Gerrit Gielen

“J’accepte la grande aventure d’être moi.” – Simone de Beauvoir

The question of the meaning of life is as old as humanity itself. Over the centuries, countless answers have been offered. Yet many people still experience their existence as pointless. They feel down, depressed, or even hopeless. Some see no way out and take their own lives — even young people. Especially when life hurts, that urgent question arises, what is the point of all this?

We are often told that life only gains meaning once we achieve a specific goal, happiness, self-fulfillment, or some special “life purpose” we’re supposed to discover. But that would mean life is meaningless for many people who never reach that goal.

True meaning cannot be a reward for success or an endpoint that only a few ever reach. It must be based on something we all share, regardless of our successes or failures. In other words, if life has meaning, it has meaning for everyone, no matter what they do with their life. It comes with no conditions — it is an unconditional gift to every human being. If life had no meaning, it simply wouldn’t exist. Even when everything goes wrong, even when it all seems to fail, life remains meaningful. What we consider a meaningless life still carries meaning within it.

The reason we often don’t experience it that way has everything to do with how we were taught to think and judge as children.

How we learn to think about meaning

One of the first things we teach we teach children is to think in terms of right and wrong. I still clearly remember primary school, a thick red line drawn through everything I got wrong. If you did everything right, everyone was happy and proud. You’d get a perfect score and were allowed to write in colored ink — except yellow, because the teacher couldn’t read it easily. In those days we still used dip pens and inkwells.

Children who made too many mistakes had to repeat the year. They were separated from their group, which was a harsh punishment. Back then, no one really considered the psychological impact this had on the child. The list of things a child could do wrong seemed almost endless.

In short, we were drilled to see everything through the lens of right and wrong, especially our own choices. Growing up largely meant we were taught to internalize norms and values, which for a child felt quite unnatural.

Without realizing it, we started treating our entire life like an exam. If we accumulate too many “red lines,” we fail and have to repeat it. This leads us to believe that life is only meaningful if we do things “right.” Traditional religion extends this same binary thinking: God versus Satan, heaven versus hell, believers versus non-believers. It saddles us with the dreadful idea that a person can fail eternally.

As a result, we begin living according to the rules of an external authority whose main goal is to maintain power. Being an adult means becoming a cog in the machine. It means we’re no longer allowed to be children. And no longer being allowed to be a child means we can no longer fully trust life. Joy, play, and creativity fade away and are replaced by fear and obedience. We gradually start to experience life as empty and meaningless because we’ve stopped listening to our own inner life force.

This is how a permanent crisis of meaning is born.

As long as we keep viewing the question of meaning through the right/wrong lens, the crisis will never end because that lens is the very cause of it. So, let’s take those glasses off and look at what we call “mistakes” from a different perspective.

Mistakes: a different perspective

Sometimes things go terribly wrong in life. A drunk driver kills a child, for example. Both the parents and the perpetrator are scarred for life. That it is a tragedy is beyond question.¹)

But what happens if we don’t look at the isolated event but view it from a much wider perspective — from the standpoint of the universe, from the whole in which every individual life is embedded? Can we still speak of “mistakes” as something that has simply gone wrong?

Our judgment of what is wrong is closely tied to our perspective, and especially to our sense of time. We see a time before the mistake, the moment of the mistake, and the time after it, past, present, and future. Within that framework, we hope for healing, reconciliation, or meaning. But what does the same reality look like when viewed from a timeless perspective, where the universe is seen as one indivisible whole?

A common metaphor is the clock. If a clock has defective gears, we call it broken. The whole doesn’t function as it should. Similarly, people argue that if the universe contains mistakes, then the whole is flawed. But if the universe is fundamentally flawed, existence itself becomes problematic, a meaningless endeavor with no alternative. How can the whole be good when it contains so much suffering and so many derailments?

Let’s try a different metaphor, the book. A good book is not one in which nothing goes wrong. On the contrary, a good book is meaningful and insightful precisely because things do go wrong. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a classic example. The protagonist, Raskolnikov, commits a double murder and is then tormented by guilt and remorse. The story is full of descriptions of suffering and moral collapse, yet that is exactly where its power lies, it explores the inner consequences of guilt in extraordinary depth.

Why do we find such a book valuable? Because the reality it describes is not our personal reality. We enter it temporarily and from a safe distance. We can close the book and step away. At the same time, it reveals something profound about the human condition, about guilt, responsibility, and inner conflict. It enriches us without wounding us personally.

This leads to an important insight; a reality can be full of mistakes and suffering when viewed from the inside yet still be meaningful and even valuable when seen from the outside. The miniature universe of a book draws its meaning not in spite of its mistakes, but because of them.

We can apply the same principle to the universe itself. What looks like a mistake within the flow of time may, from a timeless perspective, be an essential part of a meaningful whole, a whole that we, living inside it, can only experience in fragments and from within. Meaning arises when we combine both perspectives.

Can we compare our own life to a book that we are also reading? And if so, does that perspective give life meaning?

Our life as a book we are reading

If our life is a book, then who is the reader?

