"Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning"
About this Quote
Campbell is yanking meaning off the altar and putting it back in your hands. The opening line, flat and almost abrasive - "Life is without meaning" - functions like a trapdoor: it drops the reader out of inherited purpose (religion, nation, career ladder) and into a kind of existential free fall. Then he immediately offers the counterweight: not a cosmic answer, but a human one. Meaning is made, not found.
The subtext is classic Campbell: myths aren’t divine instruction manuals, they’re psychological technologies. When he says you "bring the meaning", he’s defending the individual imagination against a modern world that has industrialized belief into slogans and checklists. It’s also a rebuke to passive spirituality: if you’re waiting for life to explain itself, you’re already outsourcing your agency.
"The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be" is provocatively democratic, but not sentimental. It implies responsibility. If meaning is authored, then so is emptiness; nihilism becomes less a diagnosis than a choice of story. That’s why the final turn lands: "Being alive is the meaning". It’s not Hallmark affirmation; it’s a reframing of the hero’s journey. The goal isn’t a prize at the end - it’s participation, intensity, presence. In context, coming from a 20th-century mythologist watching old certainties dissolve, it reads like a cultural survival strategy: when the shared gods crack, aliveness itself becomes the last common myth you can still inhabit.
The subtext is classic Campbell: myths aren’t divine instruction manuals, they’re psychological technologies. When he says you "bring the meaning", he’s defending the individual imagination against a modern world that has industrialized belief into slogans and checklists. It’s also a rebuke to passive spirituality: if you’re waiting for life to explain itself, you’re already outsourcing your agency.
"The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be" is provocatively democratic, but not sentimental. It implies responsibility. If meaning is authored, then so is emptiness; nihilism becomes less a diagnosis than a choice of story. That’s why the final turn lands: "Being alive is the meaning". It’s not Hallmark affirmation; it’s a reframing of the hero’s journey. The goal isn’t a prize at the end - it’s participation, intensity, presence. In context, coming from a 20th-century mythologist watching old certainties dissolve, it reads like a cultural survival strategy: when the shared gods crack, aliveness itself becomes the last common myth you can still inhabit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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