Existential Crisis & Meaning-Making — Article 6 of 6

The Courage to Live with Uncertainty: Building a Meaning-Rich Life

Here is the paradox: the search for certainty is itself a form of suffering. Not because certainty is bad, but because certainty about the things that matter most — about meaning, about purpose, about whether any of it is worth it — is simply not available. The pursuit of it keeps people from living the life that is here, in the uncertainty, where they already are.

This is the cluster closer — the article that tries to synthesize what the others have been building toward. Not a resolution to the questions of existential crisis, depression, midlife, loss, and identity, because those questions do not resolve. A different kind of conclusion: not certainty about meaning but a description of how to live in its absence, and why that turns out to be more than adequate.

Read: What Is an Existential Crisis? When Life Stops Making Sense →

Heidegger's Thrownness: We Are Thrown Into a Life We Did Not Choose

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger introduced the concept of Geworfenheit — “thrownness” — to describe the condition of human existence: we are thrown into a world, a body, a historical moment, a family, a culture that we did not choose and cannot exit. We did not select our circumstances, our predispositions, our time in history. We find ourselves here, already underway, already embedded in conditions not of our making.

Heidegger's point is not despairing. It is clarifying. Meaning is not something that was installed in the world before we arrived, waiting to be discovered. It is something that must be made — by the thrown being who is already here, already underway, working with what is available in the situation they did not choose. This is the existential condition. Not a problem to be solved but a situation to be engaged.

The implication is significant: the search for a pre-installed meaning — for a purpose that was assigned to you before you arrived, that you need only discover to be free — is a search for something that does not exist. The meaning you build by engaging your actual life, with actual commitment, in the direction of what actually matters to you — this meaning is real, because it is constructed by a real person in a real situation. Its not-being-eternal does not make it less meaningful while it holds.

Frankl's Three Sources of Meaning

Viktor Frankl identified three categories of meaning available to human beings in virtually any circumstance. Not as consolation, but as a practical framework for finding a foothold when the ground is gone.

Creative values — the meaning found in what you give to the world. What you create, build, contribute, offer. Work that expresses who you are. Art, care, effort, craft. This is the meaning of doing — and it is available wherever there is something worth making or doing.

Experiential values — the meaning found in what you receive from the world. Beauty encountered. Love given and received. Truth glimpsed. A piece of music that moves you, a landscape that arrests you, a conversation that lands. This is the meaning of receiving — and it requires only the willingness to be present enough to notice what is actually there.

Attitudinal values — the meaning found in the stance taken toward unavoidable suffering. When circumstances cannot be changed, the freedom to choose one's relationship to them remains. Frankl developed this insight in the Nazi concentration camps: the last human freedom, he wrote, is the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. This is not toxic positivity. It is the recognition that the meaning of suffering is always, to some degree, in the hands of the sufferer.

Read: Existential Depression: When Meaninglessness Becomes the Wound →

What Meaning-Rich Living Actually Looks Like

Not the Instagram version. The research version.

Commitment Over Clarity

Meaning-rich living is not organized around having clear answers. It is organized around commitments — to values, to people, to practices, to a direction of movement — that can be honored even in the absence of certainty. The commitment is the anchor. Clarity may or may not follow, but the commitment holds regardless.

Presence Over Certainty

The search for certainty keeps you in the future — anticipating, calculating, trying to lock down what cannot be locked down. Presence returns you to the only place where meaning is actually experienced: this moment, this relationship, this activity. Meaning is not found at the end of the search. It is encountered in the quality of attention brought to what is already here.

Values Over Answers

You cannot have a final answer to why any of this matters. You can have a clear understanding of what you stand for — what you care about, what you will not compromise, what you want your time on earth to have been oriented toward. Values do not answer the philosophical questions. They make the philosophical questions less urgent by giving you a basis for action that does not depend on answering them.

Action Over Understanding

Understanding without action is rumination. Action in the direction of your values, even without complete understanding, is how meaning gets built. The person who waits until they fully understand why they are doing something before beginning often never begins. The person who acts from their best current understanding, tolerates the not-knowing, and updates as they learn — this person builds something. Understanding often follows action rather than preceding it.

The Tolerance of Ambiguity as a Psychological Skill

The psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik, working in the 1940s and 1950s, was among the first to document the tolerance of ambiguity as a distinct psychological trait — and to show that it predicted important outcomes. People with low tolerance for ambiguity, her research found, tended toward rigid thinking, black-and-white categorization, premature closure, and authoritarian personality structures. People with higher tolerance for ambiguity showed greater creativity, greater resilience in uncertain situations, and greater capacity for complex, nuanced thinking.

More recent research has confirmed and extended these findings. The tolerance of ambiguity is associated with psychological wellbeing, with adaptive coping under stress, with lower levels of anxiety in situations of genuine uncertainty. It is not correlated with the absence of anxiety — tolerating ambiguity does not mean not feeling the discomfort of not-knowing. It means being able to act and engage and commit despite that discomfort.

Critically, the tolerance of ambiguity is trainable. It is not a fixed trait that some people have and others do not. It is a capacity that develops through deliberate practice at the edge of its current limit. Like a muscle, it grows stronger through use and weakens through avoidance.

