Finding Meaning in the Modern World

The Importance of Meaning, Difficulties in Finding Meaning Today, and How to Rediscover It

The Importance of Meaning

“Meaning is the feeling that your life is pointed toward something and that it matters.”

We spend much of our lives trying to build something meaningful - chasing the right city,  job, relationships, and version of ourselves. And yet building a genuinely meaningful life is not easy in any way. Whether it's people lamenting a city move they never made, friends stuck describing a monotonous job, or avid careerists lamenting estranged family ties, daily life is full of small evidence that we're not paying enough attention to what actually matters, let alone protecting it. We even have life stages that describe this phenomenon: the infamous midlife crisis and its more recently coined cousin, the quarterlife crisis.

Beyond these phrases and experiences, the importance of meaning is backed by scientific research. Most notably, Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program produced an astounding and substantive multi-year empirical study involving 200,000 participants and found that meaning and purpose were core domains of human flourishing (a state in which all aspects of one’s life are good).

Casual conversation, famed life milestones, and rigorous social science all point to the same conclusion: our well-being is inextricably linked to our ability to find and protect a life full of meaning.

So how do we find more meaning in our lives?

Finding Meaning: Owning Your Journey

Let’s start with a simple but profound truth: every single one of us is different.

A landmark study led by researchers at Yale University demonstrated that functional brain connectivity patterns (how different regions of the brain communicate over time) are unique to each of us. This has allowed scientists to identify a specific individual within a large group with high accuracy using MRI scans and nothing else.

Isn’t that interesting?

If each brain is, as the study concludes, a distinct “fingerprint,” then we reach our first conclusion for building a meaningful life: copying someone else’s won’t work. Your brain is unique, and therefore your path to finding meaning is unique too.

The task then is to discover the life that works best for you.

Finding Meaning: Discovering How to Live & What to Aim For

Discovering how to live and what to aim for starts, somewhat counterintuitively, with looking back.

We all have different upbringings that fundamentally shape who we are and how we operate. We are not all born into the same identical system and set of conditions. We inherit stories and traditions; we are shaped by our families and communities; we are influenced by different constitutions, faiths and concepts of nationhood.

And making sense of all this helps you build the right life. I can only offer my own lived experience here, and I do so only in the hope it can provide substance to the claim.

I am grateful for my childhood. A loving set of parents, a village community, ties to the local church, and much nature. I inherited stories, too. Grandparents fighting in the war, a local community that respected their elders, churches commemorating those that gave their lives so that we could live ours. King Arthur, 1066, Henry VIII, the British Empire, Churchill. Our strange love of tea and biscuits. For me, my parents instilled a sense of community and proactivity through their own endeavors. My early Christian experience gave me spiritual foundations. Being involved in local events gave rise to a sense of community. The local history and personal ancestry gave me a respect for elders, an appreciation of history, and an understanding of the profound way (good and bad) in which being English shaped the world.

All this shaped me and gave me an inherited identity that I needed to make sense of to understand what to point toward. A few years ago, this led to a distillation exercise and the creation of a personal mission statement and set of values to help orient myself and guide daily actions.

The latest version I read daily is: be authentic, spread love, grow every day, and foster meaningful connection. I can trace each component to my upbringing, e.g., my parents' proactivity giving rise to a need to grow daily. The clues are all there; it is about making sense of all you inherit.

If we recall that meaning is the “feeling that your life is pointed toward something and that it matters,” the next step is to find what to point toward. This doesn't require knowing the exact destination, or having perfect precision on where to aim. It's closer to slowly increasing the resolution and getting a little clearer, a little more specific, with each thing you try and each thing you notice about yourself. You don't need the whole map right now; you just need to take daily action that will increase your understanding of it.

In our modern lives, the most time-intensive commitment of many of our lives is our career, so the more you can align your mission, values, and identity with this activity, the more meaningful your life will feel. In Man’s Search for Meaning, the Austrian psychiatrist, neurologist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl called this “creative value,” and it is a key source of meaning derived from giving something to the world through your actions, work, art, or deeds.

Below I offer an example to try and make this point real.

Finally, it is important to stress that finding meaning is a process of discovery rather than self-selection. Attempts to invent meaning on your own, divorced from your upbringing, will not provide you with fulfillment. This explains why a whole set of supporting actors, e.g., life coaches, mentors, and therapists, often focus on asking questions that bring about self-revelation rather than more didactic methods that explain how you can find meaning.

