it plays a role for this higher purpose. This is sometimes termed cosmic meaning in contrast to the secular personal meaning an individual seeks when asking in what way their particular life is meaningful or valuable. In this personal sense, it is often connected with a practical confusion about how one should live one's life or why one should continue doing what one does. This can express itself in the feeling that one has nothing to live for or to hope for. Sometimes this is even interpreted in the sense that there is no right and wrong or good and evil. While it may be more and more difficult in the contemporary secular world to find cosmic meaning, it has been argued that to resolve the problem of meaninglessness, it is sufficient for the individual to find a secular personal meaning to hold onto. The issue of meaninglessness becomes a problem because humans seem to have a strong desire or need for meaning. This expresses itself both emotionally and practically since goals and ideals are needed to structure one's life. The other side of the problem is given in the fact that there seems to be no such meaning or that the world is at its bottom contingent and could have existed in a very different way or not at all. The world's contingency and indifference to human affairs are often referred to as the absurd in the existentialist literature. The problem can be summarized through the question "How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?". Various practitioners of existential psychotherapy have affirmed that the loss of meaning plays a role for the majority of people requiring psychotherapy and is the central issue for a significant number of them. But this loss has its most characteristic expression in existential crises. Various factors affect whether life is experienced as meaningful, such as social relationships, religion, and thoughts about the past or future. Judgments of meaning are quite subjective. They are a form of global assessment since they take one's life as a whole into consideration. It is sometimes argued that the problem of a loss of meaning is particularly associated with modern society. This is often based on the idea that people tended to be more grounded in their immediate social environment, their profession, and their religion in premodern times. Sources of meaning