Read: Finding Meaning After Loss: When the Story You Lived By Is Gone →

Existential Courage: Living Fully in the Face of Not-Knowing

The philosopher Paul Tillich wrote about what he called “the courage to be” — the willingness to affirm one's existence in full awareness of the threats to that existence: finitude, uncertainty, the possibility of meaninglessness. Existential courage is not the absence of anxiety. It is the willingness to engage fully with life in the presence of anxiety — to love, to commit, to create, to care, knowing that all of it is impermanent and none of it is guaranteed.

This is different from toxic positivity, which bypasses the anxiety by insisting it is not justified. And it is different from existential despair, which uses the anxiety as a reason not to engage. Existential courage holds both: yes, all of this is uncertain, impermanent, and ultimately unresolved — and yes, I am choosing to live fully and commit deeply and care genuinely, despite and within that uncertainty.

This is what the person who has moved through an existential crisis, a midlife transition, a significant loss, or an identity rebuilding looks like on the other side. Not certain. Not resolved. But more fully present, more consciously committed, more genuinely alive than the certainty-seeking self that was searching for a ground that was never available.

The Role of Grief in Meaning-Making

There is a grief that precedes meaning-making — and must precede it, or the meaning-making remains defensive rather than genuine. The grief is for the certainties that were wanted and will not arrive. The meaning that was supposed to be built into the structure of things. The story that was promised — by religion, by culture, by the people who raised you — that life would make sense, that the effort would be rewarded, that the love would not be taken away.

This grief cannot be bypassed. The person who moves directly from existential crisis to meaning construction without grief has usually constructed a meaning that is still, at some level, a defense against the underlying loss. The grief — for the certainty, for the story, for the world that was supposed to be — is what clears the space for meaning that is genuinely chosen rather than defensively imposed.

What comes after genuine grief is not resolution. It is a kind of spaciousness — a clearing in which something more honest can be built. The person who has grieved the certainties they wanted is not more fragile than before. They are, paradoxically, more stable — because what they are building now is no longer contingent on conditions that could not hold.

Chronic illness is one of the domains where this grief work is most acute — the grief of a body that was assumed, a future that was planned, a self that was organized around capabilities that changed. Read: Grief and Chronic Illness: Mourning the Life You Expected →

“Meaning is not something you find at the end of the search. It is what grows in the direction you decide to move.”

5 Practices for Building a Meaning-Rich Life

Practice Tolerating Small Uncertainties Deliberately

The tolerance of ambiguity is a trainable psychological capacity, not a fixed trait. Like any capacity, it grows through practice at the edge of its current limit. Begin with deliberate exposure to small uncertainties: make a decision without researching it exhaustively, make a plan without specifying every contingency, let a conversation end without resolving every thread. The practice is not to become comfortable with uncertainty but to expand the range of uncertainty you can act within.

Clarify Your Values Rather Than Your Goals

Goals require a stable future. Values can be expressed in the present, regardless of outcomes. Use the ACT values clarification process: in each major domain of your life (work, relationships, health, creativity, community), ask what kind of person you want to be and what you want to stand for — not what you want to achieve. Values give you a basis for action that does not depend on certainty about results.

Grieve the Certainties You Wanted

The move from certainty-seeking to uncertainty-tolerance requires grieving the certainty that was wanted and not available. The certainty about the meaning of your life. The certainty about who you are. The certainty about what comes after. These are real losses — the loss of a comfort that felt like a birthright. Give them explicit grief. The person who has not grieved the certainty they wanted tends to keep seeking it, indefinitely, instead of building in its absence.

Find the Three Sources of Meaning Available to You Now

Viktor Frankl's three sources — creative values (what you give), experiential values (what you receive), attitudinal values (the stance you take toward unavoidable suffering) — can be engaged right now, without waiting for the big questions to be resolved. What are you creating or giving? What beauty, connection, or truth are you receiving? And if you are suffering unavoidably, what stance are you taking toward it? At least one of these is available in almost any circumstance.

Act From the Best Version of Yourself That Is Currently Available

You do not need to have resolved the existential questions to act well. You need to know, in this situation, what the person you want to be would do — and do that. This is the practical meaning of existential courage: not the absence of uncertainty, but the willingness to act from your values in the presence of it. Over time, this action builds the identity and the life that the abstract questions were searching for.

To the Person Who Has Lost Their Sense of Why

I want to speak directly to you for a moment — the person who has been searching, maybe for a long time, for a reason sufficient to justify the effort of your own life. Who has looked at everything they have built and found it insufficient. Who has asked the question and gotten silence back, or worse, answers that were clearly not true.

I am not going to tell you that the answer is coming. I don't know that. What I can tell you is that the question itself — the fact that you are asking it with this degree of seriousness and this degree of pain — is evidence of something worth taking seriously. The person who does not care whether their life has meaning does not have existential crises. You are in pain about this because you are a person who is alive enough to find insufficient life insufficient.

The certainty you are looking for is not available. This is true. It will not become available if you wait long enough or think carefully enough or find the right practice or teacher. The ground is uncertain. This is the human condition, not a deficiency in your particular situation.

But here is what I know: meaning is built, not found. It is built by people like you — people who take the question seriously — in the specific choices they make about what to stand for, what to commit to, what to love and create and offer and receive, in the particular unrepeatable situation they find themselves in. You are already here. The materials are already available. The question is not whether you will find a reason. The question is what you will build in the absence of one.

Start small. Start with what still has a small amount of pull. Commit to that, for now, as though it matters — because in your choosing to act as though it matters, it begins to matter. Meaning does not arrive before commitment. It grows inside of it.

The search was not wasted. It brought you here. Now the building can begin.

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Existential Crisis & Meaning-Making