Billions of years of natural processes have resulted in something pretty cool: me. I am alive. What’s more, I know that I am alive. But unlike most living things, I have the exhilarating, terrifying ability to contemplate the meaning of it all. The how. The why. With the help of 100 billion neurons, I can think of my place in this world — a tall order in itself, but my mind rarely stops there. I think of this world’s place in the solar system, and this solar system’s place in the galaxy, and this galaxy’s place in the observable universe, and it makes me feel small.

This train of thought gets to be a little too humbling, so I consider the miniature universe of which I am made. Molecules, too tiny to see. Atoms, the even smaller building blocks, which apparently consist almost entirely of empty space. And inside the miniscule protons and neutrons of the atom? Quarks, the smallest things that we know of, things which the smartest among us have scarcely begun to understand. The number of quarks in my body, by a rough estimate, is over 30 digits long. In light of that knowledge, I wonder if maybe I’m a pretty big deal after all.

The cosmos is vast, and I am five foot nine. I sometimes feel tortured by this self-awareness, caught between the infinitesimal and the infinite, unable to wrap my medium-sized head around either extreme. When it comes to understanding the very, very big and the very, very small, our minds are simply not up to the task. They didn’t evolve that way. Our ancestors did not need a scientifically accurate view of the heavens to survive and reproduce, nor did they need so much as a hunch about quantum theory. If they had, perhaps we wouldn’t be so ill-equipped to peer through the lens of a microscope or telescope. But they didn’t, and so we’re stuck with the minds that we have, only halfway comprehending even our most immediate surroundings. We simply happened, somehow, in an intimidatingly indifferent universe we don’t know our place in, for reasons that may not even exist, and the only intimate company we have is an immutable voice in our head that is desperate for significance. What could possibly be lonelier than that?

To Whom Shall I Go?

At one point in the New Testament, Jesus finds himself abandoned by many of his followers. Sadly, he asks his twelve disciples, “Will ye also go away?” The zealous leader of the twelve, Simon Peter, responds to his master thusly: “To whom shall we go?” The implication, of course, being that Jesus was so freakin’ cool that following anyone else would have paled by comparison. To Simon Peter, the Jesus thing was The Meaning of Life. He couldn’t even imagine finding another one. Perhaps many of you have felt that way about something — I certainly have. But before I endow you with my boundless insights on the meaning of life, you need a little background information about me.

I was born and raised in the Mormon church, so for the first two decades of my life, I never stopped to really ponder the big questions. I just assumed the answers were the ones I’d heard in Sunday School — that the Abrahamic God was real, Jesus was His son, and that Christ’s ancient church had been restored to the earth by a 19th-century New Englander named Joseph Smith. My life’s meaning had already been arranged for me. All I had to do was follow the church’s strictly prescribed lifestyle to the letter, making sure to give them plenty of my money in the process, and one day I would be saved from my sins so that I could become a God myself.

It sounded like a pretty sweet deal, until I took a peek at the real story of Joseph Smith, and not the one I’d heard in Sunday School my entire life. My family was more open about our church’s history than most, but there were still plenty of not-so-nice facts about the church that were big news to me. I’d never had any reason to doubt my beliefs before. The shock was overwhelming. But the more I studied, the surer I became — the church and I were never, ever getting back together. I’ll admit, there was certainly an element of relief — now I could find out what coffee tasted like! — but it’s never easy to have one’s entire worldview shattered. Still, I finally had the chance to take control of my own life. I quit my church job, I dropped out of my church university, and perhaps most daunting of all, I told my family.

It is a strange thing to leave the religion of your childhood, especially one as demanding as Mormonism. I went to a high school in Utah that was over 90% Mormon, so my upbringing, my community, my family, and my identity were all wrapped up in the thing. I’d spent countless hours in my youth reading scriptures, praying, going to church, attending youth activities and temple trips, fulfilling responsibilities in my congregation, and taking time off from school every day to go to yet another church class. I’d even spent two years of my life as a Mormon missionary, hocking this stuff to as many people as I possibly could! Mormonism was all I knew, and I felt a bit directionless without it. I’d never learned how to find meaning in a secular context. I was finally jarred awake from this haze when a top Mormon leader named Russell Ballard delivered a talk to people like me — people who had “wandered away from the path,” as he put it. The theme of this talk was a perverse reimagining of Simon Peter’s question to Jesus: “If you choose to [leave the church],” Ballard said, “where will you go?”

