[Warning: Google's "AI Overview" -- the first thing you see when you google this publication -- is thoroughly misleading: it presents the paper's thesis and argument as nearly the opposite of what I actually wrote. I've long assumed that AI will transform everything we've written into nonsense after we die, but the nonsensification in this case was almost immediate. Here's the abstract that Google garbled:] What sense could it make to describe your life as ‘unlivable’? What is it not only (...) to be alive but to have a life that you live or lead? I answer by developing a social understanding of the pursuit of meaning in life. True to other uses of ‘meaning,’ I propose, meaning in a life is communicative. If you experience your life as ‘unlivable,’ recovery can lie in this communicative dynamic: you regain the experience of leading your life by letting others remind you of meanings you have communicated to them in leading it. My argument develops an analogy between two dimensions in which you project an investment – a care, concern, love, or the like – when you form an intention or plan. Intrapersonally, you project your investment as communicatively intelligible to your own future self at ‘plan’s end.’ Interpersonally, you project it as communicatively intelligible to others who might come to love this thing that you love simply because you love it, as an expression of love for you. The normativity of meaning in your life puts rational pressure on you not only to abandon investments that you cannot communicate but to experience the meaning in investments that you retain. (shrink)