Finding Meaning: Making Life Matter

The second component of meaning is the “feeling that your life is pointed toward something and that it matters.” So how do we make our life “matter?”

It starts with understanding the two realms of lived experience described by eminent sociologist Emile Durkheim.

The first realm is called the profane realm, the realm of the ego. The ego is the voice in our heads that evolved to keep us safe and socially situated within the tribe. Interestingly, neuroscientists can physically locate the ego in the brain's default mode network. The ego helps us maintain our sense of identity over time, monitors how we are perceived, and tries to shield us from harm. This realm is busy, self-referential, and relentless, and it is the realm most of us inhabit, most of the time.

The second realm is the sacred realm. This is a realm beyond the ego, and we can reach it by turning our attention outward, toward something beyond ourselves, in an act of “self-transcendence.”

Okay, okay, but why am I telling you about funky-sounding realms?

Because the act of going beyond ourselves is the foundation of building a life that matters. Maybe some of you have experienced this feeling before when helping a friend through something difficult, giving to someone in need, showing up for your community, or connecting deeply with nature. What they all have in common is that they quieten the ego, take us beyond daily self-focused life, and plunge us into situations where we become part of something larger than ourselves.

So how do we get into these realms?

Ways To Transcend the Self

Entry Point 1: Participate in Ritual

Rituals are events built around three shared properties:

1. Time (sabbath, a music festival date, a weekly dinner)

2. Place (a stadium, a family home, a festival ground, a religious site)

3. Object (a shared meal, a cross, a prayer mat or a person being celebrated)

When all these properties combine, something remarkable happens through our participation in shared action, producing states of heightened connection. States of social electricity that Durkheim calls “collective effervescence.”

They are more common than you think. Chanting at a sports match. Dancing together in the early hours. Singing a hymn at a wedding. Praying during a religious service. Think about how those moments of shared purpose made you feel, and you already begin to understand how rituals are powerful ways to connect you to the sacred realm and move you beyond your self-referential busy brain.

Entry Point 2: Find Awe

Another way to enter the sacred realm is through experiencing awe. This is one of life’s most interesting emotions. Standing at the edge of a vast ocean. Watching a moon rise. A sunset. Listening to music that resonates. Seeing the world from the plane window or a stadium full of 100,000 people. Dr. Dacher Keltner, Director of the Greater Good Science at Berkeley, describes that awe comes when our minds struggle to make sense of our encounters with the vast and complex. The mind reaches for something to compare it to and finds nothing. This inability to comprehend takes us beyond ourselves.

We are humbled, and we are reminded we are merely small creatures inside a larger order.

Entry Point 3: Be of Service to Another

The most accessible route to the sacred realm is one we can practice daily - being of service. Whether it's checking in on someone who is feeling down, providing a sounding board for someone feeling lost, or simply being fully present as a friend or parent, when someone else's reality fills our attention, there is less room for our own self-monitoring.

The goal is not to look like a good person but to become so attentive to another person's needs that, for a moment, you forget to think about yourself. It is worth noting this point because being of service purely to be seen as generous, compassionate, or virtuous actually reinforces the ego and the sense of self as the main character.

Entry Point 4: Creativity

Another form of ego dissolution comes through creative absorption. Whether it is cooking, painting, writing, rehearsing, planting, or building - creating something for the world will provide meaning as you lose yourself in the art of creation.

Entry Point 5: Embrace Challenge

Finally, embrace challenge. For most of human history, struggle and challenge were part of everyday life. Consider an Egyptian farmer cultivating land in 5000 BC. His life was spent surviving disease, drought, crop failure, and building shelter for his family. Life’s daily struggles absorbed him totally. Survival itself demanded effort, uncertainty and physical engagement with the world.

Modern life has removed much of that friction. That is an extraordinary achievement, but it creates a strange problem: we now have to deliberately seek out some of the difficulty that life once provided automatically to make our lives matter.

So find challenges that sit at the edge of your ability. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called these states flow: states in which action becomes so absorbing that awareness of the self recedes. There are numerous examples for you to consider, whether it be playing competitive sport, learning a new technique on an instrument, or building something new with your hands.

How Technology Impacted Our Ability to Live Meaningful Lives

If we want to know more about how to build meaningful lives, we need to understand how certain technologies are affecting our ability to do so. After all, awareness is the first step to change. Only once we truly understand the problem can we build a better future together.

