In the literature a distinction has been made between "individualist" and "holist" or "personal" and "cosmic" questions about life's meaning (Wong 2008: 123; Metz 2013: 3). Holist or cosmic questions about life's meaning enquire about life as a whole; in this line of enquiry you would like to define yourself and your role or your purpose in the world. For a large portion of the history of philosophy, cosmic or holistic questions were the gateway through which we would arrive at an answer to the individualist or personal questions. That is, the assumption was that an individual's life's meaning is defined primarily by its role in the larger schemes of things.