The fear of meaninglessness or humanity’s deepest instinct?

Since the dawn of consciousness, humanity has been haunted by the same question: What is the meaning of life? For thousands of years, this question has stood at the heart of philosophy, religion, literature, and science. Yet, perhaps the more essential inquiry has gone largely unasked: Why does the human being need life to have a meaning at all?

This need is woven into the fabric of our nature. Humans are not only living creatures. They are meaning-seeking ones. For a stone or a tree, existence itself is enough but for a human, it never is. We are compelled to ask, Why do I exist? What am I enduring for? It is through these questions that we affirm our own being. Every culture, myth, religion, and ideology arises from this very urge: the fear of meaninglessness, and humanity’s desperate attempt to fill that void with meaning.

Yet no meaning remains fixed forever. As history evolves, so too does the form of our search. At times, it has turned toward God; at others, to science or inward, toward the self. Meaning, once considered an absolute truth, has become a shifting construct, rebuilt anew by every era and belief system.

This essay is not about answering what the meaning of life is, but why we ask it in the first place. Perhaps life has no inherent meaning but our need to believe it does may be the single most powerful force that gives rise to all meanings.

So what, then, is humanity’s greatest fear? Death? Possibly. But death, being inevitable, can be accepted in time. The deeper fear is that of meaninglessness. A sense that one’s life, no matter how full it seems, might still be empty. This feeling can appear in the middle of an ordinary day, when everything seems fine on the surface. It’s a quiet hollowness, whispering the same question over and over: What is all this for?

Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote that even if a person loses everything, they can still endure life, so long as they have a reason to live. Frankl himself tested this belief in the Nazi concentration camps. He observed that a human being collapses in the face of meaninglessness, because the absence of meaning is like the absence of oxygen for the soul. When thought cannot breathe, it begins to die.
(Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946)

Yet the fear of meaninglessness is not merely a personal struggle. It is a social one. In the modern age, the search for meaning has turned into a form of consumption. Motivational speeches, self-help books, social media stories of “finding purpose.” All are symptoms of the same emptiness. People craft images of a “meaningful life” not because they’ve found inner peace, but because they’re trying to silence an inner void.

Psychologists suggest that the feeling of meaninglessness often stems not from emotional pain, but from existential tension. We grow tired not simply because we are unhappy, but because, deep down, we have lost the answer to the question why. To escape this emptiness, we talk too much, work too hard, love too intensely sometimes only to drown out that silent “why.”

But confronting meaninglessness does not destroy us. On the contrary, it brings us closest to our essence. For it is in that moment we realize that perhaps life’s meaning is not something to be found, but to be created. And in that realization lies one of humanity’s oldest truths: a person cannot live entirely alone. In isolation, meaning fades. Throughout history, humans have built societies not merely to survive together, but to believe together. Society gives form to meaning. It tells us not only how to live, but why.

French sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote that individuals do not construct their beliefs in isolation. They derive them from the collective consciousness. Society, he said, is a kind of “moral architecture,” a shared structure that teaches us what life means, what to believe in, and even what to fear. (Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912)

In truth, we rarely live by personal meaning. What we experience most of the time is shared meaning. The joy we feel during celebrations, the tears we shed in moments of tragedy, the way we link success to fortune or loss to fate. All of these are part of a symbolic system handed down by society. When a person steps outside that system, it can feel like falling into the abyss of meaninglessness.

This process might be called the social production of meaning. Each society constructs its own “cosmos.” A sense of order and purpose carved out of chaos. Within this cosmos, people feel safe because everything has an explanation. Nothing is random. (Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 1967)

But when these collective meanings begin to collapse, the human spirit trembles. When the ideology of the Soviet era crumbled, many were suddenly confronted with a void: the disappearance of a world that had once told them what life was about. The same disorientation persists today. Values shift at lightning speed, beliefs fragment, and society’s power to create meaning together grows weaker.

