Dancing with the Void
When Meaning Falls Apart (and How to Create Your Own)
There’s a moment on every creative or spiritual path when the ground beneath you gives way. The beliefs, roles, and systems that once held everything together begin to dissolve. The ambitions that once lit you up suddenly feel hollow. Even the things that once felt important start to lose their shine.
This is what philosophers call nihilism, the realisation that nothing in life has intrinsic meaning.
At first, it can feel like despair, like staring into a dark and endless sky where the stars have gone out. But nihilism, when we stay with it, can become something else entirely. It can become the threshold to awakening.
Because when nothing is inherently meaningful, everything becomes possible.
If no meaning is given, we are free to create our own. The void becomes a blank canvas, inviting us to paint our lives in colours we choose, not the ones society handed us.
The Liberation Within the Void
Artists, writers, thinkers, and spiritual seekers often dance with nihilism without even naming it. It’s that moment when the external structures of meaning – success, recognition, morality, even identity – collapse. It’s uncomfortable, yes, but it’s also profoundly liberating.
When the world stops telling you what matters, you’re invited to ask deeper questions:
What’s sacred to me?
What does success mean for me?
What’s worth my time, love, and energy?
And when everything external is stripped away:
What remains?
What do I truly care about when no one’s watching?
What beauty can I still create, even in a meaningless world?
These are not questions of despair; they are doorways to a new you.
From Meaninglessness to Meaning-Making
Existentialism grew out of this very tension. It agrees that life has no prewritten purpose, but rather than collapsing under that truth, it challenges us to build our own meaning. It’s an act of rebellion and creation all at once: to live as if your choices matter, precisely because you chose them.
But beyond existentialism, spiritual traditions offer yet another lens.
Buddhism calls the void Śūnyatā: emptiness that is not loss, but interconnection.
Taoism sees meaning as something that flows naturally when we align with the rhythm of life: the Tao, or the Way.
Hinduism calls life a divine play, Lila: where consciousness experiences itself through you.
Mystics and poets call it love: the pulse that animates everything, the knowing that everything is already sacred.
Where nihilism empties life of meaning, spirituality empties the ego, and in that spaciousness, meaning reappears naturally.
Dancing with the Void
To “dance with the void” is to stop fighting the emptiness and start moving with it.
It’s to recognise that the collapse of external meaning isn’t the end, it’s the clearing before the new growth.
When we release our attachment to what life should mean, we become open to what it could mean.
When we stop performing, we start creating.
And when we stop searching for something out there to give us purpose, we rediscover that meaning arises from within: through how we see, how we love, how we create...
So if you find yourself standing in the void – uncertain, untethered, questioning everything – trust that you are not lost. You are simply between stories.
Meaning isn’t something you find.
It’s something you make.
And sometimes, the moment you stop trying to make sense of life is the moment it begins to make sense on its own.
Author’s Note
I’m moving through this dance right now. For a while, I thought I was lost, that I had slipped into meaninglessness and couldn’t find my way out. But I’m beginning to see that meaning itself is changing shape for me.
Some days I feel the emptiness; other days I feel the beauty of rebuilding.
I keep asking myself:
What’s sacred to me now?
And when everything external is stripped away – what remains?
What do I truly care about when no one’s watching?
What beauty can I still create, even in a meaningless world? Can I still be of service?
The answer shifts each time but what stays constant is the act of asking. The questioning itself becomes the art, the process of finding new meaning.
So I keep dancing with the void, trusting that even in nothingness, in darkness, is where seeds start to sprout new life, new meaning.
— Chantal G