You don't need one 'purpose' in life: the existentialist reply

The existentialists and their fellow travellers disagreed on much, but converged on the idea that meaning is a human act, not a cosmic gift.

Albert Camus framed it most vividly. The universe is silent, he said; it offers no meaning of its own. He called the gap between our hunger for meaning and that silence 'the absurd'. His answer was not surrender but defiance — to imagine even Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder forever, as happy in the sheer act of living. Viktor Frankl, from the opposite temperament, agreed that the demand for one overarching purpose is misplaced: meaning, he taught, is something you meet concretely in a particular person, work or moment — plural, renewable, and never finished.

The modern purpose-hunt rests on assumptions the philosophy quietly dismantles.

There is a strange reversal in how this idea reaches us now. The existentialists offered the absence of a fixed purpose as a liberation. A whole industry has since repackaged purpose as an obligation — one more thing to optimise, brand and monetise.

The irony is sharp. A philosophy meant to lift the weight of a pre-assigned destiny has been turned into a new source of inadequacy, complete with courses and influencers. Worse, tying meaning so tightly to a singular passion or career leaves people stranded when jobs change, dreams shift, or life simply turns out differently than planned. The existentialist correction is freeing precisely because it is plural and provisional: you are not auditioning for one role the universe assigned you. You are making commitments, here and now, that you can deepen, outgrow and replace — and the making, not some final discovery, is where the meaning actually lives.

The 'one true purpose' story does quiet damage to a lot of good lives. It tells the late bloomer they are behind, the person with many interests that they are unfocused, and the one who changed paths that they betrayed a calling. Replace 'discover your purpose' with 'make your meaning' and all three are reframed at once: there was never a single right answer they were failing to reach.

The deeper lesson is about responsibility, not relief alone. Existentialism takes away the cosmic excuse — there is no destiny to blame for an unlived life — and hands you authorship instead, which is heavier than it sounds. If meaning is made, then it has to actually be made: through commitments you choose and honour, not through waiting to be struck by a calling. The freedom is real, and so is the work that comes with it.

The thing worth keeping is permission with agency. You do not owe the universe a single grand purpose, and you are not failing for lacking one. What you have instead is the harder, better task of deciding, again and again, what is worth caring about — and the future this points to is not an answer you finally find, but a life you keep choosing to write.