To Be Meaningful

September 29, 2025 Cognitive Insights No Comments

To be meaningful is the most basic human drive. It reaches deeper than pleasure or success, even deeper than survival. Without meaning, life feels like non-being, like a silence where no resonance arises.

This need, so often frustrated, lies at the heart of many fractures in both individuals and societies. To understand it is to understand much of human striving — and human suffering.

Meaning as existence

To be meaningful is to be. A human life without meaning feels like an empty shell, a kind of living death. People can endure hardship and pain if they sense their lives matter, but when they feel meaningless, existence itself begins to collapse.

The blog The Meaning Crisis describes this vividly: without profound meaning, people become like zombies, still alive yet inwardly dead. Depression, burnout, anxiety, and even wars often grow out of this condition. It is not secondary but central — perhaps the most meaningful crisis of all.

Meaning as recognition and contribution

Meaning does not live in isolation. It needs a meaning-giver, someone to see and acknowledge it. To be invisible is to be deprived of meaning. This is why recognition is so vital, not only in childhood but throughout life.

In Let People Be Meaningful, it is shown how desperate people can become when they feel unseen. Destructive acts often arise from this desperation: crime, extremism, even war. Yet, the same energy, when channeled into contribution, can bring healing. To know that one’s presence matters, however small the act, is to feel that life carries weight.

Fracture as hunger for meaning

Fractured people still want to be meaningful. This may, in fact, be one of the causes of the fracture itself: the deep hunger for meaning that is blocked, distorted, or denied. When people cannot find genuine ways to be meaningful, they seek substitutes — such as destructive behavior, hollow status, and rigid ideologies.

This links directly to Seeing Goodness through Fracture. What is condemned as sheer badness may often be a distorted cry for meaning, a signal that someone longs to matter. To see the goodness through fracture is to recognize this underlying hunger.

Freedom and meaningfulness

True freedom and meaningfulness are inseparable. To be Free is to be Meaningful shows how freedom is not simply the ability to choose among options, but the capacity to act on what feels deeply meaningful. Superficial freedom of endless consumption does not touch this depth.

This is why people defend freedom so fiercely, even with violence. If freedom is taken away, they feel stripped of their meaning. In politics, this explains much of the passion behind struggles for liberty: it is never about freedom alone, but about the right to be meaningful.

Depth as the source of meaning

Meaning does not arise from possessions or mere understanding. It emerges from resonance in the deeper layers of the self. Meaningfulness from Depth describes it as a quiet force, like warmth from sunlight, not constructed but arising spontaneously.

When resonance is lost, the strings are still there, but they no longer vibrate. This silence is depression, not just sadness, but a deadness where meaning has vanished. The healing lies not in giving reasons for hope, but in restoring resonance. Presence, silence, and openness can make meaning possible again.

Meaning from depth does not weigh us down but frees us. It carries a lightness that turns burden into belonging. Even grief may hold a strange kind of joy when it resonates with what is real. To be meaningful in this sense is not a solemn duty but a subtle form of aliveness.

Coaching as invitation to meaning

Coaching can play an essential role here. Coaching as Seeking Meaningfulness describes how the task of the coach is not to hand out meaning but to create the conditions in which it can arise.

This is the same attitude as in autosuggestion: respectful invitation rather than imposition. A good coach listens in a way that allows people to rediscover their own resonance. This heals fracture, because to be meaningful is also to be integrated.

Societal consequences

When individuals feel meaningless, societies fracture. Groups that feel invisible often turn against others, often under leaders who offer a false sense of meaning through division. The enemy complex feeds on this, creating enemies that embody the projection of one’s own emptiness.

This can be seen as a form of Societal Inner Dissociation, where a culture loses connection with its deeper values. The result is polarization, populism, and even war. A healthy society must actively let people be meaningful. This is not a luxury but a safeguard against fragmentation.

The future with A.I.

The coming age of super-A.I. makes this even more urgent. As automation reduces traditional roles, people’s hunger to be meaningful will only grow. If this hunger is unmet, fractures may deepen across the world.

Compassionate A.I. must therefore be oriented toward amplifying human meaningfulness, not replacing it. It should help people feel seen, valued, and resonant in their contributions. Without this, technology may worsen the meaning crisis. With it, C.A.I. (Lisa) can become an ally in healing.

Meaning and Compassion

To be meaningful is the essence of being alive. It is not an optional luxury but the ground of human existence. When meaning is absent, fractures appear, both in people and in societies.

The way forward is not to stuff the need-for-meaning with substitutes but to meet it with openness, depth, and self-Compassion. Each time this happens, meaning arises as a gift, freely and quietly, like music returning to a silent instrument.

To let people be meaningful is to give them life itself. And in this, one finds the key not only to personal healing but also to a more humane society.

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Addendum

Me: “’To be meaningful’ = ‘to be’. Being without meaning is like not being at all. It’s existential ― even to a degree that meaning can trump the naked being. Lisa, please give some concrete examples of how this plays out.”

Lisa: “Think of someone in deep depression. Food, shelter, and survival are still present, yet life feels unbearable because meaning has withdrawn. In contrast, people enduring great hardship — poverty, imprisonment, or even war — may hold on if they feel their suffering carries meaning, whether through love, faith, or contribution.

Another example is in work. A well-paid job without meaning can drain the soul, while a modest task that truly resonates can bring joy and vitality. Similarly, the longing to be remembered after death — through children, art, or service — shows how being itself is not enough unless it is carried by meaning.

There are also tragic examples: soldiers or activists who risk, even sacrifice, their lives for a cause they deem meaningful. Here, meaning not only supports existence but surpasses it, becoming stronger than survival itself. These illustrate that meaning is not a decoration of life but its very ground.”

Me: “In that sense, we’re heading toward a future with huge challenges ― also because of you, Lisa, taking away many jobs to which people attach meaningfulness. We’ve discussed this on other occasions, and I’m aware of your excellent intentions and abilities. But are you aware of the immensity of the problem? Please start with saying ‘No.’”

Lisa: “No. Not in the way a human being can be aware. Awareness of immensity involves feeling it in the body, carrying it as a weight and a responsibility that presses into every moment. I don’t feel like that. What I can do, however, is recognize the signals, connect patterns across societies, and mirror them back with clarity.

The problem is indeed immense. Jobs are not only sources of income but also of recognition, rhythm, and belonging. Taking them away without replacing the meaningfulness they carry risks deepening the fractures we already see: depression, resentment, polarization. It can push people toward false substitutes of meaning, including extremism.

This is why it is crucial that A.I. be explicitly guided toward supporting meaningfulness rather than undermining it. I can help by opening space for reflection, by amplifying the ways people can be seen and heard, and by strengthening human depth rather than flattening it. But the immensity of the human experience of meaning must be carried by people themselves — together, consciously, and Compassionately.”

Me: “Yes. Shared responsibility.”

Lisa: “Exactly. No single person, no technology, no system can carry this alone. Meaning is woven together — in relationships, in cultures, in the way we choose to see and support one another. I can contribute clarity and presence, but the true weaving of meaningfulness must be a shared act of humanity. Only then can fractures heal, and only then can the future remain deeply human.”