Somehow, I couldn’t see the Savior of the World pulling the “you’ll never find anyone better than me” card. It sounded more at home in the mouth of an abusive husband than one of Jesus’s modern apostles. But that sermon helped me realize that I felt pretty aimless, that my existentialism had rounded nihilism corner and was heading straight for depression, and that I did need to find a new direction in life — so I turned to the most effective vanquisher of religious dogma I knew: science.

A Candle in the Dark

Mormonism taught me that the purpose of life was to become a God. Christianity teaches that life is all about praising Jesus and accepting His grace. The divine mission preached by Muhammad is to aggressively spread the faith of Islam and reach paradise. In many cases, these scaffoldings have endowed lives with meaning, and I don’t want to minimize that. But I also don’t want to base my entire life around a work of fiction. The earliest humans were thrust into a terrifying world, constantly battered with natural disasters and famine and plague, and had no road map to guide them along the way. Is it any wonder they tried to create their own?

Religion represents some of our earliest attempts to make sense of life. Even now, many of us take refuge within chapel walls, eagerly lapping up the infallible words of some particular prophet or holy text, solving the grandest mysteries of the universe as tidily as a Scooby-doo case: God did it. Our orderly frontal lobes despise nothing more than confusion, so when chaos occurs, we seek to imbue it with meaning — whatever the cost. An earthquake ravaged your tribe? Better sacrifice a virgin. You find some aspects of your existence perplexing? Better listen to a “prophet” who claims to have the answers, no matter how little sense he makes.

The inclination to attribute causes to a deity has been a popular one in our history, and that’s understandable. But more people are now turning from religion than ever before, and it’s even easier to see why that’s true. Most theological claims are unsupported by evidence, most religions are beset with controversy, and most ancient sacred texts are simply incompatible with a 21st-century morality. Science has acted as humanity’s great candle in the dark, elevating us from the myths of our past and reliably providing us with far more credible explanations of natural phenomena. The drift from the divine has helped us to see the world as it really is. But is this shift good for us? Are we any happier because of it?

Well, as virgins who haven’t been sacrificed to the gods will attest, a rational, evidence-based worldview can make life a lot more livable. But it also forces us to face head-on the discomfiting questions that the world’s religions once had an exclusive claim upon. We have found answers to many of these questions, but some still remain mysterious. How did life begin? Where did matter come from? How did consciousness arise? Chemists, physicists, and biologists have improved our well-being in countless ways, but they cannot yet provide insight here, and it is possible that they will never be able to. For this reason, many believers judge secular science to be the basis of an inferior worldview, apparently preferring answers that can’t be questioned to questions that can’t (yet) be answered.

When I left religion, my focus shifted away from the promise of a glorious afterlife, and I suddenly became far more interested in the world around me. I began to devour the works of scientists and philosophers, hoping to find a new viewpoint I could latch onto. This was, and still is, an incredibly productive enterprise. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius showed me how to find satisfaction in the present moment. Sam Harris taught me about the neuroscientific benefits of meditation and mindfulness. From Richard Dawkins and Yuval Noah Harari, I learned how my evolutionary and social heritage affected my everyday experience. Most inspiring of all, though, were the poetic words of Carl Sagan, which provided me with an almost spiritual appreciation of the universe and my humble place within it. Still, I found myself profoundly discontent with the unknown.

