How To Keep Going When Life Loses Meaning
Sometimes we hit a point where everything loses meaning—our work, our goals, even who we are.
The usual advice is to push through, fix your routine, get productive again.
But what if this isn’t a productivity problem at all?
What if the real issue is disconnection—when you’re showing up, doing the work, maybe even producing more than ever, but it feels like it’s going nowhere—and within that, a sneaking feeling that you’ve lost the thread of why you started in the first place?
What needs fixing, then, isn’t your output—but your connection to meaning itself.
Because when that’s restored, the spark, the sense of purpose, and the direction you’ve been missing begin to return.
In this video, I want to walk with you through that space—and share what I’ve learned about how to keep going when meaning disappears. We’ll explore how to let go of fixed ideas about who we are, face the voices that hold us back, and reconnect with that creative fire inside—especially in those moments when you’re pouring everything in and nothing seems to land—or worse, when you start questioning the point of it all.
When the results aren’t landing, it’s often not a problem of output.
It’s a sign that something in you is out of sync. A signal—not of failure, but of the need to reconnect.
And that’s where the real work begins.
OK—so let’s dive into the main piece and explore “How to Keep Going When Life Loses Meaning”
Have you ever heard someone say, “God broke the mould when they made that one”? I’ve always loved that idea. And yet—we’re quick to see it in others, but slow to remember it in ourselves. Especially when we’re down, or when life isn’t going our way. But here’s the truth: you are the broken mould. For a moment, take a look at yourself from the broader perspective of things. Think about what you’re made of—how the seven octillion atoms that form you will never be assembled in this way again. We walk around in the illusion of our human form, rarely pausing to remember the marvel of our own being. You—you are a cathedral of stardust. Each particle older than the Earth. Each arranged once, and only once, in the miracle that is you. And not even the stars know how they did it.
Somewhere along the way, though, we forget this. We settle into fixed versions of who we are—and convince ourselves the road is already run. But part of life is learning to break your own mould. Because the deeper spiritual challenge—in life, and in our creative life—is to ask: who are you when the map runs out?
As someone who’s hit that edge many times over the past twenty years in the arts, I’ve learned it isn’t an end at all. It’s a threshold. A rite of passage. Just another marker along the strange, uneven trail that makes up a life.
If there’s one thing I’ve come to understand, it’s this: there is no real story to your life without these moments. And now, looking back after so much, I see that my life wouldn’t be my life—if not for the Self I was forced to meet each time I ran out of road.
Look, we all hit dead ends. We all hit walls. We all feel shockingly negative about ourselves at points along the way. Sometimes it gets so heavy, we start to believe there’s nothing good left out there for us at all. But even then, something calls us to recreate ourselves. The trouble is, shedding old skins isn’t easy. They don’t fall away on their own—they cling to us, as if afraid to separate. After a while, they start to feel like part of you. And to shake them off, you need to shrug like hell. But even that takes something—because before you can shrug, you have to believe it’s worth trying to do so in the first place.
This is why reconnecting to meaning—to what really matters to you—isn’t just a philosophical idea. It’s a turning point of profound existential importance.
That’s why I try to see those periods when I put time aside to reconnect as neither lost nor indulgent, but as something closer to a blood transfusion of the spirit.
It’s not about stopping to get stuck. It’s about slowing down long enough to let your world catch up with you—so you can reorient yourself.
So how do you manage this cosmic shrug—when you’re out of kilter, your energy’s vanished, or your hardline into meaning has dissolved?
For me, I approach it in three ways.
First, I accept that both the forming and breaking of moulds are part of life’s pattern. The walls we hit, the dead ends we reach, the sense that our work is going unnoticed—these aren’t endings. They’re waypoints. They may not get easier, but you can prepare for them. You can learn to recognise them for what they are—not what your anxiety tells you they are.
It’s vital to remember this when you feel stuck: this, too, is part of the process. And because it’s part of the process, it’s also a kind of movement. Stuckness always precedes breakthrough. One follows the other.
It’s through the stuckness that you make time to reconnect to meaning—and when breakthrough comes, it doesn’t arrive as a lightning bolt from above. It arrives from within, as the quiet explosion of meaning turned outward.
The second approach I have in these times of reorientation is that I consciously try to face my inner voices. By that, I mean—everything. Everything I find there. That includes the hard ones. The ones that whisper I’m not enough. That I’m too late. That I’ve missed my window. The ones that compare, and condemn, and complicate.
