops is the attachment to the feeling that “right now is not enough; I need the next thing before I can be complete.”

That runs almost directly against the way we are taught to understand life. From childhood onward, the message is to keep moving: the next school, the next job, the next promotion, the next house, the next number in the bank account. Even when we turn to spiritual growth, it can easily become just the next version of ourselves: I want to be calmer, wiser, more aware; I even want to become enlightened. The object of pursuit changes, but the structure of “I need to get somewhere else” remains intact.

As I slowly came to understand what spiritual teachers were actually pointing toward, I began to see that heaven, nirvana, or enlightenment never seemed to be one more thing to acquire. Otherwise enlightenment itself would simply become another, harder life goal, and once we finally got it, we would probably ask the same question again: then what? Someone who truly sees the cycle can still work, make money, travel, fall in love, and devote themselves seriously to something. What stops is not action, but the attachment to a future in which we imagine we will finally become complete.

That made me realize that “finding the meaning of life” may itself be one of the most subtle turns of the same cycle. When money, possessions, travel, and achievement are no longer enough to answer “then what?”, we do not stop searching. We start looking for something bigger: a calling, a life purpose, a mission for the soul, some answer large enough to explain why we are here. First we wanted the ideal job. Then we wanted the ideal life. The game sounds more elevated, but the feeling “I am still missing an answer” remains.

In Pixar’s Soul, the counselor Jerry says something I love: “We don’t assign purposes… Your ‘purposes.’ Your ‘meanings of life.’ So basic.” Joe has spent years believing that jazz is the most important thing in his life. He waits a long time, and finally he stands on the stage he has always dreamed of. After the performance, he expects life to be different from then on. But the next day still comes, and life is still life. That moment brings us back to the question at the beginning of this essay: if you actually get there, then what?

Maybe the real question is not whether life “has meaning,” but why we feel such a strong need to give it one. If I believe I came into the world to accomplish a particular thing, then until I accomplish it, I always have a direction to move toward. And if that thing is distant enough, I can pursue it for an entire lifetime without ever having to face the question, “What happens after I finish?”

But the same pattern does not have to be as grand as “the meaning of life.” We often define who we are first, then let that identity tell us how we are supposed to live. “I’m a healthy person,” so I should exercise and watch what I eat. “I’m a successful person,” so I should live in a bigger house and make more money. Joe believes that his life is jazz, so standing on that stage is not merely a performance. It is also the completion of the person he believes himself to be.

Once something becomes part of “who I am,” it stops being just a thing I do. I am no longer simply making money; I need money to prove that I am successful. I am no longer simply trading; I need the next trade to prove that I am still a great trader. In that sense, “the meaning of life” may be the largest version of the same story. We construct an identity, then spend years maintaining it, proving it, and trying to complete it. As long as the story is unfinished, there is always another step ahead.

What feels more unsettling is the possibility of temporarily taking all of that away. If I am not “a successful person,” not “an entrepreneur,” not “a trader,” and I do not have some life mission that must be completed, when I wake up in the morning, will I still know what I want to do?

I used to think that kind of life would feel empty. Without a clear answer to “who am I?” there would be no direction. Without an ultimate goal, there would be no reason to move forward. Now I am beginning to wonder whether I need to know “who I am” before I can do something at all, or whether I need to assign a purpose to an entire lifetime before I can live it wholeheartedly.

Things can still happen. Goals can still exist. They simply do not have to justify the whole of life. From that perspective, perhaps “Who am I?” and “Does life have to mean something?” are not the point after all. Sometimes there is only breathing and watching the clouds. I am simply receiving the experience of the present moment as it arrives, without turning myself into “a person who enjoys zoning out, breathing, and watching the clouds.”