“După ce am descoperit că viaţa nu are nici un sens, nu ne rămâne altceva de făcut decât să-i dăm un sens.” — Lucian Blaga
“After we have discovered that life has no meaning, there is nothing left to do but to give it one.”
I return to this sentence of Lucian Blaga the way one returns to a familiar crossroads: not because I expect the signposts to change, but because I have. Each time I arrive, I stand there slightly older, slightly more worn, slightly more awake. The words remain deceptively simple, almost blunt, yet they contain a depth that seems to expand the more I live with them. They do not console me. They do not promise anything. They simply describe a task—perhaps the task—that falls to us once certain illusions have burned away.
I remember the first time I truly understood what it meant to say that life has “no meaning.” I was younger, armed with books, intoxicated by ideas, and still secretly hoping that somewhere—behind history, biology, or metaphysics—there was a final explanation waiting to be uncovered. Not a religious one, necessarily, but something solid, something that would justify the effort of waking up every morning. The discovery that there might be no such thing did not arrive as a thunderclap. It seeped in slowly, like cold through a cracked window. And when it finally settled, it left the room strangely quiet.
Blaga’s sentence does not begin with despair, but with discovery. “After we have discovered…” This matters to me. It suggests that meaninglessness is not a failure or a defect in the world, but a realization—an awakening. To discover that life has no inherent meaning is not to lose something that was once there; it is to stop projecting something that never was. That realization can feel brutal, even cruel. It strips away the comfort of destiny, the reassurance of cosmic intention. But it also clears the ground. It leaves us standing in an open field, with nothing written in the sky.
For a long time, I resisted that openness. I wanted meaning to be found, not made. Finding feels objective, almost scientific; making feels arbitrary, suspiciously human. I worried that any meaning I gave to life would be fragile, self-serving, or naïve. If the universe is indifferent, I thought, then surely my little constructions of purpose are nothing more than decorations on a void. Pretty, perhaps, but ultimately dishonest.
Yet Blaga does not say that we should give life a meaning, as a moral imperative. He says that nothing else remains for us to do. It is not an ethical command; it is an existential description. Once the old sources of meaning collapse—God, fate, metaphysical necessity—there is no neutral ground to retreat to. We cannot go back to believing by sheer will. We are left with ourselves, our consciousness, our capacity to shape significance where none is given.
What strikes me most is the quiet courage embedded in this idea. There is no heroism in discovering that life lacks inherent meaning. Anyone paying attention long enough will stumble upon that fact. The courage lies in what follows: in refusing nihilism as a final answer, and in refusing illusion as a refuge. To give life meaning without lying to oneself—this is the narrow path Blaga gestures toward.
I often think about how easily “life has no meaning” is confused with “nothing matters.” I made that mistake myself. In the early days of my existential awakening, everything seemed equally empty. Success and failure blurred into the same grey mass. If nothing had ultimate meaning, why care about kindness, creation, or even survival beyond instinct? Nihilism felt logical, almost elegant in its bleak symmetry.
But living inside that logic proved impossible. My body rebelled. My emotions refused to cooperate. I still felt joy when someone smiled at me unexpectedly. I still felt grief when I lost people I loved. I still felt anger at injustice, even knowing that the universe would not correct it. These reactions were not philosophical arguments; they were facts of my lived experience. And slowly, reluctantly, I began to understand that meaning does not have to be ultimate to be real.
Blaga’s thought helped me articulate that realization. Meaning is not something life owes us. It is something we owe life—or perhaps something we owe ourselves in the face of life’s silence. The absence of inherent meaning is not an accusation against existence; it is an invitation. A dangerous one, yes, because it offers no guarantees. But also a profoundly human one.
I am aware, as I write this, of how easy it is to romanticize the act of “giving meaning.” In practice, it is messy, inconsistent, and often painful. I do not wake up each morning feeling like a sovereign creator of purpose. Most days, I wake up tired, anxious, distracted by trivial concerns. The grand existential task Blaga implies is carried out not in moments of philosophical clarity, but in small, repetitive choices: to care rather than withdraw, to speak honestly rather than hide, to create rather than merely consume.
There is something deeply unglamorous about this. Giving life meaning is not a one-time decision; it is an ongoing labor. The meanings I gave my life ten years ago no longer sustain me. Some have collapsed under scrutiny; others have withered because I neglected them. This does not mean the project failed. It means that meaning, like life itself, is dynamic. It changes as I change.
Blaga, as a thinker and poet, understood the tension between mystery and creation. He did not advocate for reducing the world to something fully transparent or controllable. On the contrary, much of his work is infused with reverence for the unknown, for what he called the “mystery” that surrounds human existence. This is another reason his sentence resonates with me. To give life meaning is not to explain it away. It is to respond to its mystery with form, gesture, and intention.
