7 Things I've Learnt Looking for Meaning

This is my second week of openly reflecting on finding meaning in life, and it's been an interesting one.

Over on my YouTube channel, I've been sharing these thoughts as they come, one video at a time, without a neat plan or a tidy conclusion waiting at the end. Just honest exploration of a question I've been avoiding for longer than I'd like to admit.

Something interesting happens when you slow down long enough to ask the hard questions.

For most of my life I didn't. I was always in motion, running, playing poker, building a coaching business, chasing the next level. I knew what the goal was, I knew how to show up for it, and that clarity felt good. It felt like purpose.

But about a year ago, that clarity started to fade. The old games lost their pull. The old stories stopped feeling like mine. And for the first time in a long time, I didn't really know what I was doing or why.

That's where this series began. Not from a place of having answers, but from deciding to stop running from the questions.

Over the last seven videos, I've been exploring what meaning actually is, where it comes from, and what gets in the way of finding it.

Here are the 7 insights I had this week.

#1: Where Meaning Lives

The first question I had to sit with was: where do you even begin to look?

I came across a framework from a book called The Power of Meaning that gave me some useful anchors. It suggests there are four main sources of meaning in life:

Belonging — feeling genuinely connected to people who feel like yours. Not just having friends, but actually feeling like you're part of something.

Purpose — having a direction. Something you're working toward that feels like it matters, that makes showing up worthwhile.

Storytelling — the inner narrative. The story you're living in. Are you the main character? Does the story excite you? Are you inspired by where it's heading?

Transcendence — going beyond yourself. Doing things not for recognition or achievement, but in service of something larger than your own identity.

When I looked at these four honestly, I felt lacking in all of them.

What struck me most was this: you probably only need one of these to be truly strong to feel like your life has meaning. If your sense of belonging is deep, or your purpose is clear, or your story feels alive, that's often enough. I hadn't really nurtured any of them properly. I'd gone all in on one at a time and left the others behind.

#2. Can You Manufacture Meaning?

Once I had that framework, my natural instinct kicked in: great, now I know the areas. Let me go and build meaning in each one.

That instinct led me to an uncomfortable question. Can you actually use your mind to create meaning? Or does meaning have to be discovered?

I've spent a lot of time with stoicism, with CBT-style thinking, with reframing. I'm good at it. I can take a situation and find the perspective that makes it feel manageable, even positive. And that matters. Going from a victim mindset to a more open, accepting one genuinely changes your experience of life.

But I've started to notice that tidying up the narrative is different from actually feeling meaning. You can clean up the noise in your head and still feel like something essential is missing.

My honest sense is this: the mind can remove the obstacles. It can stop you from creating suffering where there doesn't need to be any. But the deeper feeling of being connected to something, of genuinely meaning it, that seems to come from discovery. From taking action, seeing what resonates, and letting life respond.

The mind doesn't like that answer. It wants to plan things, create certainty, solve the problem. But meaning doesn't seem to be that kind of problem.

#3. Climbing the Pyramid, and Finding It Incomplete

To make sense of where I am, I spent time revisiting Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

The model maps our motivation across five layers: survival, safety, belonging, esteem, and at the top, self-actualisation, reaching your full potential.

When I traced my own life through it, I could see the progression clearly. Early on, it was about covering the basics. Then stability. Then connection. Then esteem, getting respect in poker, building confidence as a coach. And now I'm somewhere between the top layers, trying to figure out what self-actualisation even looks like for me at this point.

But here's what I found most interesting: Maslow himself wasn't satisfied with this model. In his later work, notes released after his death, he added a growth need above self-actualisation: self-transcendence. Going beyond the self entirely. Living in service of something greater.

Maslow wrote that the goal of identity, becoming the best version of yourself, is simultaneously an end goal and a stepping stone. You have to complete it to get past it. You have to earn your own selfhood in order to genuinely let go of it.

He realised self-actualisation was still fundamentally self-focused. Transcendence is about dissolving that self-focus entirely. That landed differently for me. It reframed the whole journey. The achievement isn't the destination. It's a rite of passage on the way to something that doesn't revolve around you at all.

#4. What If You've Been Playing the Wrong Games?

There's a question I've been sitting with that I haven't heard talked about much: what happens when you don't know what game to play next?

I've played a few games in my life and I played them seriously. Running, get faster times, climb the rankings. Poker, beat the level, move up, make money. Coaching, help people, build something, earn your place. Each game had clear rules, clear metrics, and I knew how to show up for it.

