I honestly can’t believe this series is fifteen parts long (and something like 6 or 7 years old). But the mind war doesn’t stop and so the series continues as well (they’re all categorized, in case you want to go back and read them).
One of my previous posts in the series was called “Making Sense” which has become extremely important on my list of personal maxims (see the list below). The idea is that shit is NOT making sense so if you want any sense, well, you’d better make some for yourself. I’ve been thinking there’s something similar going on with meaning.
My consulting clients are some of the most amazing people and I’m always so impressed with how engaged and motivated they are. They don’t just want to live their best lives, they are willing to THROW DOWN and really commit to the work of getting there (it’s an honor working with you and I love you all). And there’s common thread with many of my consulting clients, particularly the long-term clients. They are, in one way or another, concerned with meaning. They are either working to discover meaning, develop meaning, or manifest meaning in their lives. And I can see that same process at work in my life too and the lives of my friends.
It’s a process where you discover what things really resonate with you, develop a life where you can do those things, and then work on manifesting more of that in the world. I can look back on my life and see the cycle of this process in action — times of meaning surfeit and drought, times of struggle and ease, times where I was off track and on the right road toward a meaningful life for me… and only for me.
It’s not really earth shattering to suggest that it’s our individual responsibility to build a meaningful life for ourself. What is increasingly clear however, is that we are now doing it in the face of a tsunami of meaninglessness. There are forces in the world right now that want to strip us of meaning… any meaning.
Now whether your definition of a meaningful life is or is not in fashion can change. Motherhood is a great example because it’s been so highly politicized in the Western world. Humans, like all living creatures, have a procreation instinct (we’d die out otherwise) and therefore tend to want to make more humans, at least in aggregate. But whether motherhood is meaningful, meaningless, the only meaning allowed to a woman, a backward thing to find meaning in, a subversive thing to find meaning in, or something aside from your personal meaning making entirely… well, it depends on when and where and who you are. Naturally, I come down on the side of finding your own meaning whether or not it’s popular or fashionable, but that’s not even the point.
Because what’s really fucked up is that the very act of finding meaning is currently so broadly unfashionable as to be not just scorned and mocked, but almost illegal. We’re reaching a nadir of postmodernist nihilism where the act of caring about anything or ascribing meaning to anything — even our lived experience, personhood, or emotions — is highly suspect.
I’m reminded of The Neverending Story and its nightmare antagonist, The Nothing. As a child it was easy to see it as the death of imagination, but it’s actually bleaker. Death has meaning. The nothing isn’t death but LACK. It’s the lack of everything that gives meaning because without meaning there is nothing left.
Fortunately, humans also have a strong meaning instinct. It might even be stronger than the procreation instinct. Our need to make things mean something might be the actual definition of what it is to be human. So how do people react when they have a desperate desire to make meaning in an environment where meaning making is missing?
The best case scenario is that they jump straight through the Overton window and just go on making meaning for themselves and being kind to others who’ve found their way to personal meaning.
But having found meaning in a meaningless world, people sometimes turn around and decide that their meaning should be everyone’s meaning and that other meanings are wrong or bad. There’s a positioning against. For example, if a nuclear family is your armor against nihilism then it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it’s the only way to fight or that other ways aren’t right or even real. On the other hand, someone who doesn’t find meaning in that (whether or not they find meaning in anything else) might harshly judge those who do. Welcome to the culture wars.
Another alternative is that people find something relatively divorced from their own interior experience to attach meaning to. In a desperate bid to make their lives meaningful, they take meaning from media or personalities or activities that don’t actually touch them deep inside. Of course no one can judge this for anyone else (if you really do find your life’s purpose in American Idol, well, you do you) but we can see the outcome of this kind of misplaced meaning making in a subsurface emptiness that manifests in obsession with the objectified mean. Welcome to fandom.
Our situation is truly archonic because it pushes us away… away from meaning, but also away from each other, away from spirit, and away from a life in a meaningful world. So while you are making some sense, look deep inside to find meaning and you know what? Mean it.
*** Ivy’s Maxims (v 7, 2023)
- Religion that’s easy is wrong (I should write about this some time so that it can have a link)
- Don’t get offended, get pissed off
- Life is too short to eat shit
- Look where you want to go
- It’s better to look ordinary and actually be interesting
5.5 But it’s better to be interested than interesting - Make your own sense
6.5 And your own meaning too - Don’t just know yourself, grow yourself
- Focus, don’t dwell
- Give. Fewer. Fucks.
