The Search for Meaning in an Indifferent Universe

When the universe stays silent to our need for meaning, courage lies in creating our own to confront and navigate through life’s absurdity.

Meaning, even if self-fashioned, is a north star for our voyage through the cold empty space.

Arun Kumar

Summary: Life’s absurdity lies in our longing for meaning colliding with the universe’s indifference. While meaning is not inherent, to counteract, we can create personal frameworks through values, relationships, and purpose, as acts of our pushing back, granting orientation and resilience in a cosmos that offers none.

It is said that life is absurd.

Albert Camus, the French-Algerian philosopher wrote: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need [for meaning] and the unreasonable silence of the world [in providing that meaning].” Søren Kierkegaard, long before Camus, called this tension “the sickness unto death” — a despair rooted in the self’s inability to reconcile its longing for “eternal” meaning with the silent void it confronts. Nietzsche stated: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” perhaps implying that without a “why (i.e., the meaning),” the “how” (i.e., engagements of life) becomes unbearable.

You have probably felt this quiet dissonance yourself — perhaps while gazing at the night sky, where stars burn silently across incomprehensible distances, or standing atop a cliff watching the ocean stretch endlessly, turquoise in its beauty but indifferent to your existence.

In such moments, the significance of your existence flickers like a candle struggling to stay alight in a storm. In such moments, your existence feels naked, vulnerable, and exposed, stripped of the shelter that meaning of existence might have otherwise provided. You are here, undeniably present, and yet the world does not seem to notice or care. It neither welcomes nor rejects you. It is simply, well, indifferent.

This is the birthplace of the feeling of absurdity — you want to be noticed, but noticing you is the last thing on universe’s agenda.

Absurdity Defined

So, the notion of absurdity emerges from a collision between our hunger for a meaning for existence and the universe’s indifference to that existence. On one side stands the individual just wishing for a reason to get out of bed each morning. On the other, the cosmos: vast, silent, and governed by laws that do not give a hoot about whether you get out of bed or not.

Why in the first place, might we even think that the universe should offer us meaning or care about us? Meaning is not a property of matter or energy. It is not encoded in the spin of electrons or the curvature of spacetime. Meaning is a human construct, a comforting tale we want to tell ourselves to make sense of our place in the world. The stars do not speak. The oceans do not explain. The laws of physics do not comfort. They simply operate, indifferent to our yearning.

We are thrown into existence not by choice, but by the blind mechanics of biology and randomness. We are the outcome of evolutionary pressures, genetic mutations, survival strategies, and chance. We did not ask to be born, and yet here we are, thinking, feeling, hoping, and compelled to live.

This is the paradox and the crux of absurdity: we must live as if life holds purpose, even when we suspect it does not.

The Courage to Construct a Meaning

To live in the face of absurdity requires courage to stand up. It is not the courage of the heroic kind that slays dragons, but a simpler kind that gets us out of bed, make a coffee, and head to work. It is the courage to create meaning where none is offered. It is courage that made us stand up to a bully in our school days.

And so, to confront the absence of inherent meaning in life, we often craft our own — fragile, personal, and often, provisional. We create meaning by exploring what we value and then choosing actions that align with our values. That choice of creating meaning is our revolt, our push back, against absurdity. It is our freedom and strength to create a meaning. It is our agency through which to confront the absurd.

By choosing relationships, creative pursuits, or spiritual paths, we build scaffolding that allows us to stand upright in the face of cosmic indifference. Meaning, even if self-fashioned and intrinsically personal, offers us luxury of a coordinate system to orient ourselves. It is a north star for our voyage through the cold empty space. It is a way to navigate cosmic indifference without being consumed by it.

This courage to construct meaning is not to eliminate the absurd, for the feeling of absurd continues to exist. It is a stance, a posture, a way of being in the universe that does not care.

And so, the paradox is that we must live as if life matters, even when we suspect it does not. And in doing so, it helps to create a meaning but also be cognizant that meaning need not be absolute. All that matters if it is enough that it sustains us, even temporarily. And even if it is an illusory creation of our agency, it allows us to weather the Santa Ana winds of absurdity.

Epilogue

And so, life is absurd — and yet we must live it. In doing that, having meaning in life is a wonderful aid.

Not because meaning we create is permanent and will always make sense. Not because it offers guarantees. But because having it is like having the ability to slide into an exoskeleton giving us the strength to face the absurdity.

But the mind wonders — are there different approaches to finding that meaning? In the face of the absurd, can we choose to revolt, and stand, against it; can we choose the path of lucid acceptance, or can we carve a path of a fusion of two, i.e., a lucid embrace of life being absurd combined a defiant revolt.

Ciao, and thanks for reading.