Start Making Sense

How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times

By Steven J Heine

Category: Psychology | Reading Duration: 16 min | Rating: 4.2/5 (51 ratings)

About the Book

Start Making Sense (2025) explores the human need for meaning and purpose using cultural and social psychology to engage philosophical questions about the meaning of life. Weaving together history, literature, Existential psychology, and the history of science, it serves as a guide for crafting a meaningful life even in unsettling times.

Who Should Read This?

• Those anxious about the state of the world, or their place in it
• Psychology buffs looking for the origins of complex human behavior
• Anyone curious about how human behavior impacts political and social systems

What’s in it for me? Discover the psychology and behavioral science of Existentialism, and why it holds the secret to crafting a fulfilling life even in dark times.

The scene is Paris, in the summer of 1949. Since the end of the war and the liberation of France, tourists once again flock to the famous cafés and attractions in an atmosphere of heady post-war optimism. A revival of art and culture is underway alongside the rebuilding of Europe, and it is having a ripple effect felt around the world. Three central figures in this intellectual flourishing are seated around one sunny sidewalk table, lighting cigarette after cigarette as they discuss the events, politics, and trends of the day.

They may appear a motley crew: the tall, dashing, Algerian-born Albert Camus next to the shorter, bespectacled and gravel-voiced Sartre — who seems to look in all directions at once. Seated between is Simone de Beavoir, whose publication of The Second Sex that same year will essentially launch the second wave of feminism and change culture forever. Looking every inch the fashionable French madame, she is at this table not as a fashion statement, but an intellectual equal. Together with several other influential thinkers, they are known as Existentialists, a name synonymous nowadays with grim, mid-century alienation.

But these thinkers and writers were anything but dark and dour. Shot through with passions and inconsistencies and very human frailties, their embrace of what is, instead of what “ought to be,” became a surprisingly uplifting philosophy that has influenced generations to embrace life more fully. This Blink dives deep into behavioral science to uncover how humans might actually be hard-wired to behave in ways the Existentialists understood all-too-well almost a century ago. To uncover why embracing the human condition in all its chaos and frailty can actually bring with it the strength and wisdom to live a happier and more meaningful life.

Chapter 1: The sense-making ape

If someone were to walk up to you on the street today and ask “who are you? ” your answer would largely depend on where in the world you grew up. If you were born in East Asia, for instance, you might immediately start talking about your family or your community. Born in Western Europe or North America, and you are more likely to answer with information about your career, your hobbies or interests.

Whether individualistic, like the latter, or more familial, like the former, humans understand who they are based on their frames of reference — frameworks which are communicated through family, religion, education, and culture from infancy onwards. As social creatures, humans have an innate need to communicate and socialize with others because our understanding of ourselves is relational. That is, we understand who we are only in relation to others. But in an age when many old social and family structures are breaking down, from the decline in religious observation to the algorithmic fragmentations of social media, making sense of oneself in relation to an increasingly complex and tumultuous world is more difficult than ever before. This matters deeply. Because as modern cognitive science has confirmed, one of the most important indicators of happiness across history and cultures is whether or not you are leading a meaningful life.

But “what makes something meaningful? ” is a question that has haunted thinkers since Nietzsche first declared “god is dead” in 1882 inThe Gay Science. Thinkers who had witnessed the breakdown of modern politics into global warfare — twice — by the middle of the last century found little refuge in the comforts of either religion or rationality. Both had led to some pretty horrific ends. Poet W. H.

Auden wrote a lengthy poem about it in 1947, called The Age of Anxiety, which poured out the disillusionment, fear, and uncertainty of living through a collapse of social meaning. Many feel deep resonance with his words today, finding in the current moment of climate crisis, authoritarianism, and increasing inequality a powerful echo of Auden’s time. For your life to make sense to you, you must find a way to make meaning of it, even in an age of anxiety. That’s where a variety of strategies of the Existentialists come in, from understanding the power of the stories you tell yourself, to why it is so difficult to change your frame of reference even when it is negatively affecting you. They took on some of the thorniest issues of how and why humans do the things we do, and the stories we tell ourselves to justify it.

