The Trouble With Meaning

Meaning. What does it mean? Meaning what? Purpose? What does purpose mean? To mean. Being mean? Purposeful. Purposefully being mean? That can be fun if you have sisters. 

these words over a sunset please ChatGPT, very purposeful

That’s enough. 

According to Viktor Frankl, mankind’s primary driver for existence is: finding meaning or purpose. He wrote a book about it- Man's Search For Meaning- which basically confirms to you what I just said. He was a psychiatrist who developed his theories whilst surviving nazi concentration camps. There’s a crass comic comparison about being a winter athlete surviving bobsleigh that I’m not going to make. 

Social media has taken on the discussion: 

Know your why! What’s your why?! Are you a miserable fucking loser? It’s because you need your why! Buy my six-week course.

The trouble with meaning in the social media age is that it’s become less a consideration for fulfilment and yet another thing we’re supposed to be succeeding at. It’s been disfigured from how humans can endure existence to optimising someone else’s income.

I do believe in the power of a cogent sense of purpose. The north star. The thing that keeps you on track when life’s chaos derails you. But where does the line draw for flogging a dead horse and nurturing it til it’s ready to ride the Grand National again? 

That’s where perseverance comes in, cries Steven Bartlett presumably. Another laudable quality reduced to cliche in our info-saturated age. Sure, plenty of people ‘persevere’ and succeed, but what about the ones whose dreams yield nothing but wreck and obscurity? How do you know when to stop!?

The difference between someone who found success after a decade of perseverance and someone who didn’t? For nine of those years, probably little.

A fine line between a story of inspiration and a tale of delusion. 

I’m trying comedy, writing- endeavours that take years to achieve success. And what measures success? Money? Winning competitions? Selling scripts? Making TV shows? Loads of social media followers? 

I mean, yeah, probably all of that. 

But should it not be measured by the joy it brings me rather than material payback or what anyone else thinks? ‘Gurus’ of creativity don’t seem to have consensus. One minute, ‘make it for you! If people like it they’ll come.’ The next- ‘make it for your audience, they’re what matter, think of them and you can’t go wrong!’ 

So then we come to the whole ‘multiple things being true at once’ thing. Oscillating depending on how deep your self-confidence/esteem spiral is at the time. 

Thinking of myself will pull me out of this or… 

Thinking of others will pull me out of this. 

Both work, what luck! 

Can we deduce meaning from the projectile brain diarrhoea of everybody else’s thoughts? Because everything seems to have been expressed. No more original ideas, only reworkings. Look at Hollywood. 

Here comes the next ‘guru’ remark, ‘yes these things have been said before… but never by you!’ Oh what profundity! That’s reassuring, now I can blindly continue rehashing stories, cliches and tropes safe in the knowledge it’s fine because I haven’t done it yet. 

I look forward to remaking Pulp Fiction, then having a crack at the Bible. 

Are my values so superficial though? Is purpose only in career? Am I scaling up career to mean- life? What about family? Children? Maybe children are what it’s all about! They are the future after all. I know plenty of people who don’t have them and are just fine thank you, plenty who don’t have them who wish they could, plenty who do who wish they didn’t and plenty who do who expound its wonder. Multiple things being true again!

Maybe certainty is what we’re after. Perhaps this essay should be called the trouble with needing certainty. Am I certain I’m getting my point across? Certain about my career choices? Certain bi-monthly vacuuming counts as contributing?

I think what starts crystallising as we unpick the picture is we seem to crave homogeneity of thought more than we think. To say what the majority say. Think and feel what the majority think and feel. George Orwell wrote something about that. 

Look at modern political discourse. ‘You better be on our side or you’re on the wrong side.’ ‘Do you think like us?’ ‘Well, start you bigot/leftie/racist/commie/deleteasappropriate.’ 

Even contrarians who would rather hammer their own face with a hammer than agree with a majority still want consensus on their views. 

Again, what about multiple things being true? Can I believe in protecting the dignity of those different to me whilst not subscribing to their worldview? Can I veer one wing on certain issues and another on others? Must divergence of thought mean tacit acceptance of some form of hate?

Are we not all confused monkeys getting software updates our hardware can’t run?

Thanks Zuckerberg, you fucked us. 

I mentioned that I like to say I’m a writer- groupthink, that’s the Orwell thing, sorry- but am I a fraud because I can’t quote Kafka? Or find his short stories so mind-numbingly dull that I can’t be bothered to work out his allegories and metaphors?

Is it that I’m mind-numbed? Am I dull? Very possibly. Does that mean I’m wrong for feeling a sense of purpose as a writer? For my audience to decide I suppose. 

No wait! They don’t matter, it's about me right now. And I think I’m great. Phew.

Maybe the trouble isn’t meaning itself. Maybe the trouble is overthinking. Meaning is the gateway drug, opening you up to a world of competing ideas. 

One minute you’re puffing happily on the purpose spliff and before you know it you’re injecting Kant’s categorical imperative into your penis. Obsessing and ruminating on what philosophical route is the key to a happy and productive life instead of just… living? 

I read a thing the other day. Don't know where, probably insta (thanks Zuck) that apparently whiling away a couple of hours under a tree enjoying a warm summer’s afternoon was somehow wasted time. As if the cosmic good fortune of existing wasn’t purpose enough.

Sitting under a tree enjoying the sun on your face is a lovely use of time.

Introduce the concept of purpose and you start questioning if sitting under the tree aligns with that purpose. Boom- you’re not living anymore, you’re thinking about living. 

Someone introduces productivity, suddenly you’re wasting time. 

Someone introduces financial freedom, now you’re stressing about how to monetise the tree. 

That’s the trouble with the relentless search for meaning. It gives you an infinite number of ways to conclude a perfectly acceptable life is being lived incorrectly.

And you’d be right to push back on this flow of consciousness. What’s wrong with learning more? Understanding more?

Absolutely nothing. 

People have always wrestled with meaning. The trouble with it in this day and age is that the route to that information is plagued with reroutes and signposts. Different philosophical paths served algorithmically all the livelong day:

Stoicism for breakfast, Frankl for lunch, Jung for dinner and before bed, some turd called Deano telling you about masculinity from his Range Rover. 

Alexander Pope said ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’ which nicely proves my next point because I thought it was Gandhi. We're in the Wikipedia age. Top line knowledge only. We know a little about a lot, which is fine until we start using the little to guide the lot. Cleverer people than us dedicated lifetimes to a single school of thought. We read a quote on a teatowel and think with fleeting certainty, ‘that’s the answer!’ 

I’d argue we’re not more educated, we’re philosophically over-stimulated. Knowing just enough about enough to continually diagnose deficiencies in our lives instead of living them as they are.

The trouble with meaning is that it can force you to question that which needn’t be questioned. Stuff you’re doing that’s absolutely fine. Thoughts and values you have that are fine. 

Sure, self-awareness and mindfulness MOTs are important too- I write, that’s how I organise my thoughts and thoughts change and flex with time and experience. I’ll read this again in a year or few and I hope to cringe at it.

That’s good insurance against criticism isn’t it? 

It’s fun to lay out thought processes. I like working out what I think and what I think at the moment is that a simpler route to market might make overthinkers like me a bit happier. 

Purpose becomes a microscope when perhaps we should use it more like a compass, pointing us broadly in the direction of those things that matter: family, love, experiences, work, whatever. 

Be careful not to replace living meaningfully with monitoring whether you’re living meaningfully. 

Or do, I ain’t a guru and shit.