For me, spiritual strength is the courage to meet yourself in your full totality. And by that, I mean to welcome everything you find inside yourself. At first, without judgment. Just with honesty and acceptance.I think reconnecting with meaning begins when you stop divorcing yourself from what’s inside you. Meeting those voices is the precursor to moving forward. And I find that only by turning around do I realise those demons were never as frightening as I thought. Because that’s the paradox of being in flight — you never quite know the face of the enemy you run from.
My third approach is to consciously reconnect to something beyond results. Can you carry some of that stardust I spoke about earlier with you—not just as an idea, but as a truth about who you are? Can you place yourself inside the vast tapestry of things—and remember that you have worth? Not conditional worth. Not transactional worth. But inherent worth. Maybe even the greatest kind: the quiet, irreplaceable role you play in the larger pattern of life. Did you smile at a stranger yesterday? Or feel—clear as day in your heart—that there was something you must do for someone else, even though it had nothing to do with your own life? We fool ourselves into thinking that meaning arrives with more status, more wealth, more recognition. But meaning isn’t something you acquire. It’s something you weave into the tissue of your being—through your choices, your actions, your way of living. The way back to meaning begins with discovering who you are—and how you choose to express that, day by day, in the immediate ecosystem of your life. That’s where you recover it. Not in metrics. Not in milestones. Not in followers or paychecks. Those things have their place—but they are not the thing itself. You are the thing itself. And you have value beyond the thousand ways society asks you to prove it. Maybe spiritual power begins at the moment you choose differently. When you decide that meaning isn’t something you wait for—but something you practise. Not once, but again and again. Because when you stop—really stop—you return to yourself. You remember yourself. And in that remembering, you realise: meaning takes work. More than that. It is the work. So if things aren’t going as you’d hoped—remember: this is work you can do any time, any day, regardless of what is or isn’t happening on the outside. Meaning is the work.
So in this context, let’s come back to the idea that the distance you feel from meaning might be because you’ve cohabited too long with a mould that no longer fits. It’s like a layer of dead skin—something that now separates you from the essence of things. I see it sometimes—when I meet someone cynical, it feels like they’re trapped in a version of themselves they never quite managed to shed. Or maybe, somewhere along the way, they just let that skin become them.
It’s why I stay on guard with cynical thoughts in myself. We all have them. The real question is: can you catch them? Can you challenge the part of you that feels threatened by someone else’s exuberance—or by a life force that makes you feel smaller just by standing near it?
Sometimes, we surprise ourselves in our reaction to things or to others — and especially nowadays when it’s so easy to fall into the pitfall of comparison traps.
I’d counsel you to have the courage not just to catch these thoughts—but to forgive yourself for having them. It might sound paradoxical, but self-forgiveness doesn’t just release the shame around these thoughts—it protects you from letting that shame sink deeper into your being. That’s what cynicism is: shame that has grown deep roots.
So as you catch these thoughts, please—don’t hate yourself for having them. Rather, intercept them. Then, try to bring your full creative potential into the darkest part of yourself. That, right there, is the work. That’s where spiritual power is formed. Not by running from what you find inside, but by first noticing—and working with—what you find there.
Believe me, there is no feeling more freeing than knowing you’ve allowed all the dark matter you find in you to wash through you. Trust in that river. That river is life—your life force doing its work in you.
But here’s the thing: if we don’t do this work—if we don’t take responsibility for what we carry inside—we end up projecting it outward. And that’s the modern trouble. We take zero accountability for what lives in us. Instead, we judge others, prop ourselves up on moral pedestals, cancel anyone we disagree with. We cast shadows without ever looking at our own. And without even noticing, we become like a society of madmen—never once pausing to see our own place in the lunatic pantheon.
So here’s the paradox: we only begin to move again when we stop—when we finally catch what’s actually going on inside us. In a society that only values acceleration, building and moving forward, we’ve lost sight of the intrinsic foundation that allows us to do so in the first place. The result is we bound restlessly on, never quite noticing that half the time we’re all just chasing our tails, wondering why we forever land in the same place.
So the point is, is that to start, you have to first stop. We avoid it though, because self-inquiry feels like ungodly fire—but it’s exactly that fire that burns off that old, mouldy skin.
And underneath?
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It’s vulnerable. And it can hurt like hell. That’s why we build our defence mechanisms, because sometimes it just feels easier to block out the pain than expose ourselves to what we might find there.
