“So, what’s it all about, then?” a London cab driver once asked British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Perhaps thrilled to have one of the world’s great thinkers in the back of his taxi, the driver seized the opportunity to pose a question as old as time itself: What does it all mean? But to his surprise, Russell didn’t have a ready answer. “And, you know, he couldn’t tell me!” the cabby later recounted.

You might think this is exactly the kind of question a philosopher, of all people, should have nailed. But the search for life’s meaning is a thorny conundrum — especially for those who devote their careers to thinking about it. Philosophers often care less about answers and more about the right questions. Some even argue that “What is the meaning of life?” might not be a meaningful question at all.

“What do we even mean by ‘the meaning of life,’ anyway?” asks Stephen Finlay, an adjunct professor of philosophy who taught a USC Dornsife course of the same name for several years. Does it suggest a single, objective meaning that applies to everyone? And if not, should that leave us disheartened? Or is it possible that meaning varies — that different lives might hold different meanings?

Untangling these questions requires patience and careful thought. But for many students, engaging with them can be a profoundly transformative experience. “It’s often the first time students have seriously confronted these questions,” says Finlay. “But they are questions and ideas that, once contemplated, are never forgotten.”

Grappling with Mortality

Many students begin the course assuming that life will be meaningful if it has an objective purpose. But Finlay is quick to challenge that idea. To make his point, he plays a clip from the film The Matrix, illustrating how even a life with a clear, objective purpose can be devoid of any satisfying meaning. “Why are we here?” he asks. “Well, this movie provides an answer: We’re being farmed by machines to provide energy. That’s the entire purpose of our existence.” Finlay pauses, then poses the deeper question: “So, do you feel that this information would give you an answer to the meaning of your life? Or would it instead suggest that your life is utterly meaningless?”

To push students further, Finlay opens the course with a discussion of death and suffering, asking them to consider what might happen to their bodies after death. Why so macabre off the bat? He explains that the idea of life ending with the body’s destruction was a key reason 19th-century philosophers began questioning whether existence has any meaning at all. Two centuries later, Finlay says, jolting students out of their comfort zone remains a powerful way to alert them to what’s at stake for them personally.

“Most students have never grappled with their mortality. A little bit of doom and gloom, even some shock and horror, is effective in waking people up to issues they’re usually very comfortable ignoring,” Finlay says. “How,” he asks, “can life be worth living when we are going to die and all memory of us will eventually be obliterated?” This was Tolstoy’s question. One of the first major writers in the European tradition to grapple with the possibility that life might be ultimately meaningless, the Russian novelist experienced a profound existential crisis in the 1870s. Originally an atheist, Tolstoy became consumed by the question of life’s purpose — a question that, according to Finlay, “began to gnaw at him, eventually becoming an all-consuming blackness as he wondered: How can anything have any value if it’s all going to crumble to dust and be forgotten?”

Shaking the Foundations

While Tolstoy may have felt the weight of meaninglessness more than most, he wasn’t alone. The 19th century was a time of deep existential unease, as advances in biology and geology began to shake faith in traditional religious teachings. The idea that humans had evolved from apes, or that Earth’s history extended far beyond the Biblical timeline, raised unsettling questions about our place in the universe.

“Some of the anxiety stemmed from the rise of modern science, which revealed a vast cosmos and an immense timescale,” says Ralph Wedgwood, director of the School of Philosophy at USC Dornsife and professor of philosophy. “We began to appear to be minuscule, insignificant — almost infinitesimal — fragments of the universe.” Recent scientific breakthroughs — including the realization that our galaxy could contain billions of potentially Earth-like planets — have shrunk humanity’s significance further still.

After a period of deep anguish, Tolstoy found solace in Christianity, placing his trust in religious tradition to restore meaning to his life. But other 19th-century thinkers, equally consumed by the question of life’s purpose, couldn’t find their answers in God.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, deeply influenced by Buddhism, believed the secret to a meaningful life lay in eliminating desire, which he saw as the source of all suffering. English utilitarian philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill proposed a contrasting answer: The meaning of life, they argued, is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. That philosophy later inspired contemporary movements like effective altruism, in which adherents — many of them based in Silicon Valley — believe we should use logic and data to determine how best to help others and then devote our lives to that cause.

Happiness Isn’t the Answer

Friedrich Nietzsche had little patience for the utilitarians. In this German philosopher’s view, a hedonistic quest was not the purpose of life. “Mankind does not strive for happiness,” he wrote — adding wryly, “only the Englishman does that.” Instead, Nietzsche believed the meaning of one’s own life must be invented, not discovered. French existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus later echoed that view, arguing that life has no inherent meaning and that it’s our responsibility to create one for ourselves.

“The existentialists thought that, if there is no God, then it’s up to us to shape the truth about who we are,” says Finlay.

