You don't find meaning. You throw yourself at it.

This distinction sits at the heart of existentialist philosophy. We spend enormous energy searching for purpose as if it were a treasure buried somewhere outside ourselves—in religion, in career paths, in relationships, in cultural scripts. Existentialists suggest we're looking in the wrong direction entirely. Meaning isn't discovered; it's created through engagement.

The existentialist concept of projects offers a framework for understanding how this works. A project isn't simply a goal or task. It's the structure through which we exist as beings who are always already moving toward possibilities. Understanding this concept transforms how we relate to questions of purpose—and to the anxiety that often accompanies them.

Sartre observed that human consciousness is fundamentally different from objects. A stone simply is what it is. A human being is never simply what they are—they're always projecting themselves toward what they might become. This forward-leaning structure is what Sartre called transcendence.

Projects are the concrete form this transcendence takes. When you commit to learning an instrument, building a relationship, or pursuing a craft, you're not just doing activities. You're constituting yourself as a particular kind of being through engagement. The meaning of the activity doesn't exist abstractly; it emerges from your invested involvement.

This explains why the same activity can feel meaningful to one person and hollow to another. Working in medicine might be deeply purposeful for someone who has genuinely committed to healing as their project. For someone going through the motions because of parental expectation, the same work feels empty. The external form is identical; the inner relationship differs entirely.

Crucially, projects require commitment without guarantees. There's no cosmic validation that your chosen projects are the right ones. The meaning they generate depends on your authentic engagement, not on external confirmation. This is both the burden and the liberation of human existence.

Takeaway

Meaning isn't a destination you arrive at—it's a quality that emerges from genuine commitment to projects you've chosen as your own.

Not all projects are equal. Beneath our everyday activities lies what existentialists call a fundamental project—an underlying orientation that shapes how we experience everything else. This isn't usually a conscious choice; it's more like the background against which all our choices appear.

Someone whose fundamental project is to be admired will experience their career, relationships, and creative work through this lens. Success means recognition; failure means invisibility. Another person whose fundamental project centers on authentic self-expression will navigate the same situations with entirely different priorities and anxieties.

Heidegger called this the way we've already chosen ourselves before any particular choice. It's the reason why two people can receive identical life circumstances—the same job offer, the same diagnosis, the same betrayal—and experience them as utterly different events. Our fundamental project pre-interprets the world for us.

Recognizing your fundamental project requires a particular kind of reflection. It's not about listing your goals. It's about noticing the deeper patterns: What does success really mean to you? What failure do you most fear? What would make your life feel wasted? The answers point toward the usually-unexamined project that organizes your existence.

Takeaway

Behind every choice is a deeper choice about what kind of person you're trying to be—and most of us have never consciously made it.

The possibility of transforming our fundamental project is both existentially significant and genuinely difficult. It's not like changing jobs or moving cities. It requires a kind of death—the dissolution of the organizing structure through which we've understood ourselves.

Often this transformation comes uninvited. A crisis shatters the project that gave life coherence. The person who organized existence around career success gets fired. The person whose fundamental project was their marriage faces divorce. In these moments, the world temporarily loses its meaning—not because nothing matters objectively, but because the subjective structure that made things matter has collapsed.

Existentialists don't see such crises as purely negative. They're also opportunities for what Heidegger called authenticity—the possibility of choosing our project rather than inheriting it unconsciously from social expectations. Most fundamental projects are adopted without reflection. Crisis creates space for genuine choice.

But transformation doesn't require crisis. Through honest self-examination, we can recognize when our fundamental project is based in bad faith—when we've organized life around fleeing our freedom rather than embracing it. The person whose deepest project is avoiding risk is living inauthentically, however successful they appear. Recognizing this opens the possibility of choosing differently.

Takeaway

Crises don't destroy meaning—they reveal that the meaning we had was always something we constructed, and therefore something we can reconstruct.

Existentialist philosophy doesn't promise that meaning exists. It does something more useful—it shows us where meaning comes from and how we participate in its creation.

Projects aren't distractions from the question of purpose. They are the answer, or at least the only kind of answer available to beings like us. We are not meaning-discoverers but meaning-makers, constituting ourselves through what we commit to.

This places responsibility squarely with us. There's no external authority to confirm we've chosen correctly. But in that uncomfortable freedom lies something like hope: if meaning is made rather than found, then making it is always possible.