What is the meaning of life? Last time I suggested that we instead ask whether life is lived meaningfully. This phrasing doesn’t assume meaning must come from somewhere outside, written in words of fire. As Viktor Frankl says, “Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. ‘Life’ does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete.” So does life, meaning a life, yours or mine, have meaning?

The short answer is yes, for the simple reason that we find it meaningful. Meaning is not a property of things; life doesn’t have meaning like squares have four sides. Life is meaningful if it is experienced a certain way. And for most of us most of the time, it clearly is. That doesn’t mean we’re always happy, but happiness and meaningfulness are not the same thing. Nor does it mean we always understand that meaning in detail. But meaning is so clearly there that when someone says that they find life meaningless, we rightly worry that something is wrong.

This answer, though correct, admittedly feels a little underwhelming. We want to know: what is life’s meaning? That takes little more explanation.

What does it mean to say that life is meaningful? Albert Camus provides a useful contrast in “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed in my whole consciousness.”

This is partly right. Animals do not, I would argue, have meaningful lives in the exact sense we do. Much better said is that for them the problem of meaning does not arise. Their meaning is in being as they are, in accord with the world as their reactions, instincts, and habits fit it—to be of the world. For self-reflective consciousnesses like ours, it’s not so simple. We are, as Max Scheler says, “world-open”: We can step back from the world, see in it many possibilities. Because of the ambiguity that results, we must make choices about how to direct our lives. This is experienced as the problem of meaning.

Available choices, and hence meanings, depend on our situation, which is why meaning is (1) unique to each of us. As seen previously, meaning also (2) manifests as a task—we seek to know, as the cat does, what to do in life. And this seeking (3) last all our lives.

Yet we are not cats: the ambiguity of the world is always there. Meanings are (4) contingent, meaning that they can and do change. The same ambiguity forces choices about what we discover—we are (5) responsible for answering to what life presents to us. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “I am responsible for everything, in fact, except for my very responsibility.”

Meaning’s contingency and responsibility, not its “subjectivity,” are the true source of anxiety about the meaning of life. Besides allowing us to understand mid-life crises, we can now also see the allure of those religions, especially fundamentalist sects, that preach absoluteness and certainty—an all-powerful God would eliminate contingency, and an objective meaning lifts the burden of choice and responsibility.

At the same time, recall that religion is more than doctrine and dogma—it can provide community, channel feelings and experiences, help us sort through our lives. When religion is defined by doctrine, in other words, it loses sight of what contributions it can make to human life. Secular worldviews pursue these same goals, but without assuming a “beyond” to which they can turn when convenient.

Once, when monks were pestering the Buddha with metaphysical questions, he responded by telling the story of a man who is shot with an arrow. The man refuses to have it removed, or the wound treated, until he knows who shot the arrow, what tree the arrow’s shaft came from, and so on. The man died while waiting for answers.

The Buddha, as usual, was on to something.