I wasn’t quite ready to climb down from the car on a rainy, moody Friday evening when I reached home from a long drive back after work. As the rain pelted on the side of my car window, I sat in silence in the driver’s seat; tired and exhausted from a long week, and quietly thankful that the weekend would be starting tomorrow.
Ordinary moments like this – the stillness, the dim light, and the steady rhythm of rain – felt as if time had briefly loosened its grip for me. The weight of time feels different like this, and something larger and less tangible seems to loom in the air. Perhaps it is the sense that everything we move through, from our routines to our memories, exists within a flow that doesn’t stop or turn back. I caught myself thinking about this, and my thoughts were running on imaginary fields before I briefly catch my breath to let that train of thought settle.
As we go about our work and life on a daily basis, how many of us actually stopped to ponder about the meaning of life of our existence in the universe? And how many of us actually want to find out the answer?
The meaning of life, when examined through the lens of science, gives something deep to ponder about our existentiality.
To begin somewhere, the studies of modern cosmology has led us to a rather uneasy discovery: the universe that we came to know is transitory. As physicist Brian Greene puts it matter-of-factly in his book, Until the End of Time, nothing is everlasting – from planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae. As far as we can tell, not only is each individual life finite, life itself is also finite.
I had to stop and do a double-take at that line of paragraph. Life is finite? If all of our being and consciousness ends collectively and ultimately, what would be the meaning of all of our great historic feats, technology, art, culture and civilization as human species on Earth?
If we narrow down the focus to our own experience on the planet instead, the question then becomes this:
Is meaning something the universe contains by itself – or something that only arises because finite beings like us are able to experience it within a finite lifetime?
Is the meaning of life shaped through our universe?
Throughout history, science have shown us that we are not the center of everything.
From 16th century Copernican Revolution to Hubble’s Law established through Edwin Hubble’s work on the galaxies, Earth is not the center of the universe, and the universe, as it turned out, is not a fixed stage either – it is expanding. At the same time, our understanding of time itself was stretched. The concept of ‘deep time’, first contributed by James Hutton, placed human life in an extremely brief interval on Earth when compared to the planet and the universe – making us individuals one of the least central narratives of the entire big picture of the cosmos.
Even within the brief interval, life was never guaranteed continuity. The Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction stands as a stark reminder: the entire dominant forms of life can disappear in relatively short spans of geological time. So, what once flourished can vanish – leaving behind traces to be interpreted much later.
Taken together, these discoveries point in a similar direction: the universe we inhabit is not arranged around us, does not remain as it is, and does not preserve what emerges within it indefinitely. Stability is temporary, and permanence is not part of the lasting structure.
And so, within such a system, is life presumably only transient because the universe intends it to be? Is it because of the way we exist within the universe, the universe dictates meaning for us then?
One could argue that it would be mindless if we follow that narrative. After all, we are thinking organisms – capable of thinking for ourselves, and of other beings of life on Earth too – so to cede to our fate in life just because our design in the universe made us so, would have been a waste of our evolutionary gifts and awareness.
The emergence of the mind: Awareness in a temporary system
If the universe is not fixed – if it expands, changes and does not preserve what arises within it – then something else becomes quietly remarkable: within this shifting system, awareness appears.
Thought is a fascinating take, considering our thinking happens here and not on some arbitrary planet or comet. Greene mentioned that if we take thought as a physical process, it can only take place when certain stringent environmental conditions are met, be it on Earth or somewhere else. To be able to think – to reflect – creates a very particular kind of outcome for humankind. With awareness, with thought, comes something new: our ability to experience, interpret and question where we came from, how it all changes, and what might become in the future.
It is particularly with this gift that humankind can make sense of meaning in such a transformative yet transitory system in the universe. Lest it becomes Pandora’s box of sorts, awareness illuminates our reality: that what we experience is temporary, that what we understand is still partial, and that what we rely on is not guaranteed to persist.
In this sense, we are left with one important layer to consider: our existence, and therefore our meaning of it, should not only be lived fully, but felt, interpreted, and questioned as if it mattered deeply.
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By this point, the question no longer feels abstract.
Is meaning something the universe contains by itself – or something that only arises because finite beings like us are able to experience it within a finite lifetime?
If meaning of life is embedded in the structure of the universe, where it is woven into its laws, patterns or its unfolding, then it would exist regardless of whether it is perceived. It would then be something to uncover, something already there, only waiting to be recognized.
We exist in spite of the universe’s natural tendencies, and regardless of our impermanence and transient nature, the meaning of life does not have to be permanent to be real. It does not need to be preserved at the level of the cosmos to matter truly. It can exist in the act of noticing, in the memories we make, in the relationships we build and keep, and in the things we choose to care about – even if those, too, are finite.
When seen this way, the meaning of life becomes less of a property of the universe, but more like a condition of being within it.
And that itself, is already beautiful and elegant in its meaning.
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