Sunday Musings: Pondering Our Quests for Significance

What is this Human Experience about? What is it about, when you drill down below the superficialities and try to get at the deepest and innermost aspects of what drives us forward... or not?

Seems like almost everything that drives people — or, at least, most people — in some way relates to a quest for significance. Or if it's not a quest for significance perhaps it could be re-phrased as running away from our fear of insignificance.

Regardless of whether we're absolute monsters or really good people, it seems like we are uniformly concerned with meaning, and with finding ways in which our day-to-day experience has some kind of meaning.

I would submit that the quest for significance is quite different from our most basic fundamental drive to survive.

Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl famously pursued an understanding of "Man's Search for Meaning." But if we dig deeper perhaps we would discover that in our Quest To Find Meaning what we're really looking for is significance; some way to establish that our having been born and now living on this planet of ours is something more significant than just a random chance that has come about because a bunch of atoms, electrons and other bits smashed into each other.

I have periodically been labeled as a Nihilist because I don't find meaning to be all that important nor do I have any particular drive to create myself as special or significant.

Gauged by the materially based success-driven metrics of Western Civilization that has often earned me descriptions ranging from "lazy" to "unmotivated." And I'm really okay with that.

I look at my surroundings and consider these questions and ultimately arrive back at the same thing I have found there since quite a young age: I just would like to live with some fundamental state of contentment, and preferably without being in a great deal of physical or emotional pain.

But such contentment isn't really contingent on some external definition of "meaning," or of "significance." It simply exists, in its own capacity.

One might be tempted to question my motivations and ask things like "well, if this is not important to you why do you spend so much time writing about life and The Human Condition? Aren't you doing that to be seen and to leave your mark? Doesn't that constitute an 'ambition?'"

Over the years, the best answer I have typically been able to come up with is that I really enjoy writing, and that I really enjoy taking my brain out and playing with it from time to time and simply having these thought exercises that mostly relate to examining the relationