This article is a dive into a realisation: nothing is meaningful until we imagine it so – and imagination is the most human act we ever perform. It started, as these things often do, with a throwaway comment delivered by someone who clearly thought they were being sensible. “Why do you bother with Notts County?” they asked, with that faint smirk people reserve for hobbies – or in my case, my calling – they don’t understand. “It’s just 22 men running around, isn’t it?”
And for a moment – a dangerous, illuminating moment – I actually paused. Because stripped of imagination, stripped of loyalty, stripped of the emotional scaffolding we build around the things we love, football is just that: bodies in motion, grass disturbed, a ball obeying physics (unless Jodi Jones fires one in from the edge of the box). Nothing more.
Imagination creates the meaning of life
But that pause opened a door. It made me realise that everything we care about – football, family, art, ambition, the whole messy carnival of human life – only matters because we decide it does. Meaning isn’t in the match. Meaning is in the mind that watches it.
Following Notts County isn’t logical. It isn’t rational. It isn’t even explainable to someone who hasn’t felt the electricity of belonging. But that’s precisely the point. The meaning isn’t in the 22 men. It’s in the story I imagine around them – the history, the hope, the heartbreak, the identity, the ritual, the community, the sheer bloody-minded devotion to something that transcends the literal.
That moment of being questioned didn’t weaken my love for the club. It sharpened my understanding of it. It reminded me that meaning is not discovered – it’s invented, and football is one of the great human laboratories where we practise that invention.
The human superpower of imagination
There’s a peculiar truth lurking beneath the surface of our daily grind – a truth so obvious we rarely bother to look it in the eye. Everything we do, from the grandiose to the mundane, is fundamentally meaningless until we decide otherwise. A mountain climb is just a sweaty shuffle uphill. A kiss is a brief exchange of moisture. A career is a sequence of tasks. A life is a biological event.
And yet we live as though these things matter. Deeply. Urgently. Sometimes painfully. But why? Because humans perform a quiet miracle every day: we imagine meaning into existence. This isn’t a flaw. It’s our superpower.
Take the mountain. Strip away imagination and it’s a geological inconvenience. But add meaning – your meaning – and suddenly it becomes a test of character, a pilgrimage, a metaphor for overcoming adversity, a spiritual ascent, a tribute to someone you loved, or simply a story you’ll tell over a pint.
The climb doesn’t change. You do. Meaning is not in the rock. Meaning is in the mind that touches it.
Philosophers explore the creation of meaning
This idea isn’t new. The great thinkers have been whispering it for centuries.
Sartre insisted that existence comes first, meaning second. We aren’t born with purpose; we invent it. We are authors, not actors.
Camus saw the universe as absurd – cold, indifferent, unbothered by our hopes. But he argued that humans rebel against this absurdity by creating meaning anyway. The myth of Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down, shows his eternal labour becomes noble, but only because we choose to see it that way.
Nietzsche urged us to become creators of values, not consumers of inherited ones. Meaning isn’t handed down; it’s forged in the furnace of imagination.
William James took a pragmatic view: meaning is whatever changes how you live. If imagining purpose alters your behaviour, then that imagined purpose is real enough.
Hannah Arendt believed actions only become meaningful when they enter a story – when imagination frames them, remembers them, retells them.
And Kant, ever the architect of cognition, argued that the mind doesn’t just receive reality; it organises it. Meaning is not decoration. It’s structure.
Life without imagination is meaningless
So, does this mean life is meaningless without imagination? In a blunt, biological sense, yes. Without imagination, life is a sequence of chemical reactions. But humans aren’t chemical creatures. We’re symbolic ones. We don’t just live; we interpret living.
Meaning is not discovered. Meaning is manufactured. Meaning is not found. Meaning is declared. Meaning is not a property of the world. It is a performance of the mind. And imagination is the stage on which that performance unfolds.
Imagination transforms the mundane into the mythic. It lets us climb mountains not for altitude, but for redemption. It lets us see love in a glance, courage in a decision, tragedy in a silence. Meaning is the paint; imagination is the brush. Without imagination, life is a blank canvas. With imagination, it becomes art.
If meaning is imagined, then the question isn’t “What is the meaning of life?” It’s “What meaning will you choose to imagine into yours?”
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