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There’s a quiet pressure most people walk around with that they don’t even realize is there.
It sounds like this: this has to mean something. Every interaction. Every setback. Every shift in someone’s behavior. Every closed door. Every unexpected turn. We’re constantly trying to decode life like it’s sending us personal messages about who we are.
And most of the time, the conclusions we land on aren’t exactly generous. We make things mean we’re not enough. Not chosen. Not secure. Not on the right path. We build entire identities off a handful of moments that were never meant to carry that kind of weight. But what if that whole instinct is off? What if life isn’t speaking in that way at all?
Strip everything down, and what you’re left with is something much simpler than we tend to believe. Life is movement. It’s change. It’s contrast. It’s a constant unfolding of different experiences, none of which arrive with a built-in interpretation. Meaning doesn’t come attached. It gets added after.
That might sound unsettling at first. People want life to be intentional in a personal, directed way. They want to feel like there’s a specific reason things are happening to them. But that belief is also what makes everything feel so loaded. Because if everything means something about you, then everything has the potential to reinforce something painful.
You don’t get the job, and it’s not just a job. It’s evidence.
Someone pulls away, and it’s not just distance. It’s rejection.
Something falls apart, and it’s not just change. It’s failure.
Now you’re not just living your life. You’re constantly being defined by it. That’s exhausting. And it’s not accurate. Life doesn’t revolve around assigning you value. It doesn’t operate on a system of personal validation or punishment. It’s not handing out experiences based on how worthy you are. It’s simply offering a range of possibilities, and you move through them.
Some of those possibilities feel incredible. Some of them hurt. But none of them, on their own, determine who you are. The problem is, we don’t leave experiences alone. We take them and stretch them into stories that follow us long after the moment is gone.
A single situation becomes a pattern.
A pattern becomes a belief.
A belief becomes an identity.
And now something temporary has turned into something that feels permanent. But that only happens because of the meaning you gave it. If you’re honest, you can probably trace a few of your core beliefs back to specific moments that felt significant at the time. Maybe they were emotional. Maybe they caught you off guard. Maybe they reinforced something you were already a little afraid of.
So you decided, consciously or not, this is what this means. And then you kept deciding it. That repetition is what makes it feel true. Not the moment itself. When you start to see that clearly, something shifts. You realize that what you’ve been treating as fact is actually interpretation. And interpretation can change. That’s where the freedom is. Because if meaning isn’t fixed, then neither is your story.
You’re not locked into the version of yourself that came out of your worst experiences. You’re not required to carry forward every conclusion you’ve ever made. You don’t have to keep proving old beliefs right just because they’ve been with you for a long time. You can choose differently. That doesn’t mean pretending things didn’t happen. It means refusing to let those things define the rest of your life. There’s a difference.
Most people are trying to control their circumstances so they can finally feel stable. They think if they can just avoid the wrong outcomes and secure the right ones, everything will fall into place internally. But life doesn’t work that way. There will always be unpredictability. There will always be moments you didn’t plan for. There will always be things that don’t go how you thought they would.
If your sense of self is tied to those outcomes, you’ll always feel like you’re on shaky ground. But if your sense of self comes from how you choose to interpret what happens, that’s something you actually have influence over. That’s solid.
You stop needing everything to go right in order to feel okay. You stop assigning yourself a role based on every external shift. You start moving through experiences instead of being shaped by them. That’s a completely different way of living. And it starts with questioning the automatic meanings your mind jumps to.
Here’s what that actually looks like in real time:
When someone pulls back or goes quiet, your mind will want to land on they’re losing interest or I did something wrong.
Pause. Don’t run with it.
Ask yourself: What else could be true here?
Then choose a meaning that keeps you grounded instead of spiraling. Maybe they’re busy. Maybe they’re overwhelmed. Maybe it has nothing to do with you. You don’t need to force a conclusion that hurts you.
When something doesn’t work out the way you planned, the default is usually this wasn’t meant for me or I missed my chance.
Slow it down.
Try: This just didn’t align right now.
That one shift keeps the door open instead of slamming it shut.
When you feel rejected, embarrassed, or overlooked, your brain will try to turn it into identity: I’m not enough. I’m not chosen.
Interrupt that immediately.
Replace it with something neutral: That didn’t land the way I wanted.
It sounds simple, but it stops the moment from turning into a belief about who you are.
When you catch yourself replaying something over and over, looking for what it “means,” that’s your cue. You’re trying to create certainty where there isn’t any. Instead of analyzing it to death, decide: this doesn’t get to define me. Then move forward.
This isn’t about pretending everything is positive. It’s about refusing to default to meanings that shrink you. It’s about staying in charge of the story instead of letting your first reaction write it for you.
Not everything that feels true is true.
Not every thought deserves your loyalty.
Not every story needs to be continued.
You get to interrupt the pattern. You get to decide that one moment doesn’t define the next one. You get to decide that someone else’s behavior doesn’t determine your value. You get to decide that a difficult experience isn’t a life sentence. Those decisions matter more than the event itself. Because they shape what comes after.
So yeah, if you want to look at it bluntly, life is meaningless. Not in a depressing way. In a clean way. It doesn’t box you in. It doesn’t label you. It doesn’t assign you a fixed identity based on what you’ve been through. It leaves space. And in that space, you get to decide who you are, again and again, without being tied to what came before. That’s not empty. That’s freedom.
If this shifted something for you, my book Radical Remembering takes it further. It’s about breaking down the stories you’ve been living inside of and returning to a version of you that isn’t defined by them.
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