When you lose all meaning in life, and your identity falls apart, what remains, and how meaning can begin again from a deeper ground
Meaning Sustains Us
A sense of meaning has sustained me through challenging times, over and over again.
It’s what has given me strength, direction and determination in many areas of my life: in relationship, in work, in creativity and in what I’ve tried to build and contribute in the world.
Without it, I feel quite lost.
Meaning seems to sit underneath almost everything we do. It gives shape to our decisions, energy to our ambitions and coherence to our lives.
We can tolerate a lot of challenges, even physical pain, when there is meaning, but without it everything is difficult to face.
And often, we don’t realise how much our lives are organised around meaning until the thing giving us that meaning begins to break down.
This disillusionment can take place in many different areas of our lives, in relationship, health, career, or even the way we view life itself.
What happens then… when the meaning on which your life rested suddenly collapses?
When the story you were living by no longer works?
Where can you find refuge? What can you hold on to?
Meaning Comes Before Goals
Meaning comes first, then goals.
Goals arise from our attempt to create meaning and coherence in our lives. They are usually not just practical objectives, but expressions of a deeper desire to become someone, to fulfil something, or to confirm a certain idea of ourselves.
A career goal, for example, is rarely just about money. Beneath it may be the desire for freedom, recognition, security, significance, contribution or self-worth.
The goal matters because of the story it supports about who we are, or who we hope to become.
Much of our ambition is driven by this attempt to make our lives feel coherent and meaningful, in sync with our worldview and what has gone before.
We pursue things believing that once attained, they will finally confirm something essential, perhaps that we are enough.
We pursue goals because we believe they will complete, confirm or stabilise a certain sense of self.
And so when the deeper meaning underneath those goals begins to crack, the goals themselves can suddenly lose their direction and stop making sense.
Meaning, Story and Identity
If there’s one thing we find difficult to bear, it is the loss of Story.
We need a coherent narrative by which we can orient ourselves in life. A sense that our lives are going somewhere, that what we’ve experienced means something, and that who we are today is connected in some way to who we were yesterday.
Story gives continuity across time. It allows us to make sense of suffering, sacrifice, failure and difficulty. Without some kind of narrative coherence, life can begin to feel fragmented and disorienting.
This is partly because meaning is deeply tied to identity.
Much of what we call the “self” is narrative in nature: the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what has happened to us, what matters, what we are capable of, where we are going and how we fit into the world.
Often, these stories are not even conscious. They quietly organise our decisions, relationships, ambitions and perception of reality from underneath the surface.
Even destructive stories can feel safer than no story at all.
We can endure extraordinary hardship when it feels meaningful. Grief, heartbreak, illness, struggle, and even physical suffering can become bearable when held within some deeper sense of purpose or understanding.
But when suffering appears meaningless, or when the story holding our lives together begins to collapse, something far more destabilising can happen.
When meaning collapses, it is not just an idea we lose. It can feel as though we lose ourselves.
When the Story Breaks
There are moments in life when the story we have been living by can no longer hold.
Perhaps your health changes, or a relationship ends, and suddenly the future you had been moving towards disappears.
Sometimes your work, career or ambition no longer gives you the meaning it once did. Even spiritual paths or identities that once felt deeply meaningful can begin to lose their vitality.
An athlete who has built their whole identity around performance suffers a career-ending injury. Overnight, not only their livelihood but their sense of self, community, routine and future can collapse. Who are they now? What remains when the thing around which life was organised is gone?
I remember a period in my own life when I had sold my house, left my job and was preparing to move to another country to begin a new venture. However, other circumstances and a relationship breakdown meant that I could no longer execute the plan.
So suddenly, there I was with no job, no relationship, no home and no plan. My future, sense of meaning, and identity in tatters!
And although I didn’t know who I was anymore, underneath all of that, I was still here…
Just here!
What seemed like a loss was, in fact, finding who I was more essentially.
