Reflection: The Eternal Search for Meaning... or Not

In all the reading I've done across the self-development field, one of the common threads always seems to be that we humans go on a search for meaning at some point in our lives.

Mine started when I was in my late 20's and I suddenly realized that following "the societally prescribed path to success" was simply not something I wanted to be part of. I realized that I agreed neither with the path itself, nor with the "official" definition of success.

Of course, the definition of "meaning" varies enormously from one person to the next, although they're often based on societally defined norms that a lot of people pursue without question.

Here in the USA, we really like to wrap up meaning as being what you get from your job; from your work. In fact your work IS you. You might not think that it's like that but consider what happens when you go to a gathering of some sort. What's the first thing you get asked: "so, what do you do?"

A large portion of the many years I spent in the self development industry; going to workshops and seminars and reading hundreds of psychology and self-help books definitely had to do with the search for meaning. Or, at the very least, with the search for an understanding of why this "meaning thing" is so gosh darn important to everyone!

I say that in a slightly flip tone because experience has taught me that an awful lot of life is actually pretty meaningless, and to expect so much meaning all the time is probably not realistic.

I watch a lot of interviews and video clips of people who are "successful" and ambitious in their field, and the only thing I really notice about watching them talk and talk and talk is that they have this shaky undercurrent of being deadly afraid of sitting still, almost as if they actually sat still they would have to be alone with their fears for a moment and so they keep moving to avoid that situation, at all costs.

One of the conclusions I eventually came to is that I don't really have any fear of sitting still; I don't suffer from any kind of FOMO when it comes to what might happen if I miss something. So what? Maybe I'll catch the next thing that comes along!

Don't misunderstand me here, I like things to have meaning, but I don't feel like my life is falling apart unless I am constantly searching for meaning. And I say that as somebody who once spent a lot of time looking for "something."

The the thing we almost invariably discover is that the "something" that we're looking for isn't actually out there, it's "in here."

It's like the people who are eternally buying more and more material things in an attempt to fill the empty space inside them, not realizing that the empty space is actually a profound fear of being alone (or something like that) and that can't be addressed by parking in new Mercedes there!

I don't claim to have the answers here, but I think it's important that we make peace with ourselves rather than relying on the world to somehow soothe our unrest... if we have inner unrest we're dealing with.

Some of us come at the process "backwards." For me, much of the seeking had to do with understanding why I didn't feel eternally driven and instead felt quite OK with just sitting and doing nothing. I thought that somehow made me a "broken human."

And yet? People seemed to be paying $1000 for week-long retreats to find the mindstate I seemed to have been born with. So I stopped...

Thanks for reading, and have a great Friday!

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Created at 2023-07-20 23:48 PDT
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