"What is the meaning of my life?". One can take a philosophical approach to finding an answer to this question and speculate about why we were born. Paul Gauguin, on his brilliant canvas, formulated it as follows: "Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?". Another person can rationalize it and think about what specific benefit we bring by existing in the world.
In either case, behind the question "Why do I live?" is the desire to discover meaning as an inner sense of certainty that we are moving somewhere that everything isn't in vain and that there is logic in what is happening.
What the "Meaning of Life" Is
As a rule, we don't think about the meaning of life until we face death. Once we learn that life isn't eternal, the psyche tries to defend itself against this discovery and either denies the fact that life is finite or rationalizes it away.
"It was a hard relationship, but I got the experience!" is how the psyche rationalizes a painful union, for example. And death is like this: "Yes, life is finite, but I can live it with meaning and not for nothing."
But rationalization doesn't give us a concrete meaning for life. It only shifts the problem to a plane where it is as if there is a solution, but it still has to be found.
Meaning as Profit
We can reduce the meaning of life to math — listing achievements and successes. This is normal: concreteness in complex issues calms our brain.
But counting the intermediate results of life often leads to frustration. For example, formally, we are successful: we have a family, a decent job, savings for a secure old age, social status, hobbies, and friends, or maybe we have already hit the jackpot through safe gambling at Bizzo Casino. But it's as if all this makes absolutely no sense: "Yes, everything worked out, but what now? Why isn't life satisfying? Why am I living?". This is the turning point after which we move from material evaluations to deeper and more complex questions.
Meaning as Justification
It happens that behind the search for the meaning of life there is an attempt to increase its "value" and add some "bonus" that will override the ordinariness. Here we begin to fantasize about a vocation, about a place in history, or about a "great love" that could "justify everything." Such impulses are normal in themselves and sometimes bring results. But the desire to radically change life in favor of dreams automatically devalues reality and its, perhaps, modest but objective results.
Before we started searching for the meaning of life, it was going its own way. That is, there was some meaning in it, but we didn't think about it. It turns out that the search for meaning "highlights" something else that is hidden: emptiness, fatigue, despair, disappointment.
Let's remember Faust. He achieved great mastery but decided to commit suicide because of the feeling that he had not grasped the deepest secrets of the universe. The meaning of life clearly belonged to them. Whatever discoveries and gifts Mephistopheles offered him — love, knowledge, time travel, and so on — he repeated: "I'm bored." So the desire for a higher, secret, and special meaning of life hides underneath the emptiness and depression.
Why do so many seek the meaning of life but cannot describe it? If words are lacking and a rational understanding doesn't add up, then perhaps we are talking about feelings from infancy, ones that were there long before we uttered the first word.
Meaning VS Essence
Infancy is filled with meaning, naturally. The answer to the question "Why?" is simple, "Because I was waiting for you and wanted you to come into the world." Of course, this is the answer of a loving mother for whom the existence of her child is valuable in itself, without additional meanings. In place of meaning here, the essence of life, which is always love, comes.
If the infant has been nourished by love, it will carry through the life the certainty that it's enough to be alive. If there was and is no such certainty, a person asks about the meaning of life.
In reality, there is no need to search for the meaning because it has never been lost. The meaning was here from the very beginning — in the core of the psyche, in the center of love, and in the essence of the Self.