Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times

By Steven J. Heine

10 min read

Why does it matter? Because your brain was built for meaning, not happiness — and modern life keeps breaking the machine.

By almost every measurable standard, Americans in 2020 were living better than their grandparents in 1950 — double the income, triple the living space, a full decade more of life. And they were dying of despair at triple the rate. Suicide, overdose, alcohol. The numbers don't make sense, which turns out to be precisely the point. Psychologist Steven Heine's argument, built from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and existential philosophy, is that the human brain didn't evolve to want comfort — it evolved to want coherence. Stories. A sense that the pieces fit. Strip that away and it doesn't matter how big your house is. What this book offers isn't reassurance that everything will be fine. It's something stranger and more useful: an explanation of why your brain is behaving exactly as designed, and a framework for understanding why the story you've been telling yourself might be cracking.

We Are Richer, Healthier, and More Miserable Than Ever

Something about our current moment should be impossible. By almost every material measure, life in the wealthy world is dramatically better than it was in the mid-twentieth century. Median American household income, adjusted for inflation, has roughly doubled since 1950. Average life expectancy climbed from 68 to 79 years. Homes nearly tripled in size. And yet deaths of despair — suicide, overdose, alcohol — have tripled over that same period. We are richer, safer, and longer-lived than any humans in history, and we are killing ourselves at record rates.

The crisis isn't material. It's a collapse in the connections that make life feel meaningful. Psychologist Steven Heine points to five that have quietly eroded: family dinners together have dropped by a third since the 1970s; time spent with friends has fallen by two-thirds in recent years; PTA membership is half what it was in the 1950s; church attendance has declined by a third; and the rise of gig work and remote employment has hollowed out the social fabric of the workplace. Each loss might seem minor in isolation. Together, they amount to a wholesale dismantling of the structures through which people have always answered the question: does my life matter?

That's the wound. Not danger, not poverty — the slow removal of every place where the answer used to be yes.

You Are the Only Ape That Needs a Story to Survive

Imagine you wake up with no language, no shared history with anyone around you, no collective story about who you belong to or why any of it matters. You still have your body, your hunger, your reflexes. But you probably wouldn't survive long — and that gap between a chimp's odds and yours reveals something important about what humans actually are.

Primatologist Michael Tomasello spent years watching chimpanzees and noticed something that seems trivial until you sit with it: you will never see two chimps carry a log together. Not because they lack the strength, but because they can't establish common ground — can't share a mental model of a shared task with a shared goal. Humans do this constantly, and it required a specific biological adaptation to make it work. Our sclera, the white surrounding the iris, is unique among primates. It evolved precisely so others could track where we were looking — so that minds could be read, intentions shared, coordination achieved. The white of your eye is, in evolutionary terms, a meaning-sharing organ.

That drive to share minds didn't stop at practical coordination. Between 30 and 40 percent of everything people say in ordinary conversation is self-disclosure — telling others what they think, feel, and experience — and the same neural reward circuits that respond to food and sex activate when we do it. On social media, that figure rises to around 80 percent. We are biologically compelled to broadcast ourselves into a shared reality with others. Steven Heine, who studies the psychology of meaning, calls our species Homo significativa — a term he coins to capture something that doesn't yet have settled scientific taxonomy: that we don't just navigate the world by sensing it, we navigate it by narrating it together.

Which raises a question. If meaning is this fundamental to what we are — not a comfort but a survival mechanism — what does the brain actually do when it's threatened?

Your Brain Treats Rejection the Same Way It Treats a Broken Arm

Naomi Eisenberger put college students in a brain scanner and had them play a simple computer game: toss a virtual ball back and forth with two other avatars. After a few rounds, the other avatars quietly stopped throwing to them. No explanation. The participant just sat there, waiting for a ball that never came. The region that lit up was the anterior cingulate cortex — the same structure that fires when you break your arm.

The ACC doesn't distinguish between a snapped bone and being frozen out of a game of catch. It runs a single alarm for both. When participants later reported how much the exclusion stung, the ones who hurt the most showed the strongest ACC activation — the same gradient you'd expect if you were measuring physical injury. The somatosensory cortex, which registers actual bodily pain, stayed quiet. There was no confusion in the brain between the two experiences — just the same alarm, triggered by two completely different causes.

The punchline arrived in a follow-up study: researchers gave half their participants 1,000 mg of acetaminophen daily for three weeks and the other half a placebo. When those participants played the same exclusion game, the Tylenol group showed significantly less ACC activation after being left out. An over-the-counter painkiller was blunting the sting of social rejection — not because anyone designed it that way, but because the brain never separated physical pain from existential pain in the first place.

