This view is rejected by various theorists, who insist that an additional aspect is required: that the impact in question makes a value difference.
But meaningfulness has additional requirements: life should be guided by the agent's intention and directed at realizing some form of higher purpose.
On a psychological level, considerations of the relative importance of the aspects of a situation help the individual simplify its complexity by only focusing on its most significant features.
For example, World War II was an important event in history both because of the suffering it caused and because of the long-term political changes it affected.
[3] Or in the field of medicine, Alexander Fleming was an important person because he discovered penicillin and thereby made a difference to the health of many people since then.
[7] Many theorists require as an additional element that this impact affects the intrinsic value of the world, often in terms of promoting someone's well-being.
For example, it has been argued that human life lacks importance on a cosmic level when judged based on its causal impact but has it in relation to the value difference it makes.
[7][10][11] For example, Napoleon is seen as an individual of world-historic importance because of how his decisions affected the course of history and changed the lives of many Europeans.
Or in analogy to The Myth of Sisyphus: if rolling a rock up a hill on earth is pointless, then one cannot simply increase its importance by multiplying its causal impact.
Or on a small scale, a short period of extraordinary suffering before death may significantly affect the overall value of someone's life even if it does not have any wider causal impact.
[7][6][5] In this regard, the relation to value is built into the concept of importance: causal powers only matter instrumentally by bringing about or protecting valuable things.
[7][8][6][29] One motivation for drawing such a distinction is that seeking deeper meaning in life is usually understood as an admirable goal associated with self-transcendence while craving importance is often seen as a less noble and more egocentric undertaking.
Some theorists identify three essential features: life is meaningful if (1) it is guided by purposes that are valuable for their own sake, (2) it transcends mere animal nature by connecting to something larger, and (3) it merits certain attitudes, such as taking pride in it or admiration from others.
[32][33] So in this regard, random events that happen by accident may still have tremendous importance due to their causal consequences, as in the case of unintended butterfly effects.
Being important, on the other hand, carries with it various instrumental values but need not improve the quality of the life in question.
Some consequentialists, for example, hold that "a life is meaningful to the extent that it makes the world overall better" without a direct reference to the agent's intentions or a higher purpose.
For example, a person with the obsessive-compulsive disorder may care a lot about things like not stepping on a crack in the sidewalk even though this is objectively unimportant.
[1][2][40] A similar view is defended by Matthew Smith, who argues from a third-person perspective that a thing becomes important or morally significant if someone cares about it.
A similar case involves a person who, following the health advice of a charlatan, starts caring a lot about avoiding a certain type of food.
Deliberative priority is a form of practical preference: it determines the weight the agent ascribes to different options in the process of deciding in favor of one of them.
Other facts, like that Apartheid in South Africa was abolished, are different in the sense that they are important independently of anyone's aims by contributing to the final value of the well-being of many people affected.
So a short drive to the supermarket does not fulfill the agent's desire for importance because they refrained from running over any of the pedestrians they passed on the way.
For example, someone may "try to become important by assassinating a political leader or cultural figure" without caring about the negative side effects of this act.
[8] Importance plays various roles in ethics, for example, concerning what reasons we have for an action, how we should act, and what merits attention.
[9][45] In the case of rational choice theory, for example, this is realized by making a cost-benefit analysis to determine the significance of each option.
[7][6][21] Raising the question of the cosmic importance of human life is frequently motivated by the perspective of the universe as a whole as described by modern science.
In this regard, it is often argued that, from this perspective, the Earth and all life on it are a mere "speck of dust in a vast universe" and "without significance, import or purpose beyond our planet".
[10][7] A similar pessimistic outlook may be motivated by comparing the spatial and temporal dimensions of human life with those of the universe as a whole.
That means that there is a conflict between the internal human desire for things to matter that is frustrated by the external lack of significance belonging to the nature of the world.
An existential crisis is an inner conflict in which the perceived lack of any importance causes various negative experiences, such as stress, anxiety, despair, and depression, which can disturb the individual's normal functioning in everyday life.