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The big hands

Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997; Cassedy 2022). Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. Relatedly, think about Koheleth, the presumed author of the Biblical book Ecclesiastes, describing life as “futility” (or “vanity”) and akin to “the pursuit of wind”, Marx on alienation, Nietzsche on nihilism, as well as Schopenhauer when he remarks that whenever we reach a goal we have longed for we discover “how vain and empty it is.” While these concepts have some bearing on happiness (qua subjective well-being) and virtue (or their opposites), they are straightforwardly construed as accounts of which highly ranked purposes a person ought to realize that would make her life matter (if any would).

Despite the venerable pedigree, it is only since the 1980s or so that a distinct field of the meaning of life has been established in Anglo-American-Australasian, and specifically analytic, philosophy, which this survey exclusively addresses, and it is only in the past 25 years or so that debate with real depth and intricacy has appeared. The initial, 2007 entry on “The Meaning of Life” in this encyclopedia cited nearly all the analytic literature on the topic, but such is no longer possible. Analytic philosophy of life’s meaning has become vibrant, to the point where there are now way too many texts to be able to cite comprehensively in this version of the entry.

To obtain focus, it tends to discuss books, influential essays, and more recent texts that are squarely works of analytic philosophy appearing in the Anglo-American-Australasian tradition. In addition to leaving aside out of print books and older essays in that vein, it does not take up contributions from other philosophical traditions such as the phenomenological (e.g., Morioka 2025) or the altogether non-Western (for some references, see “Books on Life’s Meaning in Non-Western Traditions” below). Still more, it does not engage with works from cognate fields such as theology (e.g., Mittleman 2023), the history of ideas (e.g., Keefer 2022), the social sciences (e.g., Baumeister 1991), psychiatry (Stein 2021), or psychology (Schnell 2025). This entry’s central aim is to acquaint the reader with current analytic philosophical approaches to life’s meaning, sketching major concepts, positions, and debates as well as pointing out neglected topics that merit further consideration.

When the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people tend to pose one of three questions: “What are you talking about?”, “What is the meaning of (my) life?”, and “Is (my) life in fact meaningful?”. The literature on life’s meaning composed by those working in the analytic tradition can be usefully organized according to which question it seeks to answer. This entry starts off with recent work that addresses the first, abstract (or “meta”) question regarding the sense of talk of “life’s meaning”, i.e., that aims to clarify what we have in mind when inquiring into the meaning of life (section 1).

Afterward, it considers texts that provide answers to the more substantive question about the nature of meaningfulness (sections 2–3). This entry focuses on normative-theoretical approaches to life’s meaning, that is, attempts to capture in a single, general principle all the variegated conditions that could confer meaning on life, or at least “mid-level” principles that would potentially apply to a large range of contexts (even if not all of them). It will accordingly do no more than mention work in the growing sub-field of applied meaning that parallels applied ethics, in which meaningfulness, and often theories of it, are considered in the context of particular cases or specific themes. Examples include downshifting (Levy 2005), implementing genetic enhancements (Agar 2013), handling a midlife crisis (Setiya 2014), shaping the workplace (Yeoman 2014), achieving things (Bradford 2015), getting an education (Schinkel et al. 2015), engaging with research participants (Olson 2016), automating labor (Danaher 2017), creating children (Ferracioli 2018), spending time in a virtual reality (Chalmers 2022), (over)using smartphones (Roholt 2022), interacting with artificial intelligence (Nyholm and Rüther 2023), dealing with a hypothetical “superintelligence” (Bostrom 2024), and being affected by cinema (Pamerleau 2025).

Finally, this entry also examines live arguments for the nihilist view that the conditions necessary for a meaningful life do not obtain for any of us, i.e., that all our lives are meaningless (section 4).

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