A Meaning Saved Is a Meaning Earned

The Currency of Meaning

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that finding meaning in our lives is beneficial for humans. (Not all agree with this statement, but just go with me here.) In a world where meaning is constructed for us by runaway capitalism, recalling all the small meanings that made up our lives in times past can be a useful exercise. Not as an indulgence in nostalgia but as a way of tracking just how much our lives are being stripped of true meaning and being replaced by paltry, ephemeral, yet shiny, quick fix substitutes. The substitutes usually involve financial profit – for someone else.

Within my lifetime, I have watched the sense of deeper meaning collectively erode. As I observe this slow erosion that has taken place over decades, I notice several supportive structures that held true meaning in place in times past – cultural support structures such as:

• Daily interaction with the natural world and the elements, daily connection with our kin in the form of animals and plants and trees

• Face to face conversations where scent, body language, and that certain ineffable something about two bodies engaging one another illuminate the shared space

• A pace that allows emotional assimilation

• Food grown within 5 miles of home

• Homes, furniture, clothing, cookware, other objects, that are built to last for generations

• Communities that actively care and participate in one another’s lives

• A visceral, social awareness of the community’s role in midwifing the birth and death of any of its members

• The treasuring of wisdoms passed down from previous generations, etc.

The absence of these support structures creates the precise vacuum that allows meaning to be sold to us. Like “buying water by the river,” we trade in our direct access to currency, for a substitute. Meaning is often proffered to us in this way: “I see you have a problem of lack of meaning – well here is a product you can buy that will solve for that lack.” And then we increase our production so that the money can be there to buy the bigger, the better, the faster, the more thing that is now the new meaning we live for. Thereby ironically increasing the lack of meaning. Kind of like a social auto-immune disease.

Here’s what I mean by a social auto immune disease… Let’s say the initial ‘problem’ is something like natural Grief. Or natural old age. Or natural ebbs and flows in health. Or natural beauty. Or natural Silence/ Stillness. Or our natural longing for connection. These circumstances are not something we need to attack with meaningless objects – rather, they are a natural function of being human that are doorways to deeper meaning. Since our whole way of engaging with meaning has atrophied however, we become increasingly weaker to recognize pathways to true meaning and we begin to see Life as a problem to be fixed, a set of nuisances to be subdued, a collection of obstacles to the artificial meaning we are being sold.

While I am sure the possibility of this dynamic getting the better of us has been around forever, runaway capitalism seems to have created the right conditions for this social auto immune disease to flourish. It takes quite a bit of presence to go against the collective grain that walks somewhat zombie-like through the weekly cycles of buying, acquiring, competing for, obsessing over, fabricated meaning. Stepping off that treadmill can feel like social death.

Yet many pockets of culture exist in our world where this dominant paradigm driving world economies doesn’t have the same sway. These pockets have generally figured out how to keep some of those structures supporting deeper meaning in place.

Will you join me in this living inquiry? How do we reclaim the sense of meaning we know exists, and the supports required to allow deep, inherent meaning to flourish, in the context of today’s world as it is, in a way that entices the dominant paradigm back to its senses? If you have any good ideas, I would love to hear them.