“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”William Shakespeare · Macbeth · 1606 · Actul V, Scena 5
Life becomes meaningless noise precisely when you strip it of meaning, not because it lacks any.
Macbeth says this after losing everything for a power that proved hollow. As a statement about human beings: there are moments when effort, ambition, and suffering seem like mere noise, and meaning is nowhere to be seen. The line is true as an experience of despair, even if not as a final verdict — it describes what life looks like once you have stripped it of meaning.
Passage 1. Macbeth does not discover that life is empty; he emptied it himself. He chased power by walking over everything that made life livable: friends, sleep, self-respect. When he says life is meaningless noise, he describes his own condition, not a law of the world. Think of someone who throws everything out of the house in pursuit of one obsession, then wonders why the place feels bare. His despair is real, but it is a symptom, not a verdict. The question remains: what would keep a life from sounding like mere noise?
Why it matters It resonates with crises of meaning, after great failures or at midlife, when all efforts seem hollow.