We aspiring rationalists, stuck helplessly between the quantum and the cosmic, search in vain for a grand purpose behind it all. We turn to religion and find it stubbornly dogmatic, uncompromising and woefully wishful in its explanations. Science does better, improving the world and providing more wonderful, awe-inspiring knowledge than we could possibly fill our heads with, but the deepest mysteries of the universe may forever elude its rigorous method. Now, if your quest for meaning is honestly satisfied by theology, then by all means, go with God. Just keep Him to yourself, safely away from my bedroom and my kid’s classroom (and my kid’s bedroom, for that matter). A scientific worldview has much to say for itself, but it does not have much to say on the topic of meaning. There is no good evidence for a creator god, an afterlife, or a bunch of purpose-particles floating around the universe just waiting to be measured. As religion’s day in the sun wanes, unbelievers in the rising generation must find a way to keep themselves afloat — but we need not embrace beliefs on insufficient evidence in order to live a meaningful life.

Turning Inward

I am approximately the 100 billionth human being to contemplate the meaning of life. Thankfully, some of these other people have put pen to page and cemented their thoughts into the public consciousness. One of the most brilliant of these folks, Viktor Frankl, detailed his survival of a Nazi concentration camp in the deep yet digestible Man’s Search for Meaning. There are legions of life-changing wisdom nuggets in this book, but my favorite is his dismantling of “the big question.”

We’re inclined to wonder about The Meaning of Life as though it were fixed, immutable, and invariable among all creatures. Frankl exposes the silliness of this mindset by comparing it with a question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” Anybody who’s played chess knows that there is no one best move. The quality of a move depends entirely on the situation of the game, and an effective move in one circumstance might be the height of foolishness or outright impossible in another.

So what is the meaning of life? This question, though so often asked, is futile on its face — in all likelihood, there is no overarching, all-encompassing meaning, and it is naïve to expect the universe to neatly tie our little lives together with some metaphysical ribbon. It’s not the most hopeful perspective out there, but as Dawkins said, “the universe doesn’t owe you a sense of hope.” We are not owed anything. The great terror and privilege of intelligent consciousness is having the option to create this hope, to determine our own meaning, for ourselves. Nature has endowed us all with varying abilities, and we all have different ideas and values and genetic traits; our opportunity is to accept this individuality and create for ourselves a fulfilling existence. It is a humbling enterprise which sometimes requires wading into frightening depths of independence and personal responsibility.

I focused so heavily on religion earlier because it represents the worldview that most people on this earth, including myself, are programmed into from birth. We are taught things that would seem absurd to a rational adult, but because we learn them at such a young age, we unquestioningly accept them as truth. These beliefs are simply thrust upon us — few of us raised in religion had any real choice in the matter. But in order to walk a path we find fulfilling, we must exhibit independence. When we allow external forces to dictate the meaning and direction of our lives, we risk finding ourselves woefully unfulfilled by the paths we take.

Our lives are highly individual, and one of the chief dangers of religion (or any dogmatic ideology) is that most people won’t fit perfectly inside. I witnessed this firsthand in my own Mormon community. Many LGBT people are so tormented by the conflict between their religion and their sexuality that they try to “pray the gay away” or just marry someone of the opposite sex and hope that goes well. When these paths are almost universally unsuccessful, they too often become depressed or even suicidal. Many professionally motivated Mormon women, due to the incessant direction of church leaders, have decided that their ultimate meaning lie in bearing as many children as possible, trading what might have been a fulfilling career for a thirty-year stint as a housewife and stay-at-home mother. I’m not claiming that a personally satisfying life is impossible for stay-at-home moms, or for religious people in general — just that it’s far less likely when your path is determined by something other than yourself. The happiest stay-at-home moms, I think, are the ones who are truly autonomous agents, individuals whose path aligns with their deepest values.

These determining externalities need not be religious. I’ve seen, for instance, the emptiness in the lives of friends who worship the ideal body image society batters us with, who consequently sacrifice their own happiness and desires in a relentless struggle to reach a goal that was imposed upon them. People endure brutal 80-hour workweeks at jobs they despise, climbing the corporate ladder because they’re told that a successful life includes lots of promotions, fancy cars, and all the stuff you could ever hope to be sold. People who don’t want kids have them because society tells them they should; people who do want kids put that off because society tells them they need to travel the world first. We’re all dissatisfied with our lives because they don’t measure up to the “coolest” Instagram accounts.