Chapter 2: The power of stories

One of the most recognized names in the Existential movement was Albert Camus, whose infamous life included a childhood in poverty, immigration to Paris, and time spent in the French resistance during the second world war. Though he disavowed the title, existentialist, his work launched him into the center of the movement by illuminating the idea of the absurd. Humans land in the absurd when the stories they’ve made up to understand themselves and the world around them break down because of circumstances beyond their control. Someone who always found fulfillment in a particular career suddenly being unemployed, for instance, or one who identified with a particular social group finding themselves ostracized or isolated.

What brings on anxiety and depression is the failure to find new frameworks for meaning when life breaks apart the old one. This is particularly true when the stories we tell ourselves about who we are contradict our own actions, or show inconsistencies with our character. When we’re confronted with evidence of thoughtlessness, but we consider ourselves thoughtful, for instance. Or when we are called out for being stingy, and we think of ourselves as generous. It is likely that you know someone who can paint themselves as a victim of almost any circumstance — that’s evidence of active meaning-making, and the need to reconcile one’s innate view of oneself and make the story fit around it Camus advocated for a conscious embrace of this aspect of the human condition. To understand that what you think of as your “self” is really an ongoing narrative made up of the stories you tell yourself to make sense of the world and yourself.

If you’ve got a pre-conceived notion of yourself as either “good” or “bad” as a person, this notion will often guide your choices in life and confirm this belief. So if you tell yourself that you deserve supportive friends and partnerships, and the world is full of good people to know, you’ll likely end up with just that. If you believe that you deserve negativity, degradation, or isolation, you’ll likely find that to be true as well. So understanding the stories you tell about yourself is vital to building a strong self concept, and a strong self concept can help you feel anchored in an anxious world.

Camus felt that it was inevitable that our stories about ourselves were going to break down at times, and everyone would find themselves in the absurd now and again. Strategically, the poet Walt Whitman embraced his contradictions, celebrating that he contained multitudes within himself in the opening lines of his influential poem Leaves of Grass. Acknowledging this multitude is the first step toward awareness. Understanding that what you are is really a story you’ve made up gives you the power to shape the tale, or change the script, to craft a tale that you want to tell.

Chapter 3: Faking it or making it

If what we think of as the “self” is really a story made up to explain ourselves and our relation to the world, narratives take on an outsized importance in human society. But it isn’t until adolescence that our inner narrative starts to become consistent. To understand why stories are so central to meaning, look no further than young children. In the first decade or so of life, children lack meaningful frameworks for understanding the world acquired through experience, so everything should feel overwhelming and chaotic.

But the pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget found quite the opposite to be true. He found through extensive observation that children assign meaning according to their existing frame of reference, and actively extend it to fit new ones. If you’ve spent time with children, you know that they spin endless tales attempting to incorporate new ideas into their existing world-view, to make sense of what happens around them. Often with hilarious results. So a child who is told they will attend their cousin’s recital might never ask what a recital is. When they are told to dress up for it, they might think a recital is like the church services they’ve attended, where people dress up on Sunday.

When the recital is in the evening, the child might start explaining that a recital is like seeing a movie or eating at a restaurant, as the family does at night. They are faking a meaning for something unfamiliar by relating it to familiar things. Only when they actually see the performance do they have a story to fit the meaning of “recital” into their world. And this tendency to fit what is new into what already exists in our world view persists well into adulthood — with some startling consequences. Simone de Beauvoir noted in her groundbreaking work that many women supported patriarchal structures in their homes and communities that actively oppressed them. These systems and beliefs were so familiar, so deeply woven into their sense-making world view, that they perceived them as benign instead of malignant.

