The Art of Meaning-Making in an Indifferent Universe
Every morning I wake up looking for signs that today matters, that my choices carry weight beyond their immediate consequences, despite knowing the universe offers no warranty on meaning, no receipt for purpose, no customer service desk for existential complaints.
The search feels almost defiant—like demanding answers from a cosmos that seems magnificently indifferent to our need for significance. Yet something in me refuses to accept that consciousness accidentally emerged just to recognize its own pointlessness. The very fact that we can ask “What’s the point?” suggests there might be one, even if the universe forgot to include the instruction manual.
I watch Arash build elaborate Lego structures that he knows will be dismantled by evening, yet he constructs them with the same intensity as if they were meant to last forever. His play reveals something profound about the human condition—we create meaning not because it’s guaranteed to persist but because creating meaning is what conscious beings do, like birds sing or rivers flow.
Perhaps the absence of cosmic guarantee makes meaning more precious rather than less real. The love I feel for Happy carries no universal validation, no objective verification that it matters beyond our small apartment and shorter lives. But the lack of cosmic endorsement doesn’t diminish its reality to us. If anything, meaning that we must create feels more authentic than meaning that gets handed down from divine authorities.
When I pray, I’m not necessarily seeking confirmation that prayer matters in any ultimate sense. I’m participating in the human activity of reaching toward transcendence despite—or maybe because of—uncertainty about what or who might be listening. The act of seeking meaning might be the meaning we seek.
The universe’s silence on purpose doesn’t prove purposelessness any more than its silence on love proves love doesn’t exist. Maybe we seek meaning in an apparently meaningless universe because meaning-seeking is our contribution to cosmic development. Perhaps consciousness represents the universe’s attempt to understand itself, and our search for significance is that understanding in action.
Some nights I wonder if the guarantee we’re really seeking isn’t that meaning exists independently of us, but that we’re capable of creating it despite the apparent absence of external validation. The stubborn persistence of hope, love, curiosity, and compassion in the face of cosmic indifference might be the most meaningful thing of all.
Tonight I’ll practice meaning-making without guarantee, understanding that the search itself might be more significant than any answer we could discover, that creating purpose in apparent purposelessness might be the most human thing we do.
