For many people, the meaning of life is tied to what they believe will happen after death. If they expect some form of consciousness to continue, they often assume that clarity will arrive only then—that whatever felt confusing, unfair, or incomplete in this life will make sense in the next.
Others take a different angle. They see meaning as something earned day by day, almost like preparation for whatever comes after. In that view, today matters because it shapes tomorrow, and tomorrow shapes whatever lies beyond it. Life becomes a long rehearsal for a moment we can’t yet see.
But there’s a limitation to both approaches: they pull our thoughts toward death more than life. And when we stare too hard at the unknown, we risk missing the reality that’s right in front of us.
A more grounded, human approach is to look at the life we’re actually living. Not the hypothetical one after it. Not the one we hope we qualify for. This one.
And when you look closely at life as it is — the ordinary days, the people who drift in and out, the moments that shape us — it becomes hard to deny a simple truth:
Life is made of other people.
People who confuse us, frustrate us, and misunderstand us. People who challenge us, surprise us, and sometimes show us who we are when we’re not paying attention. Even the person we might label “the strange one” is navigating the world with their own hopes, their own disappointments, their own questions about how they’re seen.
If that’s true, then maybe the meaning of life isn’t buried in the afterlife at all.
Maybe it isn’t found in preparing for death, but in how we live with others and
in how we show up, how we respond, how we treat the people who cross our path.
Meaning, then, isn’t far away or hidden.
It’s created in the ways we choose to be human with one another.