I think often about art in this context. Why do we write poems, paint canvases, compose music, or tell stories if life has no built-in meaning? Precisely because it doesn’t. Art is one of the most tangible ways we give shape to significance. When I read a novel that moves me, I know, intellectually, that it does not alter the laws of physics or the ultimate fate of the cosmos. And yet, it changes me. It reorganizes my inner world. That reorganization is meaning.
The same is true of relationships. If life had a preordained meaning, perhaps love would be merely a means to an end. But in a meaningless universe, love becomes an end in itself. I love not because it fulfills a cosmic plan, but because it transforms my experience of being alive. When Blaga says we must give life meaning, I hear an endorsement of this kind of grounded, embodied significance—meaning that emerges from engagement, not abstraction.
There is also a darker side to this freedom. If meaning is something we give, then we can also give destructive meanings. History is full of examples of people who, confronted with the void, filled it with ideologies that justified cruelty and domination. The absence of inherent meaning does not make us automatically wise or compassionate. It simply makes us responsible. This is a burden Blaga’s sentence does not shy away from.
I feel that burden acutely when I think about the choices I make that affect others. If there is no higher authority guaranteeing justice, then my actions carry even more weight, not less. The meaning I give my life spills into the lives around me. I cannot hide behind destiny or divine will. My values are exposed as my own, and I must live with their consequences.
At times, this responsibility exhausts me. There are days when I envy those who can still believe that everything happens for a reason, that suffering is part of a larger plan. Their pain, I imagine, must feel more organized than mine. But envy fades when I remember the cost of such beliefs: the surrender of intellectual honesty, the silencing of doubt. Blaga’s path is harder, but it allows me to remain awake.
I do not think Blaga meant that we give life a meaning once and for all. The Romanian phrasing—să-i dăm un sens—suggests an ongoing act, not a finished product. A sense, a direction, a way of orienting ourselves. This resonates with how meaning actually functions in my life: as orientation rather than destination. Meaning tells me where to face, not where I will end up.
For me, that orientation has increasingly turned toward presence. In a meaningless universe, the present moment gains an almost sacred quality—not because it is eternal, but because it is fleeting. I give meaning to my life when I pay attention: to a conversation, to a walk, to the texture of a thought. This may sound modest, even trivial, but it is radical in a culture obsessed with grand narratives and future rewards.
I also give meaning through refusal. I refuse certain definitions of success that reduce life to accumulation. I refuse the idea that productivity equals worth. These refusals are not passive; they require constant reinforcement. Every advertisement, every social comparison challenges the meanings I have chosen. To give life meaning is also to defend that meaning against erosion.
Blaga’s sentence does not promise happiness. This is another point I appreciate. Meaning is not the same as comfort. Some of the meanings that have mattered most to me—honesty, responsibility, creativity—have led me into discomfort and loss. But they have also made my life feel mine. In a world without given meaning, ownership of one’s life becomes a form of dignity.
As I grow older, I notice that my fear of meaninglessness has softened. It no longer feels like a threat waiting to swallow everything I love. Instead, it feels like a background condition, like gravity. I no longer rage against it. I work with it. Blaga’s words have helped me make that shift—from resistance to collaboration.
There is a quiet humility in accepting that the universe does not revolve around human concerns. At the same time, there is a quiet audacity in insisting that human concerns matter to us, and that this is enough. Meaning does not need cosmic endorsement to function. It needs commitment, care, and continuity.
When I look back on my life so far, I do not see a single, coherent meaning running through it like a hidden thread. I see layers: meanings adopted, abandoned, revised. Some were borrowed, others invented under pressure. Some sustained me; others misled me. This layered quality no longer bothers me. It feels honest. A life given meaning by a human being should look human—uneven, tentative, unfinished.
Blaga does not offer a system. He offers a sentence that opens a space. In that space, I must act. I must choose what to value, knowing that my choices rest on nothing firmer than my own judgment and experience. This is frightening, yes. But it is also the source of all genuine creativity.
If life had an inherent meaning, my role would be interpretive at best. I would be a reader of a prewritten text. But in a meaningless universe, I am also a writer. Not of the whole story, but of my chapters, my sentences, sometimes even my punctuation. This does not make me omnipotent; it makes me involved.
I do not know whether Blaga intended his saying to be read optimistically or tragically. Perhaps the power of the sentence lies in the fact that it resists such categorization. It acknowledges loss—the loss of given meaning—without surrendering to despair. It acknowledges responsibility without celebrating it as liberation. It simply states a condition and a response.
As I sit with this thought today, I feel neither triumphant nor defeated. I feel engaged. Life does not make sense on its own, and that is not a scandal. It is a fact. What matters is how I answer that fact with my living. Each day, in small and large ways, I give life a meaning—not because it demands one, but because I do.
And perhaps that is the quiet wisdom at the heart of Blaga’s saying: that meaning is not discovered at the end of inquiry, but enacted in the midst of uncertainty. Not found in the structure of the universe, but forged in the fragile space between consciousness and time. After discovering that life has no meaning, there is nothing left to do—but everything left to live.