Many people complain about the meaninglessness of life. Some go so far as to commit suicide because of it. Victor Frankl wrote a book: Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he claimed that people actually value meaning above all else.

So, does life have meaning that we could find, if we search for it? No, it doesn’t. Why not?

What does “meaning” mean? Meaning means significance, wouldn’t you agree? And within the word significance we find the common word “sign.” What’s a sign? Something that points to something else. If you sneeze and have fever, that’s a sign that you have a cold, or the flu, right? If you are driving and see a sign that says, “This Way to Rome,” you know that, unless the sign deceives, this road leads to Rome. Of course that may not matter much, since “All roads lead to Rome.”

“Meaning” does not stand alone. It forms part of a three term system, a relationship, also called a triad: your intention, the object of your intention, and the way (road), or means, to achieve your intention. That “means” represents the meaning, or sign-ificance.

So if you have no intention, nothing will have meaning. If you have an intention, whatever relates to that intention has meaning. The meaning does not, cannot, come first. Meaning only arises in response to an intention.

One hears lots of talk about the “Information Age” we live in and that we suffer from “Information Overload.” The formulators of these misleading statements (false signs) do not understand the difference between data and information.

Suppose you open a newspaper, or look on the internet, and see that the stock of IBM has risen by ten points. Does that datum hold significance for you? Does it mean anything? If you own IBM stock or are thinking of buying it, then yes, it would. Even if you are just thinking of getting into stock investing or trading it might have meaning. For you. To the homeless guy on the street, it has no meaning whatsoever. Unless, perhaps, he used to be a stockbroker.

This information for the stock trader remains simply data for the penniless person. We don’t live in an Information Age, we live in a Data Age. We don’t suffer from Information Overload, we suffer from Data Overload. It takes work to refine the ore of data and extract the useful gold, the information, the data which have meaning. The golden mean: too much data and you drown in an ocean of meaninglessness; too little data and the meaning dries up: you miss important information.

In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, A Study in Scarlet by A. C. Doyle, Watson learns with amazement that Holmes doesn’t even know if the Earth revolves around the sun or vice versa. Holmes says that he only has room in his brain for a certain amount of data so he has to choose: he knows a great deal about what relates to his work, for example the chemical composition of human blood.

In the same way, your brain can only process a certain amount of data. If you don’t choose what to process, you may be overwhelmed. That’s why I rarely read or listen to news. Is it really important to know everything that’s happening, all the time? Even if it doesn’t relate to you? Does it matter that there was, for example, an earthquake in Indonesia? Do you have relatives or friends there? Or do you contribute charity or labor to help in such situations? Do you study seismology? Otherwise, why burden your brain with it? People die all the time, from one cause or another, and there’s not much you can do about that.

Data, data, data. What has meaning for you? What data become meaningful information for you? Depends on your intentions.

So yes, life has no meaning. If you desire meaning, first set an intention. Suppose you intend to run a marathon, or a half marathon, or some kind of foot race. Suddenly lots of things acquire meaning: your weight, how fast and for how long you can run, the quality of various brands of running shoes, whether and how much you smoke, whether you have any friends who run, how much and what kind of food you eat, and so on. These things relate to your intention. You have created relationships: your intention, the object of your intention, and the means of getting there.

Search for meaning, you will not find it. Set an intention, the meaning will appear. The more interesting and complex your intentions, the more meaning you will perceive in your life.

When you have an intention, you perceive meaning in otherwise meaningless data. You notice things. “Luck comes to those who are prepared.”