This human tendency to hang on to the familiar also impedes scientific progress. While scientific breakthroughs happen overnight, scientific paradigm shifts take much, much longer. For centuries Ptolomey’s view that the Earth was fixed and at the center of the Universe had been the reigning paradigm. But subsequent observations had to be warped and distorted to keep the evidence from contradicting the erroneous core belief. Like children, scientists were faking the meaning of the evidence to fit their world view, and not making their world view expand to incorporate the evidence. And though Nicolas Capernicus published the theory of a sun-centered cosmology in 1563, it took another century and Galileo’s telescopic confirmations to shift the paradigm.

Not because astronomers changed their minds, but because those who held the previous view died out, and those younger generations familiar with the viewpoint became dominant. This is also why people so often vote against their own interests, support public viewpoints that contradict their private experience, or support policies and politics that oppress them: because these ways of thinking are deeply familiar, and have made order out of a chaotic world thus far. To tell new stories about the world, you have to confront the absurd, and tolerate the unfamiliar, until it can become the new normal.

Chapter 4: Don’t be a stranger

One of the most famous characters in existentialist literature is Mersault, the protagonist of Camus’ famous novel, The Stranger. Disconnected from all meaning in the world around him, he is blasé about his mother’s death, murders a man without remorse, and lives in total alienation from the people and events around him. The character served, for Camus, as a cautionary tale of what can happen when a person tries to forgo the idea of meaning altogether. Their empty existence fails to weave together isolated incidents and people into any sort of meaningful narrative, and they fail at being fully human.

Thus the most powerful encouragement coming from existential thinkers is to build yourself a meaningful life. To stop faking meaning in relation to others, and start making it for yourself. This means confronting the limitations of your own world view despite the uneasy feelings that it can cause. And in a world that is increasingly chaotic and inexplicable, it also means finding ways to carry on in the face of the absurd. A great way to do that is to ground yourself when you find yourself feeling adrift. When your worldview is inadequate to cope with your circumstances, focus on things that have proven meaningful to you.

Be it choosing to spend more time in nature when things feel chaotic, or finding activities that bring you joy when circumstances make your world feel bleak, the key is to engage instead of suppressing these feelings and faking wellness. Jean Paul Sartre tackled this aspect of existence in his work, arguing that while we didn’t ask to be here, or to face the kind of circumstances that we do, we are nonetheless responsible for our choices. This is a rock bottom existentialist idea: if nothing has any meaning beyond the one we give it, then the only meaningful life is one in which we actively make choices and embrace the consequences. In this way Existentialist thought calls us to flip the script on what it means to thrive in a meaningless universe. Instead of feeling like a victim of circumstance, you can view life as an endless series of possibilities and choices to make. Of course, this staggering level of freedom comes with some alienating down sides if you fail to find meaning with and through others.

But grounding yourself in what is meaningful to you, and resisting the urge to rationalize your inconsistencies and engage with them instead, gives the creation of meaning a pride of place in your life. It can empower you to root out cognitive dissonances, and make choices that align with your values and ethics — even adopt new frames of reference entirely. In embracing an Existential life, you give yourself permission to change your mind in the face of new experiences or evidence. You take responsibility for the choices you make, and build a life that is meaningful choice by choice. You start making sense of your life, instead of faking it. But as both cognitive and social science has confirmed, you’ll be all the happier for it.

Final summary

The main takeaway of this Blink to Start Making Sense by Steven Heine is that… Existential philosophy offers a framework for building a meaningful life even in times when things are falling apart, and life has become absurd. By examining how humans make sense of their world through storytelling, Existentialists found insight into why humans so often behave in contradictory ways, and act against their own interests. Learning to tolerate the uncertainty of new paradigms or points of view, can empower anyone to build a life full of meaning for themselves, no matter what life throws at them. Choosing to acknowledge one's inconsistencies or cognitive dissonances instead of rationalizing them away, brings with it the power to make different choices, and build a happier, more meaningful life.

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About the Author

Steven J: Heine is a distinguished Canadian professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia. He authored the most widely-used textbook on the subject, Cultural Psychology, as well as DNA Is Not Destiny, exploring the common misconceptions surrounding genetics and health.