The meaning of life is how it is lived.
  • For it not to be a circular exchange of words in a dictionary definition, what we mean by “meaning” must be signify/denote/designate/represent/point to/stand for.
  • So the question “what is the meaning of {my} life” becomes “what does {my, human} life signify/stand for”?
  • The only way I see to analyze that is to ask what outside of life {one’s human} existence does that existence signify/stand for?
  • The answer at first may seem the nihilist one: Nothing — life is empty of meaning because there is nothing outside of {my, human} life that it literally signifies, a fact we must comport ourselves to ala Buddhism.
  • But another level of analysis provides a more satisfying answer. Meaning is the “pointing to” relationship between signifier and signified.
  • (As reflective creatures, rational animals imbued with humans can’t stand to not have meaning. We are meaning-making machines.)
  • If we broaden the analysis of the signifier/signified relationship while simultaneously narrowing the question, we may make some progress.
  • Asking “what is the meaning of {my, human} life” in general may indeed be empty—there’s nothing outside of it that it points to.
  • However, at any particular moment, an individual human’s life can be described in terms of discrete behaviors.
  • These actions are driven by that person’s reaction to his/her life circumstances at the moment.
  • The behavior at any moment, a response to his/her immediate life circumstances, as interpreted through that individual’s conscious and unconscious beliefs, then represents the individual’s relationship to the wider world.
  • The meaning of life can only be found in each individual moment in each individual’s relationship to the wider world.
  • “What is the meaning of life?” is, strictly speaking, a meaningless question. But “What is the meaning of my life in this moment?” may have an answer.
  • Generalizing from a specific individual’s moment-to-moment experience, we could build an answer to “what is the meaning of life” to say that if the meaning of one’s life at any moment is the relationship of one’s behavior (signifier) at that time relative to one’s circumstances (signified), the meaning of life in general is one’s comportment (signifier) to his/her life circumstances (signified).