Culture

A woman finding meaning in movement, simplicity, and the company of others who live outside conventional narrative.

Every episode opens with a death. A show that made five seasons out of the question: what does a life mean?

Systematic philosophical exploration of what makes a life worth living - teleology made into comedy.

Don Draper's endless pursuit of something that doesn't turn out to be meaning when he catches it. The shadow of the value.

Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, born in the camps: meaning can be found in any circumstance, and finding it is survival.

Hermann Hesse's investigation of the divided self - the person who hungers for meaning beyond the bourgeois and can't find it.

Ursula K. Le Guin building a world to ask: what is the meaning of gender, of loyalty, of being human?

Camus's argument that we must imagine him happy - finding meaning in the act itself, not the destination. Absurdism as the answer.

The search for something lost that defines you. The meaning we find in what we are unable to save.

Jung's private exploration of his own unconscious, illustrated and illuminated over sixteen years. The search for meaning turned inward.

Tolstoy at the height of his fame, asking "Why should I live?" His answer - A Confession - is one of the most honest documents about the search for meaning ever written.

Simon & Garfunkel. Meaning as the thing that doesn't arrive through noise or certainty but in quiet, in darkness, in honesty.

Kansas. The vertigo of smallness - what does anything mean against the infinite? The song that has made a thousand people reconsider everything.

Gary Jules's cover. Everything familiar made strange. The search for meaning in a world that stopped making sense.

Marvin Gaye. The search for meaning in collective suffering - asking the questions no one in power wants asked.

Painted from inside an asylum, looking at the sky through a barred window. Swirling, alive, enormous. Meaning found in the cosmos when the human world has become unbearable.