As a result, the modern individual stands increasingly alone. And in that solitude, they whisper: “I must create my own meaning.” Yet this is a new and uneasy task, for we were taught for centuries that meaning is not made but given. Now, in the silence left behind by the collapse of shared certainties, the burden of meaning-making falls squarely on the individual.

When today’s person embarks on a journey to “find themselves,” they often end up not in reflection but in the marketplace. Bookstores are lined with titles like “Ten Steps to Happiness” and “Seven Rules for a Meaningful Life.” Social media teems with posts proclaiming “find your energy” or “raise your vibration.” All serve the same purpose: to turn the ache of meaninglessness into something that can be packaged, sold, and consumed.

Capitalism is a remarkably intelligent system. It senses our fears, insecurities, and desires and then builds markets around them. If you say, “I’m not happy,” it offers a happiness course. If you confess, “My life feels meaningless,” it sells you a purpose seminar. Thus, the quest for meaning no longer remains a personal journey; it becomes a consumer behavior.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls this the “paradox of the narcissistic society.” He argues that the modern individual, under the banner of self-development, is in fact placing themselves on the market. Everyone has become a brand. Their life, body, thoughts, and emotions all polished for display and exchange. (Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 2010)

Today, we seek meaning not through wisdom but through consumption. A new outfit, a new course, a new relationship, a new “self” each promises transformation, yet only repackages the same emptiness. And this cycle cannot end, because the system depends on our incompleteness. If one day we truly discovered how to live meaningfully, capitalism would lose its best customer.

Meaninglessness, then, has become the hidden fuel of our era. The more people search for meaning, the more they consume and the more they consume, the deeper the emptiness grows. It is an endless loop: the harder we search, the further we drift. Perhaps meaning feels so precious today not because it cannot be found, but because it cannot be sold.

Now we spend much of our lives before screens. Phones, social media, and artificial intelligence seem to connect us, yet in truth they distance us from silence, from reflection, from ourselves.

Technology promises humanity infinite connection, yet within these endless links, depth has quietly disappeared. Conversations grow shorter, emotions thinner, relationships more fleeting. We feel less, but share more. The entire world is now a touch away, and yet, at that same touch, everything begins to feel unbearably meaningless.

Psychologists describe this as emotional numbness. The human mind is flooded with information and stimulation, but none of it ripens into meaning. A post may receive a hundred “likes,” yet rarely a single word of comfort or the sincerity of a glance.

In the age of artificial intelligence, the search for meaning grows even more complicated. We now live alongside systems that can think, create, even simulate feeling. And that raises a quiet terror: If machines can think, what is the point of our own thinking?

But perhaps the problem lies not in technology itself, but in how we live with it. We have drifted far from nature, from silence, from solitude. Surrounded by screens that steal our attention every second, we lose the stillness in which meaning once formed. Life has shrunk to the sound of a notification.

Meaninglessness today is no longer a philosophical void. It has become a digital silence. We no longer think, we scroll. We no longer feel, we share. And perhaps the most alarming part is how normal this now seems. Maybe this is the final stage of human maturity: no longer fearing meaninglessness. For the moment one ceases to fear it, one begins to create it. Life no longer demands an answer to “Why am I living?” It finds value simply in the act of living itself.

In our time, it has become essential to rethink this idea. Too often, we forget to live in our pursuit of meaning. To escape meaninglessness, we fill everything. Our time, our screens, our lives. Yet perhaps meaninglessness is not an emptiness to be feared, but a space of potential. Without emptiness, nothing could ever begin. Every act of creation (including the birth of meaning itself) emerges from the void.

To make peace with meaninglessness is not to see the world in grayscale. On the contrary, it is to see colors for the first time because you are no longer painting them on by force. And so, perhaps life’s meaning will never be found. But in the search itself, the human being becomes the meaning they have been looking for all along.

Nigar Shahverdiyeva
Sociologist and Research Writer