“We don’t create our lives; we are summoned by life.”
David Brooks
You’re a storyteller.
You’ve authored more stories than James Patterson. You’ve told stories that chronicled your triumphs, failures, and everything in between. You have raving fans who snap up everything you put out. Your success as a master storyteller is unparalleled.
I know you’re thinking, “What the heck is he talking about?” Ok, maybe I stretched a bit on the last part…because you only have one raving fan.
You.
And all those stories you wrote aren’t in the form of bestselling books but streams of mostly unconscious thoughts and beliefs.
These are the narratives about yourself, your circumstances, and events in your life. These are cultural narratives that you’ve bought into and made your own. These are narratives that act as the software upon which everything you do is based.
This is powerful stuff.
There are only two problems:
1. The vast majority of these stories are negative.
2. You’re oblivious to their influence and power in your life.
The story of meaninglessness
Why does all this matter? Because there’s one overarching narrative that many of us have adopted. It’s a narrative summed up by Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that “Life is a useless passion.”
That life is, ultimately, meaningless.
Though our lives are objectively better than 99% (this is just a rough guess so don’t quote me on it) of all the humans who ever lived, we’re more anxious, depressed, and self-loathing than ever.
Lurking behind and beneath our spiritual ailments is meaninglessness. It haunts us. It mocks our accomplishments. It intensifies our failures. And it threatens to annihilate us at every turn. It wasn’t always like this.
Once upon a time, we trusted our institutions, especially religion, to provide us with a sense of meaning and order. Even though chaos ran rampant in the form of wars and disease, these meaning systems helped maintain internal spiritual order.
We may not have understood why there was evil in the world, but we trusted that there must be some meaning to it all, even if it was obscure to us mere mortals.
But that all started to change at the dawn of modern civilization as we know it today. During the Enlightenment, humans through intellect, reason, and scientific inquiry, gradually began to grab power away from God.
Instead of trusting an obscure deity to provide humans with meaning, humans began trusting in their own power to decipher how the world works. Everyone was free to create their own meaning. There was no grand master plan orchestrated by a god who controlled us as puppets in his cosmic drama.
In essence, there was no meaning. As Yuval Noah Harari puts it:
“…modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans gave up meaning in exchange for power.”
On the surface, it sounds like a no-brainer of a deal. We thought we could drive chaos out of existence by acquiring the powers necessary to order our world. But now the chaos resides within.
It’s hard being God
We underestimated how hard it is to be God. Having total freedom to set your own path and create your own meaning is no joke.
As alluded to above, the real trade-off we made was not between meaning and power, but order and chaos. We traded inner order for outer order. And we traded outer chaos for inner chaos.
As anyone knows from experience, the more choices a person is given, the more likely they are to become overwhelmed and either make a bad choice or no choice at all.
The modern age took away our holy scriptures and gave us blank journals with pens and said, “Here, write your own story.”
But we froze. Instead of creating long and complex narratives for ourselves, we took Satre’s lead and wrote, “Life is a useless passion.”
It’s hard to be God.
Man is to meaning like fish is to water
However, that’s not the end of the story. Because we are to meaning like fish is to water. If you take away water, you’d need to redefine what it means to be a fish.
If we could truly eradicate meaning, we would have to fundamentally redefine what it means to be human or scrap the idea altogether.
The truth is that we are wired to our core for meaning. Even the idea of meaninglessness is a meaningful story in itself. We can’t escape our capacity for meaning.
We don’t need to go searching for it. We don’t need to create it out of thin air. And we’re never in danger of losing it. Meaning arises from within our being as effortlessly as breathing.
And so we breathe meaningful stories into existence. The question is not whether there is meaning but whether our meaning stories empower or disempower us.
Sadly, they mostly disempower. They are stories we tell ourselves when we fail to meet our high expectations. Or when we fail to meet the expectations of others. Or when we compare ourselves to others on social media. Or when we succumb to the constant stream of fear-mongering fed to us by cable news.
When this happens, inner chaos begins to tip the scales of our lives and we succumb to the story of meaninglessness.
Break the power of meaninglessness
How can we rid ourselves of the awful feeling and consequences of meaninglessness?
