Meaning is contained within whatever we call our souls.
We find meaning through purposes we do. However, not all purposes create meaning. Meaning is the “why” we do things.
Meaning is derived from a sense of responsibility. Broadly, responsibility is a series of elements:
- Having the capacity to make decisions…
- …which create actions, which may simply be thoughts…
- …which accomplish a purpose directed toward an object.
- We’ve predicted the purpose will create value for a living thing, either directly or indirectly.
- We believe our decision changed the consequence.
- The decision we made should have prevented a potential loss or suffering, or possibly increased satisfaction.
Meaning doesn’t necessarily come from legitimately changing reality, but instead from the appearance of having changed reality. We measure it by whether we feel accomplishment.
The nature of meaning also means that we must always conquer the unknown, which ends up always reverting to some type of religious theme, no matter how secular we become.
Decisions operate independently of habit, so we can only continue feeling meaning by continuing to make conscious choices. Otherwise, we will start to drift from our sense of meaning. Building new habits can be a choice, and is probably the only choice we can continuously make the same throughout our life, beyond anything regarding religion.
From our biological origins, our gender (i.e., XX or XY chromosome) has a profound impact on how we frame meaning.
- As beings without any biological configuration, men struggle with the battle to find meaning in a world without any inherent meaning. Their result is to build, in the hopes of defying reality, and he will face an ugly trial when he realizes his utter frailty and limitations.
- As being configured for reproduction, women struggle to find connection in a generally uncaring world. Their result is to draw connections in the hopes of defying reality, and she will face an ugly trial when realizes she’s been self-deceiving or in the final solitude that engulfs us all in death.
- Either way, we are all deceived by an overstated deception about our self-capacity, and we have a hard time finding true meaningless in just about anything.
The greatest form of experiencing meaning comes through creating things that benefit others. When we only consider sacrificing for others’ interests, we will find incomparable meaning through love, especially towards others.
Every second, our meaning is subject to change. It can shift from an emotional state, or from understanding something in a new way, or could simply be because we decided something differently.
Irresponsible
The problem with responsibility is that there are always risks, which can be scary. Taking risks is difficult to start, so it’s not unnatural for people to run away from it.
Most people run from risks, at least up to a point. When pushed enough by exposure to enough evil or hardship, a small percentage of people will oppose the abdication of responsibility and push back. If those people, at that moment, are driven by a principle or the results, they will find more meaning than the rest of the population.
Even without that provocation, anyone will turn around and pursue the difficult things when they realize that we find meaning out of the challenge itself. Except for cats, animals prefer to hunt their food than have it given to them.
Recovering
We’re not morally obligated to find happiness, but we are responsible to find meaning if we are created beings (i.e., if we believe in any form of deity).
When people run from risks long enough to make it a habit, they lose control of themselves. At this point, it’s straightforward for them to feel they’re a victim. In some ways, they’re correct, especially if their family of origin hadn’t taught them how to be responsible.
The one benefit to being a victim is that there’s no need to personally change. Unfortunately, it leads to a life of existential misery, and typically leads to even more hardship, since a person will feel more loss from their bad decisions over the same experience coming by outside coercion.
The only way to get out of their unpleasant situation is to claim responsibility of what they should have done and still have control over. This can express as performing basic housekeeping or finding something that makes them happy.
Some people imagine a broadened scope of existence (e.g., a million years) makes everything meaningless. That’s only proving itself true from that specific perspective, but doesn’t prove anything else. Those people find a strange type of existential meaning in meaninglessness.
Journey
We don’t find much meaning in the fulfillment of the things we want. Generally, shortly after we celebrate attaining those things, we look immediately for something else to fulfill us. However, we anticipate that we will find spectacular meaning in things we do as we imagine it in the future.
The pathway to fulfilling a purpose is far more influential to our sense of meaning than actually getting there. The only requirement is that we feel we’re making progress toward it, which is usually possible as long as we hope it can happen, and it’s much easier to maintain hope when we can’t measure our goals.
Once we’ve attained something, we’re guaranteed to get bored. The only way we’ll ever find meaning after building something is to find new purposes to attain.
Ironically, we can find meaning through mindless habits of hope in things that do not contribute whatsoever to a better existence. This distorts the good life, since there’s only marginal love for oneself without producing any tangible benefit to anyone.
Ironically, too much specialization (which often creates the greatest consequences for a purpose) can also lead to feelings of meaninglessness.
To reiterate, though, the greatest meaning comes through genuine, heartfelt, purely selfless love for others.
Application
Purpose comes through simply acting based on a prediction of the future, so we can use technology (i.e., computers) to reproduce it. However, because meaning incorporates feelings, the agency of choice, and far more understanding, there’s absolutely no way to automate purpose. This is unfortunate because meaningful purpose is vital to the good life.
We can often feel meaning from others, which is how we can know something was “half-hearted”.
To find meaning, start with what you can control, then link it together with one of your problems. There are too many issues to focus on them exclusively, and we can’t do anything about what we can’t control.
Just because we have meaning right now, or have had it for a long time, does not mean we’ll have it in the future. It requires constantly observing our sense of dissatisfaction to observe that shift, but we’ll also detect it when we start doing things with less enthusiasm.
We typically find meaning in something, then forget to continue adding meaning. This creates challenges as we change and convert those meaningful tasks into habits, frequently culminating in a spark of awareness (e.g., a midlife crisis).
Enjoyment in something isn’t in the attainment, but the effort and expected results. For that reason, accomplishing challenging and relatively unnoticed things that help others is far more rewarding than simply acquiring or achieving more.
Video games give the appearance of creating results from actions, so they can still provide a sense of meaning even when there aren’t any legitimate results.
It’s perfectly possible (and not uncommon) to become wildly successful and feel absolutely dead inside. It comes through a distinct absence of love for others.
We find unbelievable meaning through sacrifice for others, and it’s why parenting is considered one of the most rewarding jobs, even while it’s also mostly unrewarding externally.
In a perfect society, everyone would build their own home, with the only exceptions being strictly by love that overlooked others’ weaknesses.
Opportunities to succeed exist wherever responsibility was neglected.
If someone finds meaning in something, don’t bother trying to change that person’s mind. You can potentially influence them if they want to hear you out, but their purpose is already set based on values they’ve already imagined and committed to believing.
Nihilism implies everything is meaningless because it eventually won’t matter. They’re only correct if they believe that we live all instances at once. There’s quite a lot of meaning to find in self-preservation and love for others we can do right now. Most nihilists believe in meaninglessness because they prioritize certainty too much.
We can find meaning anywhere if we think about it long enough, and it contains many shared parallels:
- A scientist and theologian will both find meaning because they increase the store of human knowledge.
- A soldier, of any country, will find meaning because they fight to defend their homeland.
- The entrepreneur and builder finds meaning by building something new.