But damn, when you let it through—isn’t it something?
To feel your heart connect to the source of things again.
Not as a concept. Not as performance. But as something real.
To know you’re interacting with the world again in its primary state—before thought hardens, before instinct is second-guessed.
That’s where creativity comes from.
From the primal fire of feeling things again.
From knitting new meanings out of the friction between your own life force—and the greater life force moving through everything around you.
It’s not always gentle. It’s not always clear.
But it’s alive. And it’s yours.
That, right there — that courage to notice yourself & the world: that’s the luminous re-emergence of meaning in your life.
One thing I’ve tried to do personally—within the absurd yet rewarding choice to live a creative life—is to move more consciously through the cycles. I don’t mean racing through life. I mean recognising that the ebbs and lows aren’t detours—they are the process itself. This ocean we sail includes its storms as part of its makeup. For me, balance isn’t about the absence of chaos anymore—it’s about the capacity to keep moving through it. Within its ebb. Its flow. Its point. And its counterpoint.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about all this because I’ve found myself in a paradoxical state. On one hand, I feel like I’m in a good process—working on a project I’ve long wanted to create, releasing the new songs each month. But even in the midst of that progress, I’ve hit deep troughs. And I’ve realised that despite the forward momentum, the excitement, the activity—there’s still an inner clash taking place.
I think we avoid checking in with these internal realities because we know that doing so can lead to violent eruptions.
But that’s how the parts of ourselves we’ve long ignored eventually hunt us down. So I’ve taken this moment to stop, to stand firm—and to let some of these demons catch up. It’s felt good—to turn and face them and in the catch-breath to see how exhausted we’ve made on another.
We’re too quick to forget it—but growth, in anything, begins by turning and facing whatever it is we’ve been trying to escape.
Can you listen to the voice in the dark—the one no one else hears?
Why are you letting it torment you, when all it’s trying to do is help you grow?
What if its sharp edge isn’t a blade meant to pierce you—but a scalpel meant to shape you?
Let me tell you this: you won’t figure out these questions all at once.
You’re not meant to.
But what you can do—today, this moment—is find the courage to listen to them.
And then—and only then—can you begin to answer them, and step into the adventure waiting for you in the next phase of your life.
Please, please try to break this terror that there’s no point in trying in the first place. **
Maybe, just maybe, your whole life is represented in the decision you make in this moment.**
What will it be?
It is not your path to give up. To say this is as far as i’m going or i’ve already given the best i could give.
No — there is another level, another gateway that you could only ever have the chance to unlock by getting to the end of this road right here.
This is the beginning of the journey, not the end.
**But you don’t get to make the change without turning and facing first.**
**In that you have to have the courage to pivot from the belief that meaning is only going to be found looking forward. No, it’s about this moment now. That’s the opportunity — and that’s where the work begins.**
Let me ground this in something personal—my own creative goal this year: to make a new play in my musical life by releasing 12 new songs, one each month on Spotify. Not just as output, but as an act of commitment to the process itself.
So far i’ve felt proud of this journey because i’m on target, working hard and most importantly for me, staying true the the vision I had when i decided i was going to fight for my musical life.
However part of following a vision is that you sometimes drift from it. Even while fulfilling something, it finds new ways to challenge you.
Something I’ve been learning is that just doing it is not enough. At every point the path is provoking you, needling you with unexpected choices, questions and knowledge that you have to learn, adapt and react to.
You walk out with a goal in mind, only to find the paths before you multiply.
You want to choose the right one, but at each crossroads all you can do is make the best damn choice you can with the new information you’ve gleaned from the path behind you.
The truth is: there’s no such thing as a perfect path. You just have to take a deep breath, choose one—and back yourself to make the best decisions you can at every juncture.
In this, two things are certain: one is that you won’t always know where you are. The other is that you’ll need to course correct along the way. That doesn’t mean giving up—but it does mean staying flexible.
In my life, I’ve found that accepting getting lost as an inevitability of the creative path hasn’t just been a consolation—it’s what’s helped me move forward when both paths ahead seem equally full of pitfalls.
In a world looking forever for guidance outside, it’s helped me to learn to build my inner compass. And when you move into the dark, as you inevitably will, it helps to know that this is your chosen dark. In my experience, it is always at this point that my eyes adapt, and as if by magic, the path that was hidden for so long begins to reveal itself.
