The major question the existentialists sought to answer was, “What is the meaning of life?” Complementary to that question is another: does life even have meaning? Of course, they weren’t the first philosophers to ask this question. People had been thinking about this for thousands of years before them.

There are a lot of different ways to approach the potentiality of a grand, overarching meaning to life itself. Existentialism attempted to ground meaning in what we can actually see; it placed our perception above all else and used it to explain what might give each of our lives meaning.