Ironically, in his classic, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl basically says to stop searching for it. He writes of his harrowing experience during the Holocaust:
“…it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
In other words, let God be God. The way to break the power of meaninglessness is to drop the story that we are ultimately in control.
Thank you for this post, Cylon.
Have nothing to say – you’ve said it all.
Again, we see ego getting above itself and hence bringing nothing but suffering.
Better to be humble and accepting, minute to minute and being grateful and blessed for that.
Thanks, Cylon.
You’re welcome Zara…I’m beginning to believe more and more that only a rise in the long forgotten virtue of humility will save us from ourselves!
Beautiful post Cylon!
There is one thing that human beings have that fish don’t have, which is self reflective awareness. So it is as you say, “We are wired to our core for meaning.” That means we’ll always be asking the questions about what gives meaning to our lives and authoring the stories, because we have the capacity to do so.
In the case of the quote of Frankl, he makes a powerful point, except when he says the answer consists not in talk and meditation but in right action. Without reflection (meditation) on meaning, without talk — the articulated speech of what we learn in deep reflection — right action and right conduct become difficult. It is through reflection and questioning meaning that we find our way to taking the responsibility for our actions, and recognizing the questioning life is asking of us (to use his words).
If we accept Sartre’s view, then nothing we do matters, so why should we care or be responsible?
But, as you say in your final sentence, we can come to the realization that we are not in complete control, but that we live in a partnership with what is outside of our control, then we break the power of meaninglessness because we realize our lives are transactions. Life is not simply happening to us, nor are we in full control, but it’s a wonderful partnership in which we have our share of responsibility, which includes Frankl’s right conduct.
As you so rightly point out, even when think something is meaningless, we are actually searching for meaning because we are fish in that water!
Thank you for this beautiful comment. Where do I begin? First, your rephrasing of my final point says what I had in mind in a much better way…lol. I especially like the phrase “we live in a partnership with what is outside of our control.” That’s exactly right. We tend toward the extremes in almost every area of life and this is no exception. The truth often lies somewhere, or at many points, along the spectrum.
Regarding Frankl quote, I actually almost removed that part – I still may as I take your point. But I left it because of the larger point I believe he was making. Many of the prisoners who lost all hope were the ones who lived in their heads, believing everything generated in their minds and not tapping into a larger sense of meaning beyond themselves and their own situation as terrible as it was. He was responding to the belief among the despondent which said “I have nothing to expect from life any more.” I think this is the kind of “talk” and “meditations” he was concerned about and not as you described. Thank you for the clarification because it’s an important one!
What a wondeful post. Thank you, Cylon.
My pleasure Michael 🙂
That’s a grand responsibility to bear. Because what if we don’t know the right answers and solutions to our problems? What if we’re struggling to find them?
Absolutely. That’s why I recommend we relinquish the heavy burden we’ve placed on ourselves. We don’t need to look for solutions, we just need to what life is asking of us in each moment. Once we learn to ask the right questions, the solutions will come…
This one is a tough subject for me. I struggle with knowing what my role is in living life the way it’s meant to be lived. It’s not about finding solutions, but asking the right questions?? Hmm. I don’t quite understand. Do you mind elaborating a little bit further?
I hear you…you are certainly not alone! I think many of us walk around asking, “Am I living the life I’m supposed to be living?” What I had in mind when I mentioned asking the right questions was this: instead of asking “What should I do with my life?” maybe we can ask instead, “What is life asking of me?” That way, we can begin noticing what’s in front of us rather than living in our heads. This is what I liked about the Frankl quote I used in the post. When you ask the second question, we start paying attention to our lives more – What do people consistently tell me I’m good at? What activities and people are you consistently drawn to? What social issue keeps you up at night? Etc.. Hope this is somewhat helpful…
Yes! Very! I know exactly what you mean now. It requires a lot of work, and intentional effort to not live in your head, but it’s something I’ve been practicing for like a year now. And apparently I still haven’t gotten the total hang of it, but I won’t give up. Thank you, as always, for sharing your insights. They’re ALWAYS on point!
You are very welcome Joell 🙂 Don’t be discouraged about not having the total hang of it. This is the work of a lifetime!
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