That is the fundamental question. Is this life a standalone event, or is it part of something larger that gives it meaning? Only in the second case do our missteps, mistakes, and failures take on a different weight. They are no longer mere errors, but necessary passages in the story of our life.

My answer is yes. There is a higher perspective within us that I call the soul. Not as a religious dogma, but as a living inner reality, a dimension of us that is not bound by time, place, or personal history. It rises above them, and from that place, every experience in our life is meaningful.

You can deny this, but then you must accept that a life can truly fail, that it ultimately has no meaning, and that it simply ends with death. The person disappears without a trace, as if they had never existed. In the end, everything vanishes into an endless night.

Whether you experience life as meaningful or meaningless depends entirely on the perspective you adopt. It is a choice, do you answer yes to this question—does my life have meaning even when things go wrong, even when it is sometimes miserable?

Life can only feel meaningful if you see and experience yourself as more than this accidental individual placed in a random time and place. It can only be meaningful if there is something within you that transcends time and space, which is the soul, the timeless light that you truly are.

When you open yourself to this possibility, something shifts. Victimhood gives way to the realization that you are a student, someone who is here to learn, who is allowed to fail, who does fail, and who grows through those failures. Mistakes become sources of wisdom and insight. You begin to feel supported by a loving presence on your journey. You are no longer alone.

The perspective flips

The book metaphor goes even further. A reader doesn’t want a flawless story. Quite the opposite, a good story needs conflict, misjudgments, and moral blindness. Without mistakes there is no growth, without crisis no depth, without errors no real learning.

What the main character experiences as a disaster is often the very moment the story becomes truly interesting for the reader.

This completely reverses the perspective. What I personally see as a mistake, the soul sees as a necessary experience, the spark for transformation. The story cannot freeze; it must keep unfolding. No stagnation, only growth.

That is why we don’t just make mistakes; we are built in such a way that certain mistakes are inevitable. Our personality already carries the seeds of our missteps. Just as Raskolnikov’s sense of moral superiority drives him to commit his crimes, our own character leads us into trouble at critical moments.

In that sense, imperfection is not a flaw, it is a requirement. Without error there is no insight. Without trauma there is no healing. The imperfect is what the soul needs in order to realize itself.

Let this idea sink in, the meaning-making force within us does not long for a perfect life. It longs for valuable experiences. It wants us to stumble, to get lost, and to meet ourselves in life’s resistance. We are designed for this to happen. Our character is our fate, but we are far more than our character alone.

Happily ever after

Many stories, especially fairy tales, end with the words “and they lived happily ever after.” This ending is deeply symbolic. The story of our life ends with death. After that comes the reunion of the masculine and feminine within us, awakening to who we really are. Then a new chapter of peace and profound happiness begins at least for a while, no more adventures.

When can we say, as we close the book of our life, “That was a beautiful life”? We can say it when our life has brought us new experiences and encounters that have enriched us on the inside. A life full of mistakes is usually quite rich in valuable insights.

The purpose of a life

The purpose of a good book is not to portray a flawless world with flawless people. Its purpose is to enrich our mind and show us aspects of outer and inner reality we didn’t know before.

That is exactly what life on earth does for us. Even a life that seems dull or colorless gives us something if only the feeling of longing. We cannot miss something that isn’t already present within us. That very longing contains a discovery, the discovery of our inner miracle, the radiance of our soul.

In short, when we remove the right/wrong glasses, we see that mistakes are the very material from which a meaningful life is built. They lead to experiences, insights, and adventures we would never have known otherwise. Life is not an exam to be passed, but a journey full of twists and turns is rich with possibilities, growth, and wonder. In every misstep and every unexpected turn lies the seed of meaning. Life is meaningful precisely because it is human, that is, full of mistakes, and therefore, full of opportunities to learn, to feel, and to grow.

Conclusion: the value of being human

From the soul’s perspective, every human experience is unique and valuable, there is loneliness, pain, and failure, yes, but also the beauty of a flower or a kind gesture. Even ordinary, everyday moments enrich the soul. Yet the most valuable thing of all is discovering who you truly are.

A fish doesn’t know what water is until it jumps out of it. In the same way, the soul loses touch with itself in the human being and discovers itself precisely through that separation. Our deepest suffering is this sense of separation from ourselves. Why do we go through it? Because that separation makes a great adventure possible, the discovery of the cosmos, the journey home, and the rediscovery of our own light.

A flower, a sunrise, beautiful music, love in someone’s eyes, wise words, they all remind the soul of itself. The soul sees its own reflection and recognizes its beauty. This is only possible because human consciousness begins with the suppression of the soul’s awareness. To become human is to choose loneliness, ignorance, and freedom, the freedom to make mistakes.

From that place we embark on wild adventures, embrace crazy ideologies, and even start wars until the magnificent rediscovery arrives, the awakening of the soul, the awakening to ourselves. The more deeply we feel its absence, the more wonderful the eventual discovery becomes.

Nothing is meaningless. Every misstep is an opportunity to feel and to grow. In our mistakes, we discover the divine.

© Gerrit Gielen

Edited by Suzy Conway

¹) For a spiritual perspective on such a tragedy, read: The death of a child: a spiritual perspective

---