The meaninglessness of life is what you need to set you free.

Years will pass seeking life’s meaning. Some will argue that it’s completely subjective, tied to individual values and goals. Seeking life’s meaning is an attempt to impose rational thinking on the universe, despite its indifference to human existence. We delegate existential responsibility to external factors, ignoring the sequence of events that made consciousness possible. There’s nothing wrong with life’s lack of meaning beyond prolonging survival for as long as we can. The challenge lies in accepting this fact while still recognizing the influence we have over our own lives.

No goal is more sustainable than a goal. Meaning and purpose are not universally related in human existence. If we imply that life has some kind of meaning, then every human would aim for the same achievement. You can have purpose without meaning, unless you’ve fabricated the necessity of one in your mind to add value to your cause. But even then, the meaning is created in a mental sandbox understood only by you.

Often, people rely on religion or spirituality to address this concern. I’m not here to argue whether one is right or wrong, but to share an applicable approach that brings power back to existential independence. The acceptance of life’s lack of meaning and creating your own still has one flaw: if you assign your own meaning, then it’s subjective, not universal. Even if we all seek the common good, someone will always prioritize their own meaning over others.

Acknowledging no real meaning gives us the keys to the fabric of reality in our minds. Even the laws of physics struggle to describe reality, since a theory is a temporary truth until an experiment yields unexpected results — like the discovery of Uranus, which made us doubt Newton’s laws of gravitation for some time. The understanding of reality is irrelevant to the human condition when faced with death. All we have is the present moment to create our purpose, as it exists temporarily alongside our existence, dissipating once we are gone.

No meaning, and no subjective meaning, grants us free will. Deciding what to do in this precise moment, unconditioned by any general meaning, is the closest experience to freedom. This is an act of assuming existential responsibility while accepting reality.