We don't wake up necessarily thinking that our life has to be meaningful.

We generally act in ways that assume that there is one.

We might set the alarm for seven, even though we don't have to be anywhere before nine or ten,

because we want to look good,

be refreshed, have time to wake up, do our routines.

We might rewrite an email three times to get it right.

We might really agonose about other writing we have to do.

We might organize our desk and clean up a workspace even though no one will see it,

because it feels like it matters.

This doesn't require consciously stating aloud a grand purpose or what our life means

or what it's all about, but we do quietly assume that what we're doing counts.

And yet a lot of us certainly at different times in our life, can face a kind of existential crisis,

where we stop and we ask, what does it all mean? What's the point of it all? It's a time where we

might cast an anxious gaze to our achievements.

What have we done that is remarkable?

There's so many ways to trace back this anxiety

about our life having meaning.

One way I would like to suggest is that, and it doesn't really matter, you don't

have to remember any of this by any means, but a very famous psychologist named Lev Vygotsky

showed as early as 1930 that developmentally, we have this sense of a inner audience and it develops

with the acquisition of inner speech.

And inner speech starts from early relationships where our parents, our caregivers, tell us through speech acts how to behave,

...