You Don't Find Meaning, You Make It

There's a version of the meaning question that leads nowhere useful. It sounds like: what is the meaning of my life? Asked that way, it implies that meaning is something out there, waiting to be discovered, a fixed answer that exists independently of you and your experience, as if only you could find it.

Most people who have spent significant time searching for meaning in this sense know the frustration that comes with it. You look at what you've built, what you've achieved, and who you've become, and the question persists. Not because you haven't found the right thing yet, but because the premise is flawed.

Meaning isn't found. It's made. Understanding that distinction changes how you approach the question.

The Meaning-Making Animal

Psychologists and anthropologists have long recognized that humans are, distinctively, meaning-making creatures. The philosopher and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl described the search for meaning as the primary motivational force in human life: not pleasure, not power, but the drive to find or create a sense that one's existence matters (Frankl, 1959). What is less often noted about Frankl's work is his emphasis on construction: meaning, in his framework, is not waiting to be discovered like a buried object. It is something humans actively create through how they engage with their experience, relationships, and even their suffering.

This constructive view of meaning is well supported in contemporary psychology. Researchers Crystal Park and Susan Folkman developed an influential model of meaning-making that explains how people respond to stressful or disorienting events by working to restore coherence between their global beliefs about the world and the specific meaning of the event they're navigating (Park & Folkman, 1997). When something happens that doesn't fit the story you've been telling about your life, meaning-making is the process of revising either the event's meaning or the story itself.

That process is not passive. It is among the most active and consequential actions a person takes.

The Stories We Live By

Narrative is the primary vehicle for meaning-making. Humans don't experience their lives as a sequence of disconnected events. They experience them as stories with characters, themes, turning points, and an implicit sense of where things are heading. Psychologist Dan McAdams, whose research on personal narrative spans decades, describes identity as the internalized, evolving story a person constructs to make sense of their life, which he calls the personal myth (McAdams, 1993).

This narrative is not merely a record of what happened. It is an interpretation, a selection of events, a framing of their significance, and a set of implicit conclusions about what they mean for who you are and what's possible for you. Two people can live through nearly identical circumstances and construct very different narratives, each with distinct implications for how they move forward.

This means the story you're living by is not fixed. It is a construction, assembled over time from experience, interpretation, and the meaning-making frameworks available to you. Unlike facts, constructions can be revised.

When the Story Stops Fitting

For many accomplished professionals, there comes a point when the story that has organized and motivated a career (I am building toward something important, the work matters, this is who I am) begins to feel insufficient. Not false, exactly, but no longer fully adequate to the full range of lived experience.

This is one of the more disorienting experiences a high-achieving person can have, because the story has been reliable for so long. It has provided direction, identity, and a framework for understanding what counts as success and what counts as failure. When it no longer fits, the disorientation can feel like something is wrong with you, rather than what it actually is: the natural consequence of outgrowing a particular narrative.

The experience described in an earlier post on this blog, the sense of going through the motions, of functioning well while feeling somehow absent from one's own life, is often precisely this: the lived experience of inhabiting a story that no longer quite fits. The body knows the story has become too small. The mind, trained for decades on the metrics the story provided, doesn't yet have a replacement.

Reauthoring as a Practice

Once you recognize meaning as construction rather than discovery, the possibility of deliberate reauthoring becomes available. Not the wholesale rejection of the story you've been living, because that story contains real experience, real achievement, and real relationships, but the active revision of its meaning and the conscious construction of a more adequate one.

Narrative therapy, developed by Michael White and David Epston, is built around this possibility (White & Epston, 1990). Their central insight was that people are not their problems; they are the authors of stories in which problems play a role, and those stories can be rewritten. The therapist's (or coach's) role is to help the person identify the dominant narrative that is constraining them and to find overlooked experiences, the exceptions, and alternative storylines from which a more adequate narrative might be built.

In practice, this work doesn't require the dramatic narrative reversals of therapeutic intervention. It often begins with the simpler act of noticing which story you're living by and asking whether it’s still the one you would choose. What does it emphasize? What does it leave out? What does it make possible, and what does it foreclose?

The Question Underneath

The meaning question, asked properly, is not what is the meaning of my life? It is: what meaning am I making of my life, and is that the meaning I want to make?

The first version of the question implies a fixed answer waiting to be discovered. The second version returns authorship to you, where it has always been, even when the story felt given rather than chosen.

That shift in authorship is not a small thing. In many ways, it's what the work of living more deliberately is ultimately about. The story you're living by shapes your experience of every day, every relationship, and every choice. Taking a genuine interest in what that story is and whether it's the one you'd write if you were writing consciously is one of the more consequential things an accomplished person can do.

If this is raising questions worth sitting with

The Self-Coaching Mini-Workbook offers a structured space to begin examining the story you've been living by, what it emphasizes, what it leaves out, and what a more deliberate version could look like.

→ Download the free Self-Coaching Mini-Workbook at beginnoticing.com

If you're ready to explore this further, you're welcome to book a free 30-minute call to discuss your next steps.

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