Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man on Earth. He had every external condition for a meaningful life — wealth, status, purpose handed to him by birth. And yet, his private journals are full of reminders he had to write to himself just to keep going. Which tells you something important: meaning isn't a thing you find. It's a thing you build.
The Problem
Do you live a meaningful life?
Not "are you successful" or "are you productive" or "are you optimizing your mornings”, but does your life actually feel like it means something?
Here's what I've come to believe: Don't try to find the meaning of your life. Do things that bring meaning into your life.
It’s a subtle shift, but it leads to a completely different life.
Finding the meaning of your life is, honestly, an unanswerable question. Philosophers and thinkers and spiritual teaches have been wrestling with it for millennia. You could spend your whole life searching and never arrive. It's the ultimate question.
But doing things that add meaning to your life? That is under your control. That's where you have agency. That's where you can actually act.
So why is "what is the meaning of my life?" the wrong question?
Because searching for meaning looks outward. You're scanning the horizon for something to reveal itself. A bolt out of the blue, a mountain-top moment, a sudden clarity that finally tells you what you're here for. And while you're waiting for that, you're sitting on the sidelines. Ready to start living once you figure out what your life is for. Which may be never.
Seneca cuts right to it. In his Letters to Lucilius he writes:
"If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable." — Seneca
It sounds like saying figure out the destination before you set sail. But I’d like to broaden the interpretation. I think he's saying: pick a direction. A direction that matters to you. Start sailing.
Because a ship that's moving can be steered. A ship sitting in the harbor waiting for perfect conditions goes nowhere.
You don't need the full map. You just need to start.
Why It Matters
So why does meaning matter so much?
Meaning is what makes the suffering in life worth it.
When our lives feel meaningless, we feel hopeless, like we're going through the motions with no point to any of it. This is why people who are deeply dissatisfied with their lives can spiral so quickly into depression. They feel like a cog in a machine. A robot. Present but not alive.
This is also why money and status are such terrible proxies for a meaningful life. You can hit every external marker — the salary, the promotion, the recognition — and still feel completely empty. We attach meaning to outcomes, when really it lives in the effort. If you're working on something that genuinely matters to you, you do it because it fills your soul, even when it doesn't fill your wallet.
Viktor Frankl understood this at a depth most of us will never have to. A psychologist and Holocaust survivor, he observed in the camps that the prisoners who had a stronger why, a deeper sense of meaning, were more likely to survive. They were less likely to lose hope. More likely to help those around them. They knew the circumstances were devastating. But they didn't let those circumstances determine who they were. They made meaning from what little they had: a sunset, a memory, a connection, a small act of kindness.
Frankl wrote: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
That's not naive optimism. That's radical agency. That's Stoicism in practice.
He also quoted Nietzsche directly:
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." — Friedrich Nietzsche
The suffering doesn't disappear. But it becomes bearable when it's in service of something that matters to you.
Meaning vs. Purpose
Before we get into what you can actually do, I want to draw a distinction I think is important: the difference between meaning and purpose. We use these words interchangeably, but they're not the same thing.
Purpose is the what of your life. Meaning is the why.
Purpose is concrete and actionable. If you're a teacher, your purpose might be to prepare young people to live well. That’s clear and definable. Meaning is what you derive from that purpose — the quiet satisfaction when a student finally gets something, or when someone reaches out years later to say something you said changed their trajectory. You can't schedule that feeling. It arises from the doing.
Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations, wrote:
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."
He wasn't meditating on the cosmic meaning of his reign. He was building his character, one decision at a time. The meaning came from the practice, from doing the work with integrity, even when nobody was watching. Especially when nobody was watching.
The Practice
So what can you actually do? Two things.
First: actively do things you find meaningful.
I think we spend too much of our lives optimizing for productivity. We stop doing things we love because they're not monetizable, or they don't look good on a resume. The way we evaluate our time has become almost entirely economic.
Flipping that script means asking not "is this productive?" but "does this matter to me?" That might be meditating, hiking, making art, playing music, building something with your hands — things that feed your soul even if they don't feed your bank account.
And creativity doesn't have to mean art. Building a fence is creation. Tending a garden is creation. Volunteering your time, helping people who need it, furthering a cause you believe in — those are acts of meaning because you're participating in something larger than yourself.
One of the most reliable ways to bring meaning into your life is simply to help other people. Service is a core component of a good life — and clinical research actually backs this up. Helping others is one of the most consistent mood elevators we know of.
When I was in college, my family had a Thanksgiving tradition. Instead of cooking a big feast at home, we'd volunteer at the Greek Orthodox church in downtown Salt Lake City — feeding people who were homeless or struggling. We'd spend the day cooking and serving. Honestly? It was one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done. That memory still carries weight decades later.
Second: shift your perspective and find meaning in what you're already doing.
This is about rewriting your own story — not gaslighting yourself, but genuinely looking at what you're doing through a different lens.
Raising kids isn't always fun. At times it's brutal. But ask most parents whether it gave their life meaning, and they'll say yes without hesitating. The hard parts and the meaningful parts aren't separate — they're inseparable.
The same can apply to work. If you have a job you don't love, can you find aspects you do? Can you reframe it as service to others? As developing skills that will serve you later? Maybe it's simply the price you pay to support yourself so you can do the things that actually matter outside of work.
Now — I want to be clear: this isn't about talking yourself into tolerating a toxic situation. Some environments are genuinely harmful. Some jobs are soul-crushing. Wisdom knows the difference between genuine reframing and self-deception. But for the ordinary friction of ordinary life, the Stoics would tell you the meaning isn't waiting for you somewhere else. It's available right here, if you're willing to look.
Epictetus, who was born a slave and had nearly nothing in terms of external freedom, put it plainly in the Enchiridion:
"Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens." — Epictetus
You don't control everything that happens to you. You do control what you make of it.
Conclusion
I want to get personal for a minute, because this isn't abstract for me right now.
A few years ago, my kids grew up and moved out, a long-term relationship ended, and I got laid off, all around the same time. That's a lot of structure collapsing at once. I felt rudderless. Like I didn't have much meaning in my life anymore.
When I was supporting my kids, even a job I didn't love felt meaningful because I was providing for them. That gave it weight. But with a blank slate and no one depending on me, all the constraints that had organized my life were gone. It turns out, constraints aren't only limitations. They're also anchors.
So for the past few years, I've been making the same mistake over and over: treating meaning like something out there to be discovered. Like if I could just find the right framework, the right direction, the right answer, it would reveal itself.
I was going about it completely backwards.
Meaning isn't something you find. It's something you build from the small, concrete things you choose to do each day. I find meaning in creating this podcast. From the emails and comments that remind me these episodes have actually helped someone. I find it in the creative work, the conversations, the things I choose to put my energy into.
The overarching meaning of my life? I still don't have a neat answer for that. But I'm learning I don't need one. I just need to keep doing things that matter and trust that the meaning takes care of itself.
Maybe that's enough for now. I think it might be enough for all of us.
So I want you to take some time this next week and think about: What's one small thing you do that gives your life meaning — even if it's not productive?
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