There’s a strange clarity that can emerge in these moments.
What I’ve Found
Over time, the meanings on which my life was built have changed. Looking back, it almost feels as though life kept stripping layers away.
At one stage, meaning came largely through material success and the desire to build a certain kind of life. Then through relationship and the hope of fulfilment through connection and shared future. Later, through work, contribution, ambition and the desire to create something meaningful in the world.
And yet, one after another, these meanings also revealed themselves to be unstable, incomplete or incapable of fully holding me.
Further down the line, perhaps through disillusionment with these earlier layers, meaning has come through creativity, growth and trying to master my own mind and inner world. Then, through a more synchronistic and intuitive way of living, where everyday life itself began to feel more alive, connected and magical.
Looking back, I can see that what felt like failure or loss was often something else entirely: a breaking down and reducing of ego identity.
It was a gradual (and sometimes not so gradual) stripping away of who I was not in essence.
There Is Not One Meaning
What I began to realise is that meaning is not singular. There are layers to it.
Some meanings are more external and conditional: our roles, achievements, relationships, identities and ambitions. These can be deeply important, but they are also vulnerable to change and loss.
Underneath these are deeper layers: values, presence, creativity, connection, being, and participation with life itself.
Perhaps meaning exists a little like concentric circles. The outer layers of identity may change repeatedly throughout a lifetime, while something more essential remains underneath them.
At one level, I am a man, English, a coach, a writer, a partner, a friend. But these are all changing expressions and roles. Beneath that, I am a human being, an animal, a living consciousness, and an intrinsic part of life.
The deeper the layer from which meaning is derived, the more unshakeable and the less easily taken away by circumstance.
And perhaps this is why breakdown, although painful, can sometimes bring us closer to firmer ground.
The Solid Foundation of Meaning
So where can we find firmer ground?
A sense of meaning, purpose or identity that is less vulnerable to the inevitable changes of life?
Although sometimes loss of meaning is painful, we can also come back to something that can’t be lost so easily. Something beneath all the roles, stories and identities we temporarily inhabit.
As the outer layers of meaning in my own life began to break down at times, I found myself returning to something much simpler and immediate:
I am. This is. I exist.
Not just a belief, but as something undeniable that remained when everything else had fallen away.
Before all the stories about who I should be, what I should achieve, where I should go or how my life should unfold, there was simply this undeniable fact of being. Of life itself.
This may sound abstract, or even like a kind of resignation from the part of us that wants certainty, control and permanence. But that hasn’t been my experience of it.
Rather than taking me away from life, it seemed to bring me closer to it.
A sense that perhaps meaning does not have to come entirely from what I achieve, possess or maintain externally, but can also arise from just being part of all that exists. From being here as consciousness.
There is wonder, joy and magic in it, of experiencing the mystery of life.
Or as I sometimes find myself saying these days:
I Am. And I’m in this magical Story.
And strangely, from that place, life begins to feel deeply meaningful.
From Firmer Ground
Perhaps the invitation is not to find a meaning that can never change, but to root ourselves in something deeper than the changing stories of life.
Because stories do change. Identities collapse. Relationships breakdown. Careers come to an end. Dreams dissolve. There may even be moments when life feels emptied of all meaning, when we no longer know who we are or how to go on.
But even then, something remains.
Not the identity, the story or the image you built your life around.
Something deeper.
And discovering that changes everything.
Even if everything has collapsed, life is not over.
From this firmer ground, health and vitality, fulfilling relationships, and meaningful work and contribution can begin as expressions arising from Being itself.
In my own experience, as the structures I had built my identity around fell away, there was also an opening into something greater.
I found space, presence and openness for life to move through me, rather than feeling that I had to force and hold everything together through effort and control.
I found vast creativity and meaning in that deeper place.
Perhaps this is the paradox: that sometimes when the life we built falls apart, we discover something in ourselves that cannot be broken.
Photo by Ruud Luijten on Unsplash