Never has a generation so diligently recorded itself accomplishing so little - unknown

1. Inflating the Ego, Worship of the Self

I, at the middle of life

Perhaps the most profound impact of our digital world is the daily reinforcement of what supposedly matters most - ourselves. Take the selfie. The clue is in the name. What began as a simple way to capture a moment with people you love has hardened into a reflex in which every event must be captured. This, in turn, has given way to an interesting new psychological construct: we no longer live our lives; we observe ourselves experiencing life.

That may feel meta, but isn’t that interesting? We have created a permanent inner self-monitor that means we cannot just be. We can’t actually just do an activity without our brain interrupting the experience and telling us we need to record it. And in making us the centerpiece of human experience, we keep the ego very much alive.

I measure all life

Another interesting facet of the modern digital world is our measurement of everything. Sleep is quantified to the minute, attractiveness is measured in dating app matches, and music taste is ranked against millions in an end-of-year wrap. Some of this data genuinely helps, but the moment something becomes measurable, there is a real risk that we stop doing things for the sake of doing them and start doing them for that inner self-monitor. Recording the 5 am park run is a signal to the world of my proactivity as much as it is getting the health benefits of the run. The Spotify Wrapped becomes a small, quiet claim to being more interesting or cool than others. The metrification of the self means we audit our lives more than we live our lives. This reinforces the self-monitor and makes it harder for us to just do things without thinking about how they might come across.

I, the target

Our algorithms are also explicitly designed to target our ego by finding our weaknesses, desires, and dreams and serving up adverts that prey on these. The comparison and self-judgment keep the ego firmly on and, as many millions have said across time, comparison is the thief of joy.

2. Supercharging Want

Want is not new, but the modern world has led us to the belief that we should be able to get what we want now. This has created one of the biggest multi-billion dollar industries globally - convenience. One amusing new example of where we have got to is ‘Priority’ Uber, which shortens wait times from 3 minutes to …. 2. Another part of want is the incredible optionality of our digital worlds. Internet & TV is 24/7, takeout options in the 000s, dating pools in the 0000s.

3. Shrinking Our Experience of Life to ‘Representations’ of Reality

We live, according to neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, in two modes of existence - reality and the representation of reality. We ‘represent’ reality in order to interact with the world effectively. This requires us to reduce the world into objects such as a hammer to build stuff with or a map to navigate by. Reality, meanwhile, is our experience of the world as a fluid, whole and interrelational experience.

Why does this matter? Because technology is a representational tool. It is built on binary code and functions through logic. It cannot reflect reality, only represent it. A sunset on a phone screen will not make you feel like a sunset in real life.

And we want more time in reality because our direct encounters with the real world make us feel alive. The jaw-dropping moment you get when you are part of a stadium of 50,000 people all chanting in unison. The goosebumps you get when you listen to music that resonates. The emotions you feel when you look at a baby smiling. These are somatic responses beyond technological programming.

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Looking Ahead: The Beginnings of an Antidote

"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him" - Viktor Frankl

At the heart of all this lies a tension in modern life. Our comfort-filled existence is at odds with a precondition for a meaningful life - effort.

See, it might be easier to scroll than to be of service to a friend; it might be easier to stay home than to get up early and do exercise; it might be easier to order in than to gather around a table with friends and be present; but easier is not the same as better.

Take a moment to consider people you look up to. Not the ones with the biggest following but the ones who left a positive imprint on you. The professor that believed in you, the classmate that inspired you, the adult that was always there for you, the novelist that inspired you, the community leader that set the tone for you. Do you think their lives were easy?

Do you think the lives of Indira Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Lionel Messi, or Bob Dylan were easy?

Building a life of meaning starts with a mindset shift and the acceptance that meaningful lives are not easy; they require effort and challenge.

Personal Actions

Here are some actions you can take that will hopefully help you build a more meaningful life.1. Discover Your NorthstarReconnect with your past, home, and culture. Let them reveal to you who you are. What did you care about before the world told you what to care about? What comes naturally to you that doesn't come naturally to others? What would you do even if nobody was watching?

This requires a level of reflection and stillness that modern life has made difficult. As I wrote in a previous piece on attention, we need mind-wandering for our minds to process, integrate, and surface personal insights. Protect some part of your day from distraction. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy, so be intuitive and listen to the little voice in your head.

