At a glance
When life feels pointless, you have usually not thought your way to a wrong conclusion. Something that connected you to your own life has gone quiet, and arguing with it does not bring it back. This article looks at what the pointlessness is made of, and what tends to move it.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The list that proves nothing. Clients can name everything that is good in their life, feel nothing from the list, and take that as further evidence against themselves.
- The slow withdrawal. Clients describe giving things up one at a time for sensible reasons, and noticing much later that almost nothing is left that they do for its own sake.
- The question underneath the question. When clients ask what the point of it all is, another question is often sitting behind it: who has this life been arranged around, and when did I last have a say in it.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does nothing feel worth doing when nothing is wrong?
Pointlessness rarely arrives as an argument. It arrives as a flatness, and then goes looking for reasons. You get up, you do the things, and somewhere in the middle of them the question appears: what is any of this for. The things themselves have not changed. The work is the work you chose, the flat is the one you wanted, the people are people you like. What has changed is that none of it reaches you, and the mind, being a mind, explains the silence by concluding that none of it matters.
That conclusion is worth separating from the feeling that produced it. The thought that your life is pointless is drawn from an absence, and it convinces because it matches the mood exactly. Clients who argue with the thought tend to get nowhere. Clients who get curious about the absence usually find it has a shape: a time it started, something it followed, and a few things it leaves untouched.
Is this low mood, or has something stopped mattering?
Both can be true at once, and they ask for different kinds of attention. A flatness that has taken your sleep, your appetite and your interest in everything, including what you once loved, is carrying more weight than a question about meaning, and it deserves to be treated as the serious thing it is rather than solved by better reasoning. A pointlessness that leaves some things intact is often more specific than it feels: it attaches itself to the part of your life that has gone unexamined for years and goes quiet when you are absorbed in something that is genuinely yours.
Clients sometimes want to know which of the 2 they have before they will take it seriously. That order is hard to hold. The flatness is already telling you something, with or without a name for it, and the work of finding out what it is attached to does not have to wait for a label.
What happened to the ordinary shape of your days?
A sense that life means something is held in place by more ordinary things than most people expect. When clients describe the period in which things stopped mattering, the description is usually full of small disappearances: the walk that stopped, the Sunday that filled up with work, the friends who were not arranged with because the arranging had become tiring. None of these looked important on the day it went.
Research on everyday routine points the same way, modestly. Across 2 studies, one with 317 adults and one following 85 students through a week of repeated daily prompts, people reported a somewhat stronger sense that life was meaningful at the moments when they were following a personal routine, though the effects were small and the design cannot show which way the influence runs.1 It is a thin finding on its own. It matches something I see constantly: the structure goes first, and the meaning leaves afterwards, quietly enough that nobody connects the 2.
This inverts the order most people work in. You wait to feel that something matters before you do it. The waiting is reasonable, and it is also how the pointlessness keeps itself fed, because the sense that something matters is built in contact with it rather than before it.
Why does thinking harder about it make it worse?
The question of what the point is cannot be answered in the form it is asked. It presents itself as a problem with a findable answer, so you go looking. You read, you make lists of what you value, you put the work, the relationship and the city on trial. Hours go in. You come back with nothing, and now you have what looks like evidence that there is nothing there to find.
What the question usually marks is a loss rather than a gap in your reasoning. Something ended without being mourned: an ambition you quietly let go of, a version of yourself you have not been for years, a relationship that went flat and has never been mentioned since. Jung described the middle of life as the point where the aims that served the first half stop paying, and a person goes on meeting them anyway. I would not impose that on anyone as a timetable, but it names what I often find: not a life with no point, but a point that has been reached or abandoned, with nothing allowed to take its place.
What helps when nothing feels worth doing?
Start with contact, not with meaning. The aim is not to feel that your life matters by the end of the week. It is to put yourself back within reach of what used to register, at a scale that is possible when you have no motivation at all.
- Pick the smallest thing you once did for its own sake. Not the thing that would be good for you. The thing that was yours.
- Do it at the wrong moment. Waiting until you want to is waiting for the flatness to lift before you go anywhere near it.
- Follow whatever still registers, however faintly. A piece of music that is almost interesting is information. Dismissing it for being small is how the search ends.
- Say the question out loud to one person. Pointlessness holds together in private and sounds different once somebody else has heard it.
- Look at what you have dropped. The list of things you have stopped doing in the past 2 years usually tells you more than any list of values.
Hold these as ways of getting close enough to see what you are dealing with, not as a cure. They are not sufficient where the flatness has lasted for months and taken your sleep and appetite with it, where it has narrowed your life down to the few things you cannot drop, or where every attempt to re-enter your own life meets a wave of feeling you cannot stay with on your own. A good deal of individual psychotherapy in Copenhagen is exactly this work: staying with the flatness long enough to find out what it is made of, and what it is keeping you at a distance from.
Questions people ask
Can therapy do anything about a feeling that life is pointless?
Yes, and usually by finding what the feeling is attached to rather than arguing with it. The work is slower than persuasion and tends to hold better.
What if I cannot say what is actually wrong?
That is the ordinary starting point rather than a reason to wait. Most of what matters here is not available as a clear statement at the beginning.
Do I need to want to change before I start?
No. Low motivation is part of what you are bringing, not a condition for coming. I would rather work with it than wait for it to lift.
How long does this kind of work usually take?
It depends on how long the flatness has been there and how much of your life it has reached. I would rather give you a view of that after a few sessions than a number before them.
What kind of therapy suits a loss of meaning?
Work that treats meaning as something you are in contact with rather than something you decide. My own training is in psychosynthesis, with attachment thinking and object relations alongside it.
If life has lost its meaning for you, please reach out, because depression therapy is where I can help you find a way forward.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
