What's the Point? A Treatise on Meaning-Making

“...man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942/2012, p. 28)

Our brains are wired to detect patterns. Infants depend on caregivers for stability and predictability. Our ancestors who could create shared stories and form group identities survived better, because meaning bound people together in ways that made collective life possible.

Thus, humankind’s neurological fate is yearning for meaning, coherence, and purpose. We want to know that our suffering was not senseless, but rather that it was part of cosmic design or it made us stronger, so everything had to happen this way.

But the world is not ordered around human needs or justice. What happens to us is shaped by accidents, circumstances, choices, and luck. Given an environment formulated by chaos, unfairness, and contingency, what better salve than the pop psychology dictum of “everything happens for a reason”? This retrospective predictability helps us defend against despair, at least temporarily.

But we are continually forced to confront the collapse of old meanings.

So what happens when symbolic meaning dissolves? Our preferred numbing agents lose their anesthetic function, our ego-ideal collapses, we become terrorized by our own shame, self-disgust, and overwhelm.

Where are we in relation to our own lack? How can we learn to live with what cannot be understood?

These moments are ruptures. They are also a protest against endless repetition compulsion. They are threshold states where we become more aware of our mortality. Whenever we become exhausted, disillusioned, and can no longer be sustained by our old fantasies, we have to grieve the lives we did not live, the needs that went unmet, the time that was lost.

Holding the Parts of Ourselves That Resist Integration

The ethical commitment to easing suffering is important to me, but it’s not what drew me into the work of therapy. I have never resonated with the idea that our task as humans is endlessly fortify our egos until we feel more self-assured - or simply convinced that we’re in control.

Ego psychology, with its focus on strengthening the ego to reduce distress, often becomes a project of domestication.

It aims to make the self orderly and coherent, but in doing so it risks ignoring the parts of us that resist assimilation altogether. As Julia Kristeva reminds us, something foreign always persists within:

“Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder.”

— Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (trans. Roudiez, 1991/1994, p. 1)

We are never fully unified. The subject is shot through with internal divisions - between what we consciously claim to want and what our unconscious repetitions, fantasies, and drives insist upon. We live caught between two incompatible logics: the protective safety of our personal narrative, and the unruly, foreign truth of desire - wanting what we “shouldn’t,” fearing dissolution, resisting coherence.

Desire organizes our psychic life precisely because it cannot be satisfied. Its movement is structural, not accidental.

“Desire is the metonymy of being in the subject.”

— Jacques Lacan, Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation (1958-1959/2019, p. 19)

A part of us is always unassimilable - resistant to our ego’s story of who we are and who we are supposed to be. When the promise of wholeness fails, when the point evaporates, our meaning-making structures falter. And in that breakdown, something more fundamental, more permanent, reveals itself: the divided nature of subjectivity itself.

Becoming Responsible for Our Inner Lives

As a psychotherapist practicing under supervision in California, I hold that the self cannot be fully integrated or fixed. But even when the strange, disturbing or alien parts of ourselves feel unworthy or incomprehensible, we can learn to recognize them and treat them with a kind of internal hospitality.

Challenging emotions do not need to be defined as pathological. They are signs of subjectivity itself. Without them, we would be shallow, unable to resonate with others’ pain, and incapable of emotional intimacy. Emotions only become pathological when they dominate the psyche and restrict movement. Shame arises whenever the ego encounters something it cannot integrate - and it becomes harmful only when it is totalizing, unrelenting, and immobilizing.

Part of the work of therapy is learning to tolerate ambiguity and coexist with it. Not everything happens for a reason, but we can still create meaning from the choices we make and the commitments we take up. This is what it means to become existentially responsible for our own lives: not inventing a perfect narrative, but responding to what we carry with honesty, curiosity, and courage.