Life Experience and the Meaning of Life

A translation of https://dialoogid2.blogspot.com/2025/08/elukogemus-ja-elu-mote.html from Estonian.

 

Life Experience and the Meaning of Life 

Karmo Talts 

 

In this work, I examine what makes life meaningful. To do this, I analyze life experience and the role of the subjective side of experience in giving meaning to life, and role the objective side of individual's life.  

Finally, I examine the obstacles to living a meaningful life, which arise from both the subjectivity of the individual's experience and objective facts. 

 Let's examine life experience. We usually assume that life experience means wisdom, that is, that life experience corresponds to something in the world. If we understand life experience simply as a subjective experience gained during life, then it is possible that some of our life experience is not adequate, its content does not correspond to reality. 

Let's now examine a meaningful life. Not every experience that corresponds to something in the external world can make life meaningful, because in this case the meaning of life would simply be the acquisition of empirical knowledge. 

Let's now examine whether experience that nothing in the world corresponds to can give meaning to life. Apparently not, unless we think that the meaning of life is simply the use of imagination. 

Let us now consider in what sense life experience has content and in what sense this content is the content of life. Unconscious beings and things have no experience, and their existence therefore lacks that which can have content. Since life really exists, the content of life must also have something to do with life. The content of an experience that does not even partially correspond to what is actually happening in the individual's life is not the content of life. Thus, what gives meaning to life is how the individual subjectively experiences what is actually happening in his life. If he experiences what is happening in his life as meaningful, then he has a meaningful life, if he experiences that it is meaningless, then life is  meaningless. 

Let us examine whether this does not make the meaning of life completely non-objective. Apparently not, because a completely non-objective “meaning of life” would have no connection with what is happening in the individual's life, and this “meaning” would not give meaning to what is actually happening in the individual's life. 

Let us now consider whether it is not possible to find a meaning of life that is completely objective. Suppose that an objective meaning of life could be found, but there were individuals to whom the objective meaning of life does not seem meaningful. An objective meaning of life cannot therefore give meaning to the lives of all individuals, because it cannot give meaning to the lives of those individuals to whom the objective meaning of life does not seem meaningful. 

Let us now look at some problems that may prevent living a meaningful life. Some of them are related to the subjective component of the meaning of life. 

Let us look at them more closely. For some individuals, few things seem meaningful. If the fact that life seems meaningless makes life meaningless, then for an apathetic individual who is indifferent to everything, life is not even meaningless, but he is simply alive. For some individuals, many things seem meaningless. Thus, a large part of what happens in their lives seems meaningless to them. A separate problem is that what seems meaningful and what seems meaningless to an individual can change over time. Because of this, some individuals experience crises in their lives, where the individual changes and their life no longer seems meaningful to them or even seems meaningless.* Since the subjective experience of a particular individual depends, among other things, on the state of their psyche, the same thing may sometimes seem meaningful and sometimes meaningless to an individual with an unstable psyche. While a person to whom their life seems mostly meaningless may be in permanent depression, constantly melancholic, etc., a person with an unstable psyche may experience depressive episodes or their mood may simply change abruptly. 

Let us now examine the obstacles to living a meaningful life arising from the objective side of the meaning of life. One obstacle is that since in order to live a meaningful life, an individual must actually achieve what seems meaningful to them in their life, living a meaningful life may prove difficult or insurmountably difficult if what seems meaningful to the individual is difficult to achieve. 

Let us now look at an another obstacle. Different individuals may find different things meaningful and meaningless. This can lead to indifference of some individuals being to the efforts of other individuals or to their active opposition to the efforts of other individuals. 

In this work, I investigated what makes life meaningful. I found that the experience that gives meaning to life has both a subjective component - otherwise, acquiring empirical knowledge would be enough to give meaning to life - and an objective component - otherwise, using the imagination would be enough to give meaning to life. It is also impossible to find a purely objective meaning of life because a purely objective meaning of life would not be able to give meaning to the lives of those individuals who do not experience the objective meaning of life as meaningful. A completely non-objective experience, however, would not be connected to the actual life of the individual at all. I found that subjective obstacles that interfere with living a meaningful life include the apathy and negativity of some individuals' subjective experience of world, crises that arise from changes in what seems meaningful to an individual, and psychological problems that cause negative emotions and sudden mood swings. In addition, I found objective obstacles to that interfere with living a meaningful life, such as the difficulties that may arise in pursuing what seems meaningful to the individual and that sometimes a difference in the difference of views of different individuals do not motivate individuals to support each other or to motivate individuals to work against each other. 

 

 *It is possible that existential angst in adolescence and midlife crisis are often crises of this type.