You have everything, but feel nothing
Here’s a better approach to “finding” life’s meaning.
with Stephen Johnson • Thu 17 July, 2025
Hey Big Thinkers,
Reasoning your way into toxic nihilism is easy. It could look like this: There’s probably no afterlife, God, or grand purpose to the Universe. The best we can hope for is to be remembered. But history only remembers a handful of “great” people. I’m no Caesar or Einstein. So why try when I could just run out the clock, distracting myself with creature comforts? After all, the most “successful” people I know are often the most unhappy. Life is suffering with no clear goals, so who cares?
None of this is necessarily wrong. But it is obnoxiously sad and cowardly. Most people instinctively reject this blackhole-bummer of a worldview, even if they’ve never read a lick of philosophy. We choose to believe things matter.
So why does meaning often elude us, changing shape or vanishing altogether at different points in life? As Danny Kenny explores this week in his interview with behavioral scientist Arthur Brooks, the answer might lie in how people mistakenly think meaning is a puzzle to be solved.
Read on,
Stephen
THE BIG RETHINK
The meaning of your life isn’t a puzzle to solve
After his soccer career ended, behavioral scientist Danny Kenny hit a crisis of meaning. “I thought if I could just find the perfect job, the perfect routine, girlfriend, apartment—if I could arrange all the pieces correctly—meaning would automatically emerge.” It didn’t. What eventually helped wasn’t an answer but a shift in mindset: Meaning isn’t a final destination, but a way of traveling. “There’s a strange irony in the search for meaning: the harder you chase it, the more elusive it becomes. But learn to wrestle with the question instead of demanding an answer, and meaning stops running.”
Fast Stats
6 — The number of “superpowers” that generalists bring to leadership, according to Mansoor Soomro’s The Generalist Advantage.
40 quintillion — The estimated number of black holes within the observable Universe.
70% — The share of terrestrial species wiped out when an asteroid struck Earth some 65 million years ago.
1714 — The year Britain passed the Longitude Act, an early gamified innovation challenge.
THE BIG DISCOVERY
Evolution isn’t a straight line: Modern humans come from 2 ancient lineages
For decades, the prevailing theory of human evolution held that Homo sapiens descended from a single ancestral population in Africa. But new research suggests a more complex story. About 1.5 million years ago, our lineage split in two. These separate branches of humanity evolved apart for over a million years, then rejoined around 300,000 years ago. That reunion — not a straight line of progress — is what shaped the modern human genome.
MINI PHILOSOPHY
The 4 psychological markers of ideological extremism
By Jonny Thomson
People tend to define “extremism” by its content — far-right or far-left politics and religious fundamentalism, mostly. It’s thought that people’s beliefs fall somewhere on a spectrum, and if you push them a bit further along, they suddenly fall under the “extremist” umbrella.
But in this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, Leor Zmigrod argues that extremism should be measured not by the contents of a belief, but by how that belief is held. In other words, extremism is defined by how it filters your interactions, how inflexible it is, or how it demands a degree of violence — against others or yourself.
When it’s framed like this, it becomes apparent that most of us are at risk of being “extreme” about something. But what factors incline a person more or less to extremism? Well, that’s what we talked about in this week’s article.
Subscribe to Mini Philosophy on Substack for even more from Jonny Thomson.
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THE BIG EXPERIMENT
Science meets sweat: How experimental archaeology brings history to life
Science writer Sam Kean recently found himself on an Aztec ball court, wearing a leather loincloth that crushed his groin to “neutron-star density” as he tried to hit a 15-pound rubber ball with his hips. Why? Experimental archaeology. In Dinner with King Tut, Kean takes a hands-on approach to the past by recreating the practices of people long gone. He tanned animal hides. He made a canteen from an ostrich egg. He even fired a trebuchet and medieval cannon. “It helps us get in touch with our deeper humanity and get over some of the discontents of modern times,” Kean said.
Stephen Johnson is the managing editor at Big Think.
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The piece on lack of meaning covers the loss of meaning in a day-to-day sense (loss of one's career, kids leave home, etc.), not the existential-like (philosophical) loss of meaning ("toxic nihilism" a la The Grand Inquisitor; there's no inherent meaning in the universe) as indicated in your opening line. These are distinct, and for many "thinkers" the latter's impact is profound. Also, re the former, there's no grounding in biology or a philosophical theory of boredom (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche): Meaning comes from challenges; when life is "comfortable," challenge-meaning go out the door, and we just fill time.
The answer might lie in how people mistakenly think “meaning” is a puzzle to be solved. Do you mind if I give that answer a name? I’ll call it the “null” hypothesis, the testable answer that meaning is not a puzzle to be solved.
What’s the alternative? I’ll call it the “omega” hypothesis. By that I mean that alpha is our species origin and omega is humanities destiny. The omega hypothesis is the testable answer that meaning is a puzzle to be solved.
In the justice system, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. In science, the null hypothesis is confirmed by default and refuted by exception.
In the justice system, the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In science, an explanatory hypothesis is refuted by default and confirmed by the “beyond a reasonable doubt” exception. And omega is an explanatory hypothesis.
Did Homo sapiens descend from two lineages, or did Homo sapiens descend from a single ancestral population that lived in Africa 300,000 years ago? I’d say the latter. But I digress.
We live in a social system. A social system is a life system comprised of more than one animal. Regardless, a life system is comprised of interdependent parts, and every life system is independent of other life systems. A human social system is a socially and economically autonomous group of humans. A Paleolithic human system was a hunter-gatherer band comprised of roughly a handful of families.
For thousands of generations, the meaning of life for the individual Paleolithic Homo sapiens was to serve the band-sized system at the expense of its subjects. In our generation, the meaning of life is to serve our global system at the expense of its subjects. If we did, then the system would be healthy, but the system is unhealthy because most of its subjects are serving parts of the system at the system’s expense.
Ergo, the null hypothesis is refuted, and the omega hypothesis is confirmed.
I’m glad that you think big, but it would be better if you thought BIG.