The USC Dornsife philosopher embraces that existential outlook himself. Finlay firmly rejects the idea that life comes preloaded with some external meaning, waiting to be discovered. “As human beings, we try to impose artificial and false simplicity onto a chaotic world,” he says. But does that mean life is pointless? Not necessarily. “I’m not a raving nihilist,” Finlay insists. Nietzsche, he believes, was on the right track. There can be joy in shedding illusions and facing reality head-on. “There’s a joyful wisdom in being able to look the world in the eye, see it for what it really is, and say, ‘Yes, bring it on. I want this.’”

It’s an idea, says Finlay, that can feel exhilarating. If there’s no single, objective meaning to life, we are free to shape our own. And while existence may not come with a built-in purpose, life can still hold many meanings — ones that resonate with us personally and offer feelings of happiness and fulfillment. From this perspective, pinpointing the meaning of one’s life becomes a process of exploration, trial and error.

Finlay says that one of the questions he asks students is, “Why the meaning of life? Might there be many meanings for different lives? Might your life have different meanings at different times?”

Wisdom, Knowledge and Virtue

Wedgwood, however, offers a very different perspective. He’s more persuaded by the Ancient Greek philosophers, who, while they never explicitly asked about “the meaning of life,” were interested in its purpose. And for thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, that purpose was clear: The aim of life is self-perfection — the pursuit of wisdom, knowledge and virtue.

“Some people think that sounds terribly self-centered,” says Wedgwood. “But almost all the ancient philosophers who advocated some version of this view insisted that playing your part within the communities to which you belong is also a crucial element of self-perfection.”

Wedgwood’s perspective, he admits, is a “minority view.” While many philosophers dispute the existence of a universal purpose to life, he insists there is an objectively correct answer to how we should live. He acknowledges the difficulty of determining what makes a life good, but he defends the view that it is possible to live an objectively good life — or an objectively bad one — and that some people fall short of their potential.

Humans, he argues, have certain capacities, including the unique ability to reason. Realizing those capacities, he says, is what it means to live well. “Individuals definitely do find different paths through life, different experiments in living,” he says. “But it’s still objectively true that some of those paths are good and reasonable ones, while others are bad and unreasonable. You can have a view that accepts and even celebrates diversity in human beings while still holding that virtues — such as courage and fair mindedness — are fundamentally objective.”

The Dark Side of Greek Philosophy

The Ancient Greek philosophers, in fact, did accept that different people might have different goals and capacities. But for Assistant Professor of Philosophy Merrick Anderson, that very idea points to an abhorrent aspect of Aristotle’s legacy: his defense of slavery.

“Aristotle is notorious for having defended ‘natural slavery,’” says Anderson. “What he meant by that is certain people are just born ill-equipped intellectually to figure out how to lead their own lives.”

It’s an odious idea. And yet, even if their values sometimes clashed with ours, the Ancient Greek philosophers were still asking the right questions, Anderson argues — especially about how we ought to live.

For thinkers like Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, those questions weren’t abstract thought experiments. They were deeply personal and political. Socrates, after all, was sentenced to death for encouraging others to question traditional beliefs — a reminder that, in some eras, simply asking how to live can carry life-or-death consequences. “They were the first people to ask how we should live in a systematic way,” says Anderson. “That is a major philosophical accomplishment, and it’s something we owe to them.”

No Easy Answers

So, the next time a cab driver asks Finlay the meaning of life, how will he respond? Like Russell, he might demur. His goal as a philosopher and teacher, he says, isn’t to deliver easy answers. “Humans want to be able to boil things down to a simple idea,” he says. “And the search for the meaning of life is partly a symptom of that desire for simplicity — the desire to understand things that are complicated.”

Fundamentally, Finlay thinks the idea that there’s a single, objective answer to how we should live is a comforting fiction. “How on Earth do you prove the existence of these ‘meanings’ of life?” he asks. “I don’t think any philosopher has ever succeeded in providing any good evidence for them. It seems to me that what it comes down to is a strong desire for them to be true.”

Instead of offering an answer, Finlay’s goal is to encourage his students to wrestle with the question of life’s meaning themselves. “The course gives them a palette of options,” he says. Many arrive with what he calls a package deal — often shaped by a religious tradition — about what life is supposed to mean.

A Christian, for example, may believe that the meaning of life is to know and glorify God. Finlay never challenges his students’ religious beliefs, and some may even leave the class with their faith strengthened, much like Tolstoy, who found renewed meaning through religion after a period of deep doubt. But ultimately, Finlay hopes that students walk away with something deeper: not an answer, but a readiness to ask better questions. “I hope they leave the course with a deeper understanding,” he says, “so that when they face this question later in life, they are better equipped to explore their own answers.”