Meaning is not in yourself

Reading | Existentialism

Orlando Moreira, PhD | 2025-06-13

A year ago, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

It wasn’t fatal.

I had already been struggling with increasing hearing loss in one ear. One of the doctors told me I was imagining it. He even told me I was crazy for thinking that. But the tinnitus was worsening—shrill, reactive to sound, inescapable. I was convinced that once I saw a specialist, she would figure out something, and things would improve. In our first meeting, she promised me it would get better. One month later, she told me the opposite. It wouldn’t improve. It would get worse. I would eventually go deaf in one ear. The tinnitus would get louder.

And it did. Two months later, the noise became unbearable; and reactive to other sounds. Before the GP agreed to prescribe sleeping pills and antidepressants, I went six days without sleep. I was panicking, in absolute despair, a wreck.

Music—always a core of my inner life—became distorted, then unlistenable. What had once grounded me now wounded me. I had imagined my later years spent visiting the world’s concert halls and opera houses. That future is gone. The distortion is permanent. The silence is overrun by noise. The world didn’t end, but it lost its sweetness.

As my hearing collapsed, I began to fear more than just noise and silence. With age, my vision has also started to weaken. The arts that once gave me solace—music, literature, cinema, painting—began to feel fragile, contingent. I saw the possibility of a future where no form of beauty, no intellectual pursuit, would remain accessible to me. But the real dread wasn’t sensorial or aesthetic. It wasn’t about losing pleasure. It was the creeping horror that even shared experience might one day, not too far, become unreachable and life would go on without it. And although this was part of my thoughts at the time, I only half realized how essential it was.

For a while, I wanted to die. When the medication began to take effect, that urge faded; but I no longer wanted to be alive either.

It wasn’t despair. Not depression. Just a hollowing out. I felt like a broken doll. Music, but also other arts, movement, contemplation, and even quiet conversation, lost their appeal completely. Sound itself was hostile. I stayed inside. I stopped exercising. My health declined.

Psychologists told me that doing things would help; that motion could hold despair at bay. So I kept going. I functioned. I spoke. I worked. But it felt hopeless. Life was to force yourself to go through another day. Don’t think too much. The resonance was gone.

And still, I went on, because what else can you do?

They told me to look within for meaning, intent, pleasure. To find my true self.  But I found nothing worth keeping. No purpose in work. No comfort in thought. Yes, there were pleasurable activities: reading, studying, intellectual work; but there was no real reason to endure. 

Yet, there was something else too: an urge to tell others how I felt. And whenever I did, when I spoke with raw honesty, others would eventually tell me their own stories; their suffering, their pain, their grief, their worries. It made me think of how much we suffer and how much pain we hide. And it was in listening to them that I found motivation and meaning.

That was it. The others. My children. My wife. My brother. Friends. Colleagues. People who, each in their own way, told me they would rather live in a world with me than one without me.

That didn’t restore music or peace, but it gave me a place to go. Not certainty. Not confirmation. Just a reason to stay, and a reason to build.

Ernest Becker believed humans construct meaning to deny death; that we fear extinction, and so we build culture, ego, myth. I find his message compelling. His work, along with Camus and Schopenhauer, has strongly shaped how I see the world. But I think he missed something deeper.

The primary fear isn’t death: it’s being alone—eternally, structurally, metaphysically alone. Death is finite; solitude without escape is not. Even an immortal life in perfect conditions, if lived in isolation, is not freedom; it’s collapse without end.

I wouldn’t choose it. Not even for silence. Not even for the return of music. I would rather live in this broken world, in my weakened body, among flawed and finite others, than in a perfect world inhabited only by myself. I’d rather be one of many than a lone god.

There’s a moment in For the Man Who Has Everything—a Superman story by Allan Moore, which I read many years ago for the first time and to which I always eventually return—in which Superman is trapped in an illusion where Krypton never exploded. In that illusion, he has a family, a son he loves. And as the illusion begins to crack, he holds the boy and says: “I was there at your birth, and I will always love you but… but I don’t think that you’re real.” And he lets go.

He doesn’t leave because his fantasy world is unpleasant; quite the contrary He leaves because it is not inhabited. It’s full of all the things he ever wanted—a simple life, a family, memory, love—but no Other; no inner life; no suffering; no real presence. It is perfect in every way except for the absence of other minds.

And that makes it unbearable.

That moment stayed with me. The dream was vivid. The love was real. But it wasn’t mutual. And when it becomes clear that no one else is truly there, I will always choose the world that might still contain others, even if it hurts.

And if I choose this world because I can’t bear to be existentially alone, then I must hope others feel the same. I reach because I need them, but if they exist, they might need me too. And that’s enough to make it a responsibility.

Becker understood our instinct towards death. But not the first fear. A child does not cry because she understands mortality. She cries because no one comes.

That is what kept me alive. Not belief. Not clarity. Just the chance that I might still matter; that someone might need me; that someone would feel my absence.

This is not noble. It is not defiance. It is not bad faith. It is simply the truest act of hope I could take in a life stripped of all guarantees.

Camus asked: Why not kill yourself?

I answer: Because someone may be there.

And that must be enough. 

L’espoir, c’est les autres.