This week, my project has hits its next crossroads, and it is time to look at both how far i’ve come and where I want to go to - as well as what it is i can do to help me get there.
So this week, I’m clarifying my vision and for me this is like taking an inventory of everything I’ve learnt so far - good, bad, beautiful, ugly.
If you’d like me to go deeper into how I self-audit in another video, feel free to drop a comment.
But for now—for the purpose of this video—I want to leave you with this:
You don’t have to figure it all out right away.
Just start here: write. Feel. Begin there.
When it feels like meaning has disappeared—or like you’ve drifted from your “why” because things aren’t working out as you’d hoped—this, right here, is your opportunity.
Put everything you’re feeling on the table.
Write it down. Let it hurt. Let it instruct.
Because the pain—whatever shape it takes—brings you back to the source of yourself.
That suffering, great or small, helps you feel again.
To renew. To flush away what’s stagnant.
And in the aftermath of that flood, a greater sentience emerges—
one that reconnects you to the living heart of life itself.
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So to conclude, taking time to self-audit is about building a bridge back to meaning.
What the modern world forgets—amid the tsunami of guides and gurus—is this: the fantasy that action for action’s sake will fix your life is just that—a fantasy. And just as mistaken is the idea that escape into the spiritual will shield you from the long reach of reality.
In the end, it’s your challenge—and your freedom—to find balance between being and doing. Those are the vector points of that bridge.
And so often, our best work comes in the aftermath of remembering how to feel again. That’s the purpose of the pain. Because it’s in that drama—at the threshold between what we feel and what we do—that not just life happens, but meaning returns.
You will find your way. You will find your path. And you will uncover what it is you’re meant to do next. We forget too easily—but the tools you need are already inside you.
Those demons—they’re not here to consume you. They’re messengers. They’re trying to be heard.
And that brings us back to meaning.
Viktor Frankl once wrote:
“Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Meaning, then, isn’t something that arrives from outside.
It’s the very expression of choice.
It’s not just a feeling—it’s a form of action.
It’s what you do with what you’re given.
It’s the art of living deliberately.
And for me, the artistic process is the most powerful form of that. Because it fuses being and doing into one cosmic whole. When you create, you don’t just express yourself—you become yourself. You choose who you are, over and over again. In the face of doubt. In the face of fear. In the middle of the storm.
So if you’re lost right now—if your sense of meaning has slipped—maybe this is the moment you choose again.
Quietly. Without applause.
Not to be seen, but to see.
Because even in the void, there’s something sacred about saying:
I’m here. I’m still choosing. And I’m not damn well done yet.
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Guys, I want to say thank you so much for listening and also just to share a short story about how this piece was written. I originally recorded the first version of this a week ago. As I walked home, I felt not entirely happy with what I’d written and decided that I need to throw it all out and start again from scratch. Upon entering my flat I found a plumbing disaster and spent the next 3 hours dealing with the emergency. The next morning exhausted on the plane, I decided to start rewriting my script and started tapping madly on my phone. Later in the flight, taking a quick pause, the Scandinavian women on on my right by the window excused herself and said “I hope I’m not being nosey, but I just want to say that I love what you’re writing”. I was completely taken aback because, like we all can do, I’d been feeling a little bit of dismay at having already done so much work and wondering if I was just an idiot to be doubling my workload. As such, her words hit me in an important moment and gave me both the confidence that I had made the right choice and the energy to see through what I’d started. I said thank you and that I’d noticed she was writing a diary earlier in the flight. “Yes” she said, but I only write when I’m in pain. Like prayer I said. She asked what I did with my writing and I told her that I had a weekly newsletter on Substack, and asked her if she’d ever considered publishing. She said she’d been on the fence for years but that the conversation had given her the push she needed to give it a try. We were both rather thrilled with the encounter — and it was a lovely example of how one person’s moment of curiosity and social bravery could lead to a powerful outcome in each person’s life. I wanted to mention this story for three reasons. First, you never know what an impact you can have on another’s life through a simple moment of kindness. Second, that even though you may be doubting what you are creating, you never know if it may be exactly the thing that another person needs to hear. And third, that sometimes when we lose a sense of meaning in our own lives, it is the process of commitment to something we love that leads us back to remember our sense of worth. Whatever you are experiencing — through thick or thin — keep going, keep believing and keep giving your gift to the world. My name is Jim and it’s my absolute honour that you’ve listened today.
