In 2015 I argued that life has no inherent meaning — and that this is its most liberating feature. It wasn’t nihilism — on the contrary: if nothing has a predefined meaning, then creating meaning is entirely up to you, which gives you more power, not less. I tried to stay out of the philosophy deep dive — no Kant, no Schopenhauer — and make the argument practical.

I still believe it. But the argument needs more work in 2026 than it did in 2015, because the question “what is the point?” has become louder. Also, the people asking it are in more distress, and the easy version of my answer — freedom! you get to decide! — sounds a bit thin against everything that the last decade has actually pushed on us.

The Argument, Revisited

My claim was very simple: the universe didn’t come with an instruction manual that assigned a purpose to your specific existence. There is no cosmic ledger in which your life is either succeeding or failing at its pre-assigned task. And, behold, this is not a tragedy. It’s a blank sheet of paper on which you get to write your own story. That can indeed feel like terror or freedom depending on what you do with it, but let’s save this for another blog post.

What the 2015 post didn’t fully acknowledge is that “blank sheet of paper” is a metaphor that works better for some people in some circumstances than for others. A blank canvas is exciting when you have paint and a brush and some time. It’s less exciting when you’re exhausted, or grieving, or can’t see past the next week.

The absence of pre-assigned meaning is only liberating if you have the capacity to assign meaning yourself — and that capacity isn’t equally available to everyone at all times. That’s where compassion fits in, by the way. Everybody is fighting their own fight.

You Have to Do Something with that Freedom

This is the part I’d add to the original post if I were writing it today. The absence of inherent meaning is a pre-condition, not a conclusion. It doesn’t automatically produce freedom. What it produces is a space where freedom is possible — but only if you do something with it.

What does doing something with it look like? In my experience: deciding what you’re for, not just what you’re against. Building things rather than only criticizing. Making commitments you can actually keep. Having people in your life you’re responsible to. The meaning doesn’t arrive — you have to keep making it, which is work, and the work doesn’t stop.

This is why the argument is harder to make in 2026. The cultural environment is optimized for reaction, for critique, for consuming other people’s narratives about what’s wrong. None of that is meaning. It’s the opposite: it’s using the blank canvas to watch someone else paint. The freedom the original post described requires active use — and the current environment makes passive consumption the path of least resistance.

Where I Am Now

I became a parent again at fifty-plus. I’ve run races longer than most people drive to work. I’ve built ten iOS apps in four months, most of them with significant AI assistance, because I wanted to see what was possible when the barrier to making things dropped to near zero. I’ve kept writing — this blog has been running since 2006, and I’m still here, which at this point is itself a kind of answer. None of these things have cosmic significance. All of them are just mine, and they count for me.

The 2015 argument was right. Life has no inherent meaning, and that really is good news — but it’s news you have to keep acting on. The freedom doesn’t expire, but it doesn’t maintain itself either. You have to keep choosing it, especially in the years when the world gives you strong reasons not to.