the.com/meaninglessness
The suspicion that the universe never signed the contract you think you're living under.
means The quality of lacking purpose, significance, or sense — the state of being empty of meaning.
from Built from 'meaning' (from Old English 'mænan,' to intend or signify) plus the negating '-less' and the noun-forming '-ness.' The word itself is a 19th-century assembly job — philosophy and literature needed a noun for the void, so English bolted one together from parts already lying around, rather than importing some older, grander root. Its rise tracks the rise of existentialist thought, which needed exactly this kind of plain, load-bearing word to name what classical vocabularies hadn't needed to.
- philosophical term
- central to absurdism and existentialist thought
- camus take
- the gap between wanting meaning and finding none
- not the same as
- nihilism, which says nothing matters at all
- common fix
- humans invent meaning anyway, daily, on purpose