That finding reframes something specific: the exhaustion catalogued in those loneliness surveys from Section 1, the kind that accumulates in people who report going weeks without a meaningful conversation. Modern life constantly trips this alarm — a text ignored, a meeting you weren't invited to, a sense that the community around you has dissolved. The brain processes each one the way it processes a blow. That's not weakness. It's one biological system, firing at a rate our ancestors never had to sustain.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves Are More Real to Us Than Reality

In 1969, Paul Frampton was already imagining his Nobel Prize. By 2011, the British particle physicist was seventy years old and still waiting. He was also profoundly lonely. So when a message arrived from someone claiming to be Denise Milani — a Czech swimsuit model famous enough to have her own Wikipedia entry — Frampton didn't balk. She wanted to marry him, she said. Start a family. He was, she wrote, the best thing that had happened in her cursed life. His friends looked at the photos and told him plainly he was being conned. He didn't listen. When she asked him to carry a suitcase from Bolivia into Argentina, he did it. The suitcase was packed with cocaine. Frampton was arrested, jailed in Buenos Aires alongside cartel members, watched a fellow prisoner get killed a few feet away, and still — while awaiting trial — decided to represent himself, confident a judge would simply recognize his innocence. As he later explained: "It seemed plausible at the time."

To everyone outside Frampton's head, the situation was obviously absurd. But we don't live outside our own heads. We live inside a story about who we are, and that story shapes what we're even capable of perceiving as possible. Frampton's story had a specific premise at its center: he was exceptional — destined for greatness, destined to attract greatness. That premise didn't just color his interpretation of events; it blocked him from seeing the con at all, the way a lens smeared with grease doesn't just blur an image but makes you think the world itself is soft-edged.

Jerome Bruner's playing-card experiment shows how deep this goes. Bruner flashed cards at participants — including trick cards like a red six of spades. Most people reported seeing either a red six of hearts or a black six of spades. The brain corrected the anomaly before it reached consciousness. It didn't register the wrong card and then dismiss it; it never registered the wrong card at all. Perception itself bent to fit expectation.

Which means you don't just spin a flattering story after the fact — the story screens what evidence gets admitted in the first place. Frampton's self-image didn't merely survive contact with the obvious; it demolished the obvious on arrival. The brain will edit perception, ignore testimony, and rationalize disaster before it allows the narrative of the self to break.

When Reality Breaks the Story, We Double Down — Not on the Truth, But on Something Else

The clearest demonstration comes from a study run by social psychologist Barry Staw during the Vietnam War. In 1969, thousands of young American men faced a brutal gamble: enroll in the National Guard or ROTC now — committing several years of your life — to avoid being drafted to the front lines, or wait and hope your lottery number came up high enough that you'd never be called. Men who enrolled in the ROTC made that choice before the lottery was drawn. Then the numbers came out. Men who drew low numbers discovered their enrollment had probably saved their lives. Men who drew high numbers discovered something else: they had never been at risk. They'd surrendered years to a precaution they didn't need.

Staw surveyed both groups afterward. Logic says the men who avoided Vietnam should feel best about the ROTC — it worked. But they didn't. The men who discovered their enrollment was entirely unnecessary rated their time in the ROTC significantly more positively. They described it as rewarding, character-building, worth the sacrifice. The men whose lives it had arguably saved felt lukewarm by comparison.

The unnecessary enrollees were staring at an uncomfortable truth: I gave up years of my life for nothing. That's a crack in the foundational story — I make good choices. The brain's response wasn't to sit with the discomfort or revise the premise. It was to rewrite the chapter so the choice looked wise all along. They didn't just say they'd enjoyed the ROTC more — they actually studied harder and earned better grades there, living their lives in service of a story they needed to keep intact.

Once you see this, a great deal of seemingly irrational behavior snaps into focus. People don't double down on failed beliefs because they're stupid. They do it because the alternative — admitting that a major chapter of their life was built on a mistake — threatens something the brain treats as non-negotiable. The story must hold. And if reality won't cooperate, reality gets edited.

Freedom Is the Source of the Anxiety, Not the Cure

Freedom, it turns out, is its own kind of trap. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called it the "dizziness of freedom" — the vertiginous anxiety that opens up when you stand before infinite possibilities and realize you alone must choose. This wasn't abstract for Kierkegaard. He spent a decade failing to finish his university exams because every path foreclosed every other, and he never recovered from breaking his engagement to Regine Olsen — a decision he revisited with grief for the rest of his life, ultimately leaving her his entire estate. His life wasn't ruined by too few options. It was paralyzed by too many.

WEIRD societies — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — have handed that problem to everyone. In small-scale traditional communities, most of life's major decisions arrive pre-answered: your trade is inherited, your spouse is selected within a narrow social orbit, your place in the world is legible to you by adolescence. In the modern West, all of that has been replaced with open-ended possibility. The result is a developmental stage that didn't exist a century ago: "emerging adulthood," the long unresolved stretch between adolescence and committed life. The median age of first marriage in the United States was around twenty in the 1950s and is now past twenty-eight. That gap isn't freedom being savored — it's the abyss being stared into.

