The Meaning Project
"How do I live a life I won't regret?"
"How do I attain meaning in life?"
"How do I know that I have maximized meaning and fulfillment?"
These were the types of questions my friend group---and likely millions of others---poured over during The Pandemic. Being locked in a cage of our own homes made a lot of people start looking around and wonder what all of this is for. Not even getting into how at the time the world felt like it was burning.
This conversation spawned my Life Architecture series. For my friend Christo it was
The Meaning Project, which with this post I am now responding to and collaborating on.
I always struggled with "meaning." When people get into these conversations they inevitably start getting wrapped up in "fate" and "God's plan." If you have a destiny how do you fulfill it? If God has a plan how do you find and fulfill that plan? That short answer is there is no answer. You can't chase that successfully so don't. Even if you did confidently think you found your destiny or God's plan for you, you can't actually verify that you're right.
When you get the fate/God mess out of the way, all that's left is finding fulfillment as an individual. After years of thinking on this and spending months meditating on death it has become somewhat clearer what this means. What's the grand answer to finding fulfillment?
Know who you are and make decisions that are true to who you are. "Meaning" is a problem of consciousness. Struggling with meaning is a struggle of lack of consciousness.
Is that easier? Harder? I don't know. Regardless my theory is that people who have regretful ("meaningless?") lives never knew who they were and/or never acted authentically on who they were. They consistently prioritized low value outcomes over high value ones. More horrifying are those that live their lives on autopilot and never know what was low vs high value to them.
There are a lot of accountants in the world who wanted to be novelists. There are a lot of parents who never wanted to be parents. There are a lot of would-be globetrotters who never get their passport. These people have betrayed themselves.
So how do you find yourself then? The real question. For me, developing the Life Architecture program has really helped. Knowing my [[Guiding Principles]] and [[My Dreams]] have been an extremely rewarding project of self-discovery. After all, do you actually know yourself if you don't know what you value? What you dream of? Can you verbally and confidently articulate your values and dreams? If you don't know these things how can you say you are making purposeful life decisions?
People think that being aware of hobbies and interests are the same as knowing yourself. That's barely the tip of the iceberg. Knowing you like baseball and Star Wars isn't really knowing yourself. Ask yourself: would you still value those things in a vacuum? If nobody was looking and you had no one to talk to about it, would you still like baseball and Star Wars? Is it the community that you actually enjoy? Another question: do you actually like those things or are you only filling the time? Are there things you should be prioritizing over those interests?
As a minor deviation, psychology may be helpful to illuminate some challenges. If you are unable to plan your life, find motivation, etc, you may have been raised in an environment of coercive control. That is, you were raised in an environment where desires and needs that you expressed were consistently denied. It is also that you were punished in one way or another for expressing thoughts or emotions. The psychology around this says that adults raised in such environments find expressing themselves extremely difficult and in turn this makes long-term planning and action very difficult. Your lack of ability to purposefully make decisions about your life might literally be a trauma response. "Autopilot" as a concept appears to be trauma-related disassociation. If you are one of the 50-60% of the population(!) with this it might be time to talk it out with a therapist. A good video on this: This is Why You're Living Life on Autopilot - YouTube
To close all this out, by no means do I think these ideals are perfect. What's being discussed here is such a bizarre intersection of the human experience at the macro and micro scale. What I do consider an absolute truth however is that you should live life purposefully. Life is not a game. This is it. Don't mess it up.
Written August 2023