Riddle: I slip when you chase me

Demand one neat answer

Everything around us seems to change faster than we can make sense of it. How does that affect our search for meaning? The UCLA American Freshman survey1 has been asking incoming US college students about their life goals every year since 1966. Developing a meaningful philosophy of life showed the largest decline across generations, from its position as a top value in the late 60s for more than 80% of entering freshmen to just around 45% of millennials endorsing it as a priority. In 2019, the same Freshman Survey2 revealed that half of students still endorsed developing a meaningful philosophy of life as essential, but it was strongly overshadowed by 84% of respondents reporting "being very well off financially" as the most important goal (which might be a meaning in itself ).

Trying to understand such profound changes in the quest for meaning, I went looking for someone in charge of the meaning of life, only to learn that the position has been vacant for about 2,500 years. Fortunately, there was someone closer to home to poke about it: my colleague Éva Kállay, a psychologist at Babeș-Bolyai University who studies meaning in life and psychological well-being. Hoping for a neat answer (ideally, a number), I brought her some of my questions.

Laura Visu-Petra: Why is the meaning of life such an impossible quest?

Éva Kállay: In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings commission Deep Thought, a supercomputer, to determine the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything4.

After 7.5 million years of computation, the long-awaited answer to the ultimate question finally arrives: The meaning of everything is … 42.

The response is met with astonishment and disbelief. How could the most powerful supercomputer ever built produce an answer that seems so utterly meaningless?

But Deep Thought is perplexed, too—by its creators’ reactions. The problem, it explains, is not the answer. The problem is that nobody knows the correct question: Only when you know the question will the answer make sense.

So, perhaps our real difficulty is not that we lack answers. Perhaps we have never asked the right question. And yet, this has not stopped us from looking outside ourselves for conclusive answers.

Like Beckett’s characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who wait through two acts for a Godot who never comes, we keep waiting for something that promises to make everything clear, but never quite arrives4.

Behind this seemingly futile exercise lie questions as old as humanity:

What is the meaning of our lives?

For thousands of years philosophers, theologians, and more recently psychologists have wrestled to answer these questions. Yet, they remain as compelling, and elusive, as ever5. And for good reason. In what appears to be an infinite universe, whether our existence has an ultimate (or cosmic) meaning remains one of the greatest mysteries.

LVP: So, what can psychologists tell us?

EK: Fortunately, by reframing the question, psychology throws us a lifeline. Instead of asking about the grand meaning of life (traditionally the realm of philosophy and theology), it investigates how people experience, construct and ascribe meaning to their own lives. While the meaning of life remains an abstraction, meaning in life is a personal psychological experience, one that can be observed, discussed, and measured.

When we look at the details, our everyday lives become full of meaning6—we speak of meaningful memories, relationships, experiences, work, achievements.

LVP: What is a meaningful life made of?

EK: Most contemporary psychological perspectives identify three core components5,7.

Coherence is........

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