What's been lost is the shared framework that once made choices feel like steps rather than leaps. Choosing a career or a partner inside a coherent cultural story about what a good life looks like is very different from choosing inside a vacuum of pure self-expression. The first is still a choice; the second is a verdict about who you fundamentally are. That's why more options keep producing more anxiety, not less. Infinite freedom, stripped of shared meaning, isn't liberation. It's just a more elaborate kind of loneliness.

When a Culture's Story Collapses, Its People Die

When the shared story collapses, so does the individual — and the Stasi figured this out before most psychologists did. In the 1970s and 1980s, East Germany's Department of Operative Psychology ran a program called zersetzung — decomposition. Agents would break into a dissident's apartment while they were out, reset the alarm clock from 7 a.m. to 5 a.m., swap the coffee and sugar, rearrange objects on shelves. Nothing missing, nothing visibly broken. Just everything slightly wrong. Phone calls at 3 a.m. with no one on the other end. Classified ads placed in the target's name offering illicit sexual services. Rumors seeded among their friends that they were Stasi informants. The goal wasn't punishment through violence — it was to decompose the structure of meaning a person depends on to understand their own life. Thousands of targets developed serious mental illness. Some took their own lives. All the Stasi had done was scramble the story.

That same dynamic plays out at cultural scale — and the consequences show up in death rates. Psychologists Michael Chandler and Christopher Lalonde spent years studying nearly two hundred Indigenous communities in British Columbia. The bands weren't identical; they varied dramatically in how much of their cultural story remained intact. Some had secured legal title to their traditional lands, established working systems of self-government, and built institutions to preserve their languages and practices. Others had none of these. Chandler and Lalonde tracked youth suicide rates across all of them, controlling for income, population density, and geography. The finding was stark: bands with all six markers of cultural continuity had suicide rates at or below the national average. Bands with none had rates hundreds of times higher — among the worst recorded anywhere on earth. The difference wasn't poverty. It was the presence or absence of a coherent story connecting past to present, ancestor to grandchild, individual life to something larger than itself.

What Chandler and Lalonde found is that the story a culture tells about itself works like infrastructure. When someone falls apart, we tend to locate the problem inside that individual. But when the story holds, individuals can weather enormous private pain. When it collapses, the damage is as predictable and collective as a bridge failing. The suffering isn't personal weakness. It's what happens when the structure that was always doing the load-bearing work is no longer there.

You Can Rebuild a Meaningful Life, but Only If You Treat It as a Story Worth Rewriting

Think of a house that's been badly neglected — roof sagging, walls damp, the structure still standing but barely. Scented candles in every room won't fix it. The repair has to happen at the level of the frame, not the décor. Heine's argument about meaning works the same way. The real problem isn't a missing gratitude ritual or an inconsistent sleep schedule. It's that the story you're living inside doesn't have a shape that makes suffering useful, setbacks legible, or your life feel like it's going somewhere worth going.

The most practical tool Heine offers comes from an unlikely source: mythologist Joseph Campbell's analysis of why stories like Star Wars grip us so completely. Campbell spent decades mapping the narratives that have gripped human audiences across cultures and found the same spine running through all of them — a person whose ordinary life ruptures without warning, who is forced into a journey they didn't choose, and who emerges changed in a way that leaves something behind for the people they came from. The structure works because it maps onto something true about how meaning is actually built. Hardship stops being a verdict on your life and becomes a chapter in it.

What Heine's research shows is that people who deliberately reframe their own biographies this way — treating their worst chapters not as evidence that life is random and cruel, but as the crucible that made them who they are — report measurably higher levels of flourishing. Henry James put the underlying insight cleanly, though it's easy to miss how radical it is: adventures happen to people who know how to tell it that way. The events of your life aren't fixed. The story you construct around them is a choice, and some versions of that story are genuinely better than others.

This is the final move the book makes, and it's the one that earns the earlier argument. The answer to an absurd world isn't to deny the absurdity or paper over it with habits. It's to cast yourself — honestly, not delusionally — as someone whose particular struggle is worth the telling.

The Absurd Is Not the Enemy — It's the Starting Point

Here is what the science keeps returning to, underneath all the neuroscience and the mythology and the mortality statistics: your brain is not asking for comfort. It is asking for a story coherent enough to act from. Not a flattering story, not a painless one — just one where the suffering has a direction and the protagonist is recognizably you. The tools for building that story turn out to be oddly specific: find which foundation is cracking, name the chapter you're actually in, locate the quest. That's not therapy-speak. That's the architecture your brain actually requires. Camus looked at Sisyphus straining under a boulder he'd never get over the hill and called him happy — not because the absurdity vanished, but because he'd made it his. You can do the same thing. The story doesn't write itself, but it also doesn't require better circumstances. It requires a different framing. That part is yours to choose.