INFP: When nothing feels meaningful enough

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Poster for the Whitney Museum of American Art (1989) Keith Harring

INFPs struggle with meaning because your standard for meaning keeps rising.

Once you’ve experienced something that feels deeply aligned with your values, ordinary life starts to feel shallow by comparison. So your rule becomes: I only do things that are meaningful. But over time the definition of meaningful gets narrower. The bar rises. And eventually nothing quite clears it.

Psychologists call this existential perfectionism, which means your value system becomes so refined that real life can’t satisfy it. From the outside, this can look like quitting or losing interest. From the inside it feels like a heavy weight.

With existential perfectionism every meaningful thing you do shows you how much more there is to do. Success creates obligation. I learned about this from watching Nino.

When I met Nino he was in film school experimenting with new media. One of his projects was an interview with a man dying of AIDS. The conversation ran for hours — chaotic, overwhelming and politically important.

Nino spent two years editing it. What he finally released was ten minutes: just the moments the man broke down, and the moments he steadied himself with a cigarette. Everything else cut away. Just grief, and the effort to survive it.

The film still screens at festivals. It becomes more powerful over time as viewers understand the history around it. Nino gave people a way to feel something they didn’t live through.

Around the same time he had work shown at the Whitney. Then he stopped making art. He told me he had nothing important enough to say. Later he spent years working to improve conditions at Rikers Island. Then decided he hadn’t done enough and left. We had a child together. He was a deeply present father. Then decided he was failing and asked for a divorce.

For years I thought he was quitting things. Now I see something different. He wasn’t running away from meaning. He was searching for it so intensely that nothing felt sufficient.

The problem is that meaning doesn’t work that way. Meaning isn’t something you find before you act. It’s something you make by staying.

Nino knows how to do this. He spent two years sitting with raw material, cutting away everything except what mattered. The film holds because he committed to it. He just struggles to extend that same patience to his own life.

When your standard for meaning gets high enough, your own life stops qualifying. The work you’ve done, the people you’ve stayed for, the small persistent ways you’ve mattered — none of it clears the bar. The meaning you’re searching for is often already there. It’s in what you built while you were busy deciding it wasn’t enough.