When Meaning Is No Longer Given

I read a story recently that tied into a concept I am reading in Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy.

This woman wakes way before dawn, as she often does now, because sleep has become unreliable. The house is too quiet now. The familiar sounds that once anchored her mornings have vanished. She sits upright, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the surge of grief that arrives each day with mechanical certainty.

Her son died first. An accident so sudden it felt provisional, as though the universe had made a clerical error it would soon correct. It never did. Her husband followed months later, his body never recovering from the injuries of the same crash. At the funerals, people leaned close and spoke in low, rehearsed tones. God knows best. Everything happens for a reason. She nodded then. She does not nod now.

What unsettles her is not grief alone, but the collapse of explanation. The rituals of life remain intact. She cooks. She cleans. She washes. She attends weddings and birthdays. Yet none of it tells her why she should continue. Faith, once steady as gravity, now feels like a language she understands but can no longer speak fluently.

That moment, when the world stops explaining itself, is where existentialism begins.

Long before the term existed, this fracture had already been diagnosed. In the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard wrote about despair as the sickness of a self unable to reconcile what it is with what it is expected to be. Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God was dead, not as a celebration of atheism as many take it to be, but as a warning that inherited meanings were eroding faster than people realized; that it was not a good thing. Fyodor Dostoevsky filled his novels with characters who discovered that rational systems could not restrain cruelty, guilt, or freedom. These thinkers were responding to a shared unease, the suspicion that meaning was no longer guaranteed by faith or reason.

Europe reached that moment in full between 1939 and 1945.

By the end of the Second World War, the continent resembled the woman’s house. Still standing, but hollowed out. Sixty million people were dead. Dresden and Warsaw lay in ruins. Hiroshima had been erased in seconds. The concentration camps revealed something more disturbing than brutality. They showed that modern efficiency could coexist with moral emptiness. The same rationality that built laboratories and universities had perfected extermination.

God had not intervened. Technological progress had not prevented catastrophe. Rational thinking had not protected the innocent. The Enlightenment promise that reason would civilize humanity lay scattered among the rubble.

This was when philosophy returned as an emergency, not as mere abstraction.

Jean-Paul Sartre encountered this collapse firsthand. Captured by German forces in 1940, he lived among prisoners stripped of freedom, watching how men behaved when external structures dissolved. Later, in occupied Paris, he observed collaborators justify betrayal with bureaucratic calm while others risked execution without moral certainty to lean on. What unsettled him was not simply the presence of evil, but how ordinary it appeared in everyday life.

When Sartre later wrote that existence precedes essence, he was refusing the idea that human beings arrive with a fixed moral blueprint. “Man is condemned to be free,” he said, meaning that even refusing to choose is itself a choice. There is no script to consult, no nature to blame. You are what you do, and every action quietly proposes a definition of what a human being should be.

The label existentialism came later. It was coined in the mid-1940s by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who used it to describe a group of thinkers preoccupied with human freedom, responsibility, and finitude. Sartre initially rejected the term when it was applied to him at a 1945 colloquium. He accepted it months later.

Albert Camus reached similar conclusions by another route. Tuberculosis nearly killed him young. War framed his adulthood. In The Stranger, his protagonist commits murder without moral narrative and faces death without repentance. Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus with a line that still unsettles readers today: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” The question was not whether life had meaning, but whether one could live honestly without pretending that it did.

Simone de Beauvoir extended these ideas into the intimate terrain of gender and power. When she wrote that one is not born but becomes a woman, she was applying existentialism to lived oppression. She meant that human beings are not born with a fixed nature that dictates who they must be. They exist first, then become what they are through action, choice, and the situations they are thrown into. Biology to her was not destiny. Freedom existed, but unevenly distributed and often fiercely resisted.

Existentialism was not born in cafés because philosophers enjoyed clever debate. It emerged because millions of people, like the grieving woman, discovered that inherited meanings could evaporate overnight.

Viktor Frankl witnessed this in the concentration camps. He observed that men often died not solely from hunger or brutality, but from the loss of purpose. Those who endured longest did not possess certainty. They clung to meanings they chose, sometimes fragile, sometimes provisional. Meaning did not save them. They carried it.

This is why existentialism refuses comfort. It does not promise redemption for suffering. It offers no assurance that history bends toward justice or that goodness will be rewarded. What it insists on instead is honesty, and a severe form of dignity.

Sartre argued that dignity begins when one accepts responsibility for a life without guarantees, acting without appeal to destiny or divine plan. Camus called this stance revolt, a refusal to surrender to despair even when the universe remains indifferent. Existentialism does not strip life of value. It relocates value from promises beyond the world to action within it.

It tells the woman in the quiet house that the absence of meaning is not her failure. It tells her that waiting for answers may be futile, but choosing how to live, going forward, is not. Even grief does not absolve her of freedom.

Existentialism endures because the world keeps recreating its conditions. Wars continue. Systems fail. People wake to find that the rules they lived by no longer apply. In that exposed space, the question returns as deman, not as theory.

What will you do now that nothing guarantees meaning?

Existentialism does not answer. It hands the question back to you.