My most persistent struggle right now is that of meaning. I am young and healthy and employed, but I still spend my spare moments bemoaning my status quo: I’m a washed up college graduate, a wrung out towel with too little aliveness. I had always hoped and expected in high school and college that the older me would magically be more satisfied with life, but I’ve come to realize that magic is not synonymous with real life. That realization, although obviously true, has been a bit crushing in its own right.
Of course, much of my suffering stems from my assumption that I am entitled to meaning. Rationally, I know that I’m not entitled to anything — good health, prestigious jobs, lots of paid Substack subscriptions — but I keep hoping and craving and angsting for everything anyways. I’m the little kid in the car during a long drive, asking my parents every minute if we’ve finally arrived. Am I there yet? Do I finally have meaning now? Why don’t I have a purpose yet, it’s been so long! Why can’t I just know what makes me come alive? I want meaning, and I want it now!
I keep hoping that I can outsmart life and achieve my way to meaning. First it was being insanely good at math competitions, then it was getting into Harvard, which was then followed by a finance job, which have now been replaced by publishing a novel and being able to making a living from my Substack. Some of these have not panned out and might never pan out (still hurting over my math competition days), but the ones that did brought minimal improvements to my experience of life.
I’ve found that meaning often comes from the routine minutia of life — calling my friend Nish during my afternoon break at work while I buy a fake gemstone ring from the dollar store, reading Beverly Cleary’s memoir in a single afternoon before severely undercooking steak for
and Angie, getting thoughtful email responses on my Substack posts. My mom told me yesterday about former college friend sending her flowers for my grandpa’s funeral and her boss showing up to the funeral. She was incredibly touched.I keep thinking about my conversation with my grandpa told me when I visited him in the hospital before he died. He was an incredibly devout Catholic who told me that he went to church for fun during his youth. To him, any earthly successes he had were gifts from God, and he was extremely grateful. I was and still am struck by how truly grateful my grandpa was. I have much to learn from him still, starting with viewing whatever meaning I have as a gift and cherishing it.
Forgive me, I spent hours reading Beverly Cleary’s and Fitzgerald’s memoirs today, and my writing style was a bit melodramatic as a result.
This October the seasonal change really sucked. I read, however, Daniel Lieberman's The Story of the Human Body. I guess I would say the following:
Meaning is an empty concept, which can be defined in any which way, and thus is spurious, or has no possibility of stability. It is like an empty placeholder, which can be filled with anything; but as soon as you get depressed (your brain is unable to see purposes, to make plans, to visualize the future), the placeholder is flipped upside down and the meaning falls out. In October, as I got depressed, I felt that the foundations of my life, upon which I had been certain, were thinning out like the weaker Autumn trees, evaporating, until I lived my life not knowing why I lived it anymore. Naturally, as soon as I adjusted to the seasonal change, the sap of my body flowed meaningfully again.
Farming is 6,000 years old, which is nothing; our bodies are still those of our hunter-gatherer past. Hunter-gatherers worked collaboratively to hunt, were egalitarian, shared food, lived in camps of 60-100 (we are not adapted for Instagram audiences), and most importantly walked a lot more than we do. Their landscapes were not filled with threatening noises. While they died younger than we do, they do not suffer from morbidities from our maladaption to the environment around us.
When you share food to your loved ones, the question of meaning is not present. When you work on something with your partner, you feel love. Vacations are often places where couples fight, because they are here merely to enjoy, and not to work together on anything. Working together with someone fulfills our evolutionary need, and hence provides us with not meaning, but no longer the question of meaning. Being in nature, walking, all these things, by fulfilling our evolutionary needs — deep breathing, waking early to see the sun — playing a vigorous sport, defending a younger brother, taking care of an elderly parent, all these activities, full of sunlight, beggar the question of meaning, and prove the question of meaning to be merely an intellectual's overthinking mistake.
Our brains evolved to do inductive reasoning for things like tracking paths in a forest. When those tools are applied to empty thought, that same power of inductive reasoning comes up with scary questions: What is after death? What is the point of all this? The powers which we gained for mere simple tasks, for visualizing the map of the forest, for seeing our loved one's face, overwhelm us now because they are operating on immaterial things, matters of empty thought. We use our reasoning abilities outside of their proper field.
Have you read Frankel's writings on the will to meaning, Val? His framework might be relevent to your case. I view meaning sources as ever-changing, based on our shifting value structures & environments. Doesn't mean that it's easy to find 'em, but at least we can understand their fleetness.
That might be a feature. This part strikes me as as positive outcome:
"I keep hoping that I can outsmart life and achieve my way to meaning. First it was being insanely good at math competitions, then it was getting into Harvard, which was then followed by a finance job, which have now been replaced by publishing a novel and being able to making a living from my Substack."
Look in the mirror! That's amazing, all of it! I'm don't support a hardcore, intense lifestyle, but one can appreciate these achievements. The fact our self defined goals change over time makes the journey interesting.