Working through the Meaning Crisis & Brute Force Suffering

I, like so many of us, have gone through numerous meaning crises. I’ve lost meaning and found it again, only to lose it again. I find myself coming back again and again to the question “What is Meaningful in Life?”

Here are my reflections.

What’s meaningful is:

• empathy: the opportunity to connect with another through the act of being in their world.

• creativity: birthing ideas and perspectives into the world that didn’t exist before.

• overcoming fear: feeling fear and acting in spite of it.

• showing up every day: no matter how hard life gets.

• love: emanating warmth towards ourselves and those around us.

• beauty: our capacity for appreciating it, and the development becoming process in which our capacity deepens.

But this only the beginning. In my own search for meaning, I’ve gathered some frames that you may find helpful. What follows are a few of my favorite frames.

Why are we in a meaning crisis in the first place?

The way our society is structured today isn’t conducive to finding meaning. Our culture values shallowness. Yet everyone has more depth than we make it out to seem. I’m imagining that the reason we stay in shallow conversations most of the time is because of implicit cultural rules about what it’s okay to communicate about and what’s not okay to communicate about. Breaking the invisible barrier ain’t easy, but I feel the difficulty in breaking it as I have trouble pushing past it most of the time.

We have more data and information than ever before, but less understanding of why any of it matters in the first place. We have more but appreciate less. We’re more productive than ever before, but what for?

It seems dark, but we’re disconnected from ourselves and others, and reclaiming that connection ain’t an easy task.

Unlearning The Stories We’ve Been Told

Staring with the narrative is very important. Of all the books I’ve read, I’m noticing a common pattern. The stories we tell ourselves construct what we find meaningful and how we perceive reality. Narratives are important, so let’s step back and be more meticulous about the stories we’re using to understand our world.

Right now it feels like the cultural stories aren’t all that conducive to flourishing. Our stories are slowly breaking us apart, and we’re not even conscious of why. Our culture seems to promote stories of insignificance, denial of death, and skirting moral and ethical responsibilities.

These stories give us hits of pleasure, telling us that everything is quite alright and there’s nothing to worry about. It keeps us isolated and in our own little bubbles. These stories give us false certainty and delusions of aggrandizement. What if we were to take a step back and realize that we actually have no clue what’s going on around us? Why the fuck does everyone hate each other? Why is there so much pain? What am I participating in?

Grieving the Loss of Philosophy

My experience of philosophy is that it has given me this sense that what it is that’s actually happening here & now isn’t as obvious as we make it out to seem.

I resonate with Hanzi Freinacht when he said

The Beginning of Something New

When I drop into my felt sense of what is most meaningful and what isn’t, it’s actually quite obvious. Creative energy just genuinely feels more in touch with the flow of life, with the tao. Yet, even as I write this creativity remains the most difficult act in the world. I struggle to write every single day. It’s actually quite rare that I find myself crafting a new article, even though it’s what lights me up the most. There is so much resistance and I just don’t know why.

Maybe it’s fear, doubt, insecurity, uncertainty, overwhelm, or depression. There are thousands of excuses and it’s only when I see through them and see that they don’t have power over me that I rekindle that meaning in my life.

Sure there’s nothing wrong with consuming, but when it entirely replaces my creative life force that’s when I feel the deepest lack of meaning.

Everything we do is to not feel our inherent suffering

Life is suffering. We all know it. We can pretend like life is all bliss and flow, but at the end of the day, we can all admit that life is painful a lot of the time.

I’ve been going through a lot of suffering lately. Just brute force suffering. Resistance to reality. Resistance to my phenomenological experience of life. I don’t foresee how I could possibly live the rest of my life in this much pain. When I’m feeling suffering it’s hard to imagine that there will ever be a time when I won’t be suffering.

Subsequently, when I’m suffering to this degree the number of impulsive thoughts and urges I have to go drink, watch Netflix, or do anything that I can possibly do to avoid the pain that I’m feeling increases, naturally.

One frame on addiction is that All the addiction and unhealthy behaviors that we take as a culture stem from not wanting to feel our inherent suffering. It’s that easy. We don’t want to feel our inherent suffering. Suffering that we often didn’t have a hand in creating. The suffering that just happened upon us based on situations that were outside our control: the psychodynamics of our familial upbringing, the country we were born into, etc.

How might we find meaning in that suffering? What might it look like to move towards the suffering rather than away? What would it look like to contemplate the suffering, to contemplate that source of suffering itself? Why do we choose to run away from it so much? What pain are we avoiding?

When contemplating suffering I’m reminded of a couple of thoughts from Leo Gura.

Sharing my journey

I want to share my journey and my path with you — because I find meaning in doing so, and because I want to share honestly where I’m at. I strive to NOT give you advice. I don’t feel called to tell you how to live your life or how to find meaning.

I doubt that these articles will have any profound change on you, but if there’s even a subtle shift, a micro shift, that you don’t even recognize as having stemmed from reading about my path, then that’s a win in my books, and maybe you’ll view your work in a similar way at some point in your future.

Embrace melancholy

These days I find myself in a melancholic mood more often than not. Apathy, depression, insecurity, and overwhelm seem to be aspects of my experience more than inspiration, motivation, and meaning.

It seems like my best days are the ones in which I embrace my melancholy. When I don’t run from the sadness and let it be whatever it is. Yet I’m not aiming to make this sound simple. Enacting this (what it feels like, looks like, breaths like) is quite the puzzle.

If I could tell my 15-year-old self one thing at this moment it would be “Embrace Melancholy.” It’s not something to run from. It’s not a bad thing to be sad. Your current emotional state doesn’t reflect who you are as a person.

Be a millionaire right now

I once read this post titled How to be a Millionaire Without Having Much Money. In it, the author spits a couple of insights that are quite obvious and simple, yet if you let them sit and digest I imagine it’ll change you.

I fuck with this. If you love yourself and show up every day for yourself then breakthroughs will occur. What are you willing to do for yourself? How far are you willing to go? What are you willing to let go of in order to follow through on your dreams?

Above all else. Be Kind.

Here’s one frame that I’ve been sitting with when asking myself; What is worth doing?

Perhaps kindness is the root. It’s what’s worth doing. Sure we can strive to make more money, have more sex, be powerful, be charismatic, command a room, master tons of skills, evolve, shift the consciousness of the planet, but what does it matter if you’re not kinder to people on the other side. 

What does any of it matter if we’re all going to die anyway? What is worth doing?

Death is nothing to be afraid of

As I was listening to John Vervaeke speak on Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics, he was talking about how death isn’t scary. Here, follow along with me, and think about the amount of time before you were born. Is it scary to think about? You know, nonexistence. The void. There was no one there before you were born so where was the fear? Well after you die it will be the same way. Nothing to be afraid of. Nonexistence isn’t scary.

Vervaeke proposes that what we’re afraid of isn’t death but the loss of agency leading up to death. All of the things we’re attached to (our status, estates, possessions) will all be torn of us right before our last breath. In the lecture Vervaeke refers to the Epicureans & Stoics and how they taught that the way to counter anxiety around mortality is to develop philosophical relationships that afford the development of wisdom. I mean, what else is there to do in life other than deepen our wisdom and depth.

Personally, I’m still afraid of death, but I welcome this frame on nonexistence to make life a little more tolerable. I hold out hope that developing deeper capacities for wisdom may be an antidote to mortality anxiety.