Searching for life’s meaning can feel like pinning down a cloud. Worse, it can feel like the harder you look, the less you find, with meaning perpetually just out of reach. This inability to satisfy our desire for meaning is a central trope of the human condition. Let’s sketch an anatomy of the question “What is the meaning of life?” (henceforth The Question) by bringing its implicit assumptions into focus.

Any answer to The Question falls into one of two categories: either life has a meaning and you haven’t found it, or life has no meaning. The very act of asking The Question rules out the possibility that life both has a meaning and that that meaning is discernable just by being alive: if we felt our lives had meaning, there would be no reason to ask The Question in the first place. Having ruled out the possibility that our lives are already meaningful, The Question positions the speaker as someone whose life is meaningless as it is.

One position is that life simply has no meaning. From this stance, it cannot even be said that the point of existence is existence itself, since that would be some meaningful basis for life. We’ll return to this position later, but for now we’ll just note that it’s quite distant from how we actually perceive our existence. When we think of the human condition, we think of the search for that which lies beyond, a tortured journey for the deeper explanation. For that, we turn to the second option: Life does having meaning, you just haven’t found it.

Within this position, there are two possible justifications: either you haven’t found meaning because you haven’t met the right conditions, or meaning is simply unattainable. This is distinct from the first position, in which there is no meaning at all, since in this case there is an underlying meaning, it’s just inaccessible to us. Again, we will return to this position, but the meatiest bit is the position that sees meaning as a quest; something that, through a certain series of actions, can be obtained. Meaning is discrete; knowable; measurable. And under the right conditions—arranging your life a particular way, changing your mindset, or meeting the right person—we find meaning.