But each of those games also had a problem it was solving. Running solved a recognition problem. Poker solved a money problem. Coaching maybe solved a self-worth problem. The games and the problems were always linked.

Now I'm in a phase where the old games don't feel right anymore, and the new game hasn't revealed itself. And I noticed something: rather than sit with that, the temptation is enormous to just rush into a new game. Any game. Set a financial goal, launch something, pick a direction. The mind wants certainty more than it wants alignment.

Peter Thiel talks about this in his book Zero To One. The idea that you can win a game and still have played the wrong one. Andre Agassi became one of the best tennis players in the world, then admitted he never loved tennis. He won the game. He just wasn't sure it was worth playing.

I don't want that. So I'm trying to wait, to stay in the discomfort of not knowing, long enough to see what game actually feels worth playing.

#5. It’s Ok To Not Know

This has been one of the harder things to write honestly about, because it goes against everything I know how to do.

For the first time in my adult life, I genuinely don't know what I'm working toward. Not in the short term. Not in any concrete sense. And rather than sprinting toward a plan, which I absolutely could do, I'm trying to stay in the uncertainty and see what it brings.

Here's what I keep coming back to: if you could script out your entire life in advance, every goal achieved, every experience had, you'd probably spend a few years doing it. Then at some point you'd go: now what? And you'd want life to surprise you again. You'd want to not know what's next.

Alan Watts makes this point beautifully. If you could fulfil every fantasy you've ever had, you'd eventually find your way back to wanting the open-ended, uncertain game. Because the not knowing is where life actually lives.

I'm 37. The voice in my head says I should have this figured out by now. But another, quieter voice is saying: sit with it. Be okay not knowing. The right path tends to reveal itself when you stop forcing it.

#6. The Danger of Staying Busy

One of the biggest realisations I've had during this series is how easy it is to spend a whole life busy, and to never actually ask what it's all for.

I've been in motion for as long as I can remember. And for the most part, that motion was good. Fun, even. I was pursuing things that felt alive.

But busyness is also one of the most effective ways to avoid the deeper questions. When you're always onto the next thing, you never have to sit with the discomfort of not knowing. Your phone is there if things get too quiet. Your next goal is there if things feel too uncertain. And life just keeps going.

What shifted for me is that the old distractions stopped working. The goals that used to feel urgent started feeling hollow. And when I tried to keep myself busy, I felt something pushing back, an internal pull toward going deeper, toward asking questions I'd been sidestepping for years.

The fear underneath it all, if I'm honest, is this: I don't want to look back one day and realise I lived busy but not meaningfully. I don't want to have been efficient in the wrong direction.

So I'm clearing space. Not perfectly, not all at once. But more than before. And the deeper questions are starting to come to the surface.

#7. Taking Life Less Seriously

The final thing I've been exploring is one I didn't expect to land as powerfully as it did.

When did life get so serious?

I grew up playful. Poker in my 20s still felt like play, just a game, a fun game, that happened to also have stakes. But somewhere in my early 30s, as I moved into coaching and started taking on a more professional identity, something shifted. I started treating life as a project to be optimised. Something to get right.

And I think that's where a lot of the weight crept in.

When life feels serious, everything feels like it matters too much. Every decision carries consequences. Every phase of uncertainty becomes a crisis. You lose the looseness that lets things actually arrive naturally.

What I'm trying to recapture, in the day-to-day rather than as some grand framework, is the attitude that this is all just a game. Not in a nihilistic way. But in the sense that you can be fully committed to something and also hold it lightly. You can care deeply and still laugh at yourself. You can not know what's next and still enjoy the not knowing.

Children learn this naturally. They don't approach life as a performance. They just show up, try things, fail, laugh, and try again. Somewhere along the way, most of us are conditioned out of it.

I think conditioning yourself back into it is possible. It just takes some unlearning.

What This All Points To

Another seven videos in, I don't have the answers. I wouldn't trust myself if I said I did.

But I'm starting to see some of the shape of the thing. Meaning doesn't come from optimising harder. It doesn't come from manufacturing a better narrative. It comes from slowing down enough to actually feel what resonates, and then having the courage to follow that, even when it doesn't make obvious sense.

It comes from connection that's real, stories you're actually living in, and at some point, from giving yourself over to something that goes beyond the project of becoming a better version of yourself.

I'm not there yet. But I'm closer to understanding the direction than I was.

That feels like enough for now.

Thank you for reading and I’ll see you next week for more insights.

Adam