2. Build A Life Around Your Discovered Identity & Meaning

Once you have a clearer sense of your purpose - teaching, parenting, building something, serving your community, going after a specific job, reconnecting with nature, or whatever it turns out to be - the task is to structure your life around it.

And structuring your life is primarily done through allocating time responsibly. So find out what deserves your attention and what doesn't. Prioritize what you find meaningful and say no to what pulls you away from it. This is far harder than it sounds and more important than almost anything else on this list.

3. Rebuild Your Roots

French philosopher Simone Weil argued that "to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." Our roots give us a sense of belonging, shared meaning, and understanding of who we are. We need active links to community, culture, and a place to stay morally and spiritually healthy.

Paul Kingsnorth, author of Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, offers a useful ‘4Ps’ framework here to guide how we can build lives with more solid roots.

People

Commit to a real, physical community. Prioritize face-to-face relationships and local responsibilities over online networks. Show up consistently for the same people in the same place until you stop being a stranger and start being known. Rebuild local dependence and reject modern isolated individualism. We are not designed to live as atomized individuals; becoming part of a people is a critical root.

Place

Root yourself in a specific physical geography. Learn the history of where you live. Notice the seasons. Walk the same routes until you start to see what changes. Treat the land as a permanent home to care for instead of a temporary space to abuse. This doesn't mean you can never move places, but rather, when you do move, you respect, engage, and learn about the place and land.

Past

Respect your ancestry and your cultural inheritance. Ask your oldest living relative about the life they had before you existed. Visit the places your family came from. Find out about the past so you can show up to the world as an authentic individual.

Prayer

Find some practice that regularly reminds you that you are not at the center of things. Consider meditation and prayer. That might sound unfashionable in today’s world, but just look at Andrew Huberman, the face of modern science and progress. After years of fine-tuning his morning ritual, he realized that prayer was the missing piece.

Why? Because prayer connects us to something beyond ourselves in the form of a higher power, and prayer cultivates a humility that we are not fully in control and an acceptance that we are not perfect.

4. Reimpose Limits

In the pre-modern life, askesis, also known as the ascetic life, was a part of everyday existence. People had only a certain amount of food to feed their families, could work only until darkness, and rested on the Sabbath. This way of life gave clear limits and provided meaning: the feast meant something after the fast. A day of rest meant something after a hard week of work.

So create limits. Shrink your world. Set boundaries. In doing so, you will stop craving more and wanting more, and you will start appreciating and finding meaning in the small things.

5. Build A Routine That Dissolves Your Ego

If modern life inflates the ego, the antidote is to build a routine that reliably dissolves it. These four practices are worth making habitual:

Be of Service

Put others first and make helping others become second nature. Purposefully commit weekly time to helping someone else - mentorship, volunteering, skill-sharing, attentive listening. Congratulate someone for the growth you see in them.

Embrace challenge

Find difficult activities that fully absorb you. Engage in competitive sports. Solve challenging problems. Learn something new. Deliberately build more of it into your week.

Attend rituals

Start finding rituals. A football match, concert, parade, march, weekly park run or religious ceremony. Go find events that have shared purpose and connect you to something beyond yourself.

Curate and seek out awe

Watch a sunrise, find a viewpoint of the city or countryside. Watch a storm roll in. Go to a gigantic stadium. Seek experiences that make you stop and say: wow.

Get creative

Draw something, cook something new, grow a part of nature, write, build something, stimulate the creative part of your brain and feel meaning by ushering something new into the world.

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A final word

Beneath the pristine lawns, postcard river views and carefully curated campus sits the rollercoaster of being at Harvard - the intensity of the academic curriculum, the career uncertainty, the social reset - all of which is done away from your original roots of family, community and place. But in the difficult moments, just remember that being at Harvard affords you something most people spend their whole lives wishing for, and that is time. Time to sit with the deeper questions and create the life you want before the momentum of a career, social expectations, mortgage, and family make the answers for you. Managing the rollercoaster is no small thing, but it's an extraordinary moment to be standing in and we should be careful not to forget what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity this is for us all.

Jack Probert (MBA '27) is an EC; prior to HBS, he worked in venture studios, most recently as a Product and Growth Lead at Accenture Song, and consulting, product, and growth across several firms. He graduated with a master’s degree in history from the University of Edinburgh.