Consider the following comments on meaning.
Meaning is not something you find lying about, it is something you decide to keep.
The question of life's meaning visits us most often when we are too tired to answer it.
Perhaps a life does not have a meaning so much as it has meanings, one for each person who loved it.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
We ask what life means when what we really want to ask is whether we matter.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that meaning is less a truth we uncover than a relationship we build, and that the question feels urgent precisely when that relationship has frayed. Open with a concrete moment, perhaps a sleepless night or a sudden stillness after a loss, when the usual busyness fell away and the question surfaced unbidden. Then explore the tension between meaning as something given, by faith, family or role, and meaning as something made, chosen and tended without any guarantee that it is real. A useful structural move contrasts the times life felt obviously meaningful, often while absorbed in someone or something, against the times the question itself arrived, usually in isolation. Caution: resist the tidy resolution that meaning is simply whatever you decide it is, since that answer can feel hollow at three in the morning, and the honest reflection sits with the difficulty rather than dissolving it.