Amidst all the noise and distraction, a meaningful life is possible for all of us — but you have to know where to look. As with most good things, it doesn’t just materialize from nothing. It requires fierce introspection and an intimate understanding of yourself, and this is far more easily spoken of than gotten. What are your wants, your abilities, your values? Finding out is a scary process, because you’ve got to become deeply attentive to your mind, and we’ve forgotten how to be comfortable with that. When we’re bored for even a few seconds, we automatically reach for our phones, desperately seeking a refuge from the horrifying possibility of being alone with our thoughts. Fight this impulse. Take time to examine yourself. Chances are, when you do this, you’ll have to sort through a lot of desires that aren’t really yours after all. You’ll probably realize that your deepest values are not reflected in how you spend your time. Few are exempt from the discomfort and demanding work required to learn one’s true priorities and put them into action.

When considering the meaning of your own life, there may be a number of steps involved — but the only one necessary is that you decide it for yourself. What’s more, the meaning of your life need not be solely determinant on you, but on the circumstances you find yourself in at the present moment. As Frankl said, “the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour.” Somebody blessed with the intellect and creativity of Bill Gates may find themselves born into a wealthy family in suburban America, in which case the self-prescribed meaning of their life may involve a complex plan to change the world through innovation and humanitarianism; the exact same person rotting in a death camp might well find meaning by simply alleviating the suffering of their fellow prisoners.

Finding your own meaning is not just difficult — it can be downright terrifying. Even amid the repository of endless wisdom that is my 24-year-old mind, this process has only just begun. Not too long ago, I was fresh off a very high LSAT score, preparing my law school applications. I planned to attend one of the nation’s best, and I would ride that impressive degree to an equally impressive salary. Why had I laid out this plan? Because I was stuck in that paralyzing haze, valuing what I was told to value and not what I myself truly valued. Aided by a regular vipassana meditation practice, I cleared some of my mental clutter in just enough time to stop myself from dropping $200,000 on a legal education I didn’t want. Three months from graduating with my bachelor’s, I pulled the trigger on some drastic life changes. I dropped out of a church-sponsored university I despised, enrolled in a school less prestigious but better suited to my style, and changed my major, sacrificing plenty of credits in the process. Now, although I’m a couple years behind in my education, my feet are firmly on a path toward a career I’ll find not as lucrative as the law, but much more personally fulfilling: teaching high school English.

It bears repeating that this is not a blanket condemnation of lawyers, nor a praise of high school English teachers. Rather, it’s an admonition for everybody to seek a meaningful life from within — wherever that leads you. My motives for pursuing law were not terrible, but they were not my own. I only gained clarity when I asked myself what I wanted out of life, what things I valued and what paths I’d find fulfilling, and I really listened. And let me tell you, nobody was more surprised at the answers than me.

The Here and Now

If you’re still reading this behemoth of a piece, you’ve probably noticed by now that the title is a bit misleading. I haven’t told you the meaning of life at all — in fact, I’ve actively argued against one. As a child, I was told the meaning of life, and when I left religion, I became a bit depressed because I was looking for someone else to tell me a different story. But now, I’ve found that the idea of an individually determined life is freeing and exciting. I can hardly claim ownership over the idea — plenty of people have realized this truth before me. I’m just a 24-year-old kid who wonders about the big questions, like you do, and I’ve done my best to lay things out in a way I hope some will find helpful — provocative headline and all.

And, in the end, isn’t that what we’re all doing? The best we can, with what little we have? It can be difficult to accept, but none of us know how the mysteries of matter or life or consciousness originated. We’re all, as a probably very high Joe Rogan once said, “talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe.” Despite our best efforts, it’s hard to find ultimate meaning in a situation like that. Now, perhaps new scientific discoveries will arise to provide insight, or perhaps a spiritual revelation will surface which is not faith-based, archaic, and maddeningly vague. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, our questions will one day be answered. But until then, all we have is the here and now, and it only lasts as long as we do.

Which brings me to one last thing we’ve got to deal with before we go: someday, in the not-too-distant future, you and I will both be dead. Buried. Rotted. Gone. Doesn’t that suck? I feel it too — there is perhaps no reality we instinctively push against more, nothing that damages our quest for meaning more, than the notion of our impending non-existence. In the face of a final breath, isn’t it all ultimately and infuriatingly pointless? Perhaps the poet Dylan Thomas was onto something when he wrote, “do not go gentle into that good night . . . rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The wide expanse of space has never heard of me, the atoms which make me up are indifferent to my existence, and someday even our own sun will fizzle and die. When I’m gone, and when the people who know me are gone, and when the planet to which I once belonged and contributed is gone, there will be no cares left and nothing left to give them. But this doesn’t mean we’re meaningless. Far from it. It means that there’s no objective purpose to life, sure, but do you really want that anyway? To me, the idea of a god looking over my shoulder telling me what I can and can’t wear, what drinks I can and can’t enjoy, and demanding my money and my worship in the process is the definition of unfreedom. It is a spiritual North Korea. Far better, it seems, is the liberty to decide for myself how to live, and when the time comes, to meet “that good night” as gently or as rage-filled as I wish.

Before 1993, I didn’t exist. There was no me. The fact of my current being was not contemplated or realized by anybody before it happened — not even my parents, who spent their first quarter-century not knowing me and not knowing of me. And you know what? Non-existence didn’t bother me in the least. There was no me to be bothered. I didn’t care about my purpose in life when Kennedy was shot, or when Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, or when our ancestors came down from the trees. I wasn’t around to care. And yes, someday I will be dead, but I won’t be inconvenienced by it. Missing the year 2400 will bum me out exactly as much as missing the year 1600 did — that is, of course, not one bit.

This doesn’t mean we’re meaningless. It means we’re impermanent. The meaning of your life may only matter as long as you’re around to care about it, but while you’re around, it does matter. You are a conscious creature, capable of well-being and suffering. Some philosophers may disagree, but I take it as an axiom that well-being is preferable to suffering. Your project, then, should be to maximize your well-being and minimize your suffering (and that of those around you) however you best see fit, and the project of humanity should be to implement this on a global scale.

This worldview may conceivably lead some to a life of hedonism and debauchery, but to me it is inspiring. It fills me with a sense of urgency. I feel fulfilled when I am healthy, when I have positive relationships with my friends and family, when I’m learning and growing and contributing to the world around me — and my time to do those things is limited. Knowing this causes me to take care of my body so I can extend and enjoy that limited time. It causes me to spend a little less time on my phone and a little more time immersed in the majestic world of which I am a small, self-determined part. It causes me to indulge in mind-numbing pleasures with moderation and mind-expanding pleasures with abandon. Knowing myself better and discovering what I find meaningful is a priority now, because now is all I have.

It’s sad, but it’s happy. It’s depressing, but it’s thrilling. We feel big and we feel small. We’re complex creatures, we humans, and we’re stuck between the atom and the universe with a world to navigate and no reliable guide. Isn’t it scary? Isn’t it humbling? Isn’t it exhilarating? It kind of makes me want to leave this coffee shop and stop writing to you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been fun, but I’ve got a wife to get home to. Our nights together are limited, but that doesn’t make them any less amazing. Some nights we Netflix and chill, on others we talk for hours — but my favorite night of all was on August 15th, 2015.

It was the night I asked her to marry me. I didn’t make too big a show of it; some things are meant to stay private, I think. I’d set up a nice display of candles and flower petals at a mountain lookout with a view of the beautiful Utah Valley — a place that was meaningful to both of us. We danced, with no objective purpose, to our favorite song. And after she said yes, we spread out a blanket and stared together in wonder at the darkened, starry sky. I have to admit, looking up there used to freak me out a bit. But it doesn’t anymore — because the cosmos is vast, and I am five foot nine, and I’m finally starting to feel okay with that.