Someone asked me recently what makes for a meaningful life in the recent IG Q&A.

I think most people, including myself, believe that meaning is something we need to find. 

The book I recommended in response was How to Live a Meaningful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans – the Stanford duo behind the bestselling Designing Your Life, who published this follow-up in early 2026. 

What they and I both agree on: The belief that one job, one version of yourself, one achieved milestone can finally fill the cup is one big trap. It’s also the belief that drives a particular kind of high-achiever exhaustion: the person who has done everything right and still feels like something is missing.

What Burnett and Evans propose instead is a reorientation away from fulfillment as destination and toward being fully alive in the process of it all – present, engaged, in genuine contact with your experience as it’s happening. 

They identify four areas where meaning reliably lives: (1) wonder, (2) coherence, (3) flow, and (4) community. 

None require tearing your life down and starting over. All require a quality of attention that is easy to lose without noticing.

A) What this has to do with drift

The people I work with are rarely in obvious crisis. Their lives are full and often impressively so. 

What the challenge usually is – the sense that they’re moving through their own life rather than being in it. That things are getting done, but nothing is quite landing. That they’re performing a version of themselves that is technically accurate on the outside but doesn’t feel like them or right on the inside. 

This is Identity Drift – not a big dramatic rupture where everything falls apart but more of the quieter unease that builds up day to day. 

We manage our lives instead of being present in it. Relationships feel functional instead of deeply connected. Tasks never get completed and we feel like we are running on a neverending hamster wheel. 

What I usually tell my clients is that the outcome or action can be identical. What changes is the quality of energy and presence you bring to it and that changes everything about how you actually experience your own life.

B) What I think meaning actually is

Meaning, in my view, is something you make, not something you find. Actively, repeatedly, as a practice. It also means it can erode quietly through the accumulation of efficient, responsible choices made without checking in with yourself. A gradual drift away from your own experience of your own life.

The question I’d sit with: where in your life are you still actually present? Where have you moved into a kind of capable autopilot not because you chose to, but because it became the default somewhere along the way?

That’s usually where the drift started and it’s where the work of meaning-making has to begin.