Why There's No Grand Meaning Revealed at the End of Life

A lot of people wonder why purpose doesn't culminate or present a "grand reveal" at the end of life. Why, they might ask, does the end of life seem anti-climactic and devoid of meaning?

Well, the answer is—other than the fact that life doesn't work like a movie—pretty straightforward. The meaning of life is to grow, and so when your life is ending, you stop growing. People will debate what happens when you die (as usual, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s either you are gone forever or you go somewhere else in a non-physical form), so it is possible that you continue growing in a non-physical form and/or return later in a new physical form to continue that growth as a new organism. However, the meaning is in the growth, so it doesn’t magically appear at the end but is in the activities you perform throughout your lifetime.

If you want to work this question out for yourself, here are a couple of fun exercises that will help you see how your sense of meaning, purpose, and accomplishment are derived:

• Watch the last 5–10 minutes of a movie you’ve never seen before (preferably, one of the best ever made that you don’t mind ruining for yourself) and see if the ending has any significance to you (i.e., if you feel anything). You probably won’t care much. Why? Because you didn’t see the journey leading up to the outcome. There’s no meaning, significance, or anything if you don’t care. For your life, the meaning at the end will just be what you can look back on as to what you did of significance throughout that brought you to where you are, not at the end.
• Imagine how pissed off you would be if you spent your whole life working toward goals or accomplishments that you thought were significant only to have an angel of death come to you and say, “HA! It was really something completely different! What a waste of life you had!” You’d immediately (to paraphrase Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer) shout, “Something that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!!!” Or have them say, “You see, you should’ve taken away these lessons from life,” only for you to say, “That’s weird; I took ________ away from them.”

Meaning is unique to you and something you give to your life by caring. It won’t magically come to you at the end because it’s something you give to it throughout your life with your thoughts, words, decisions, and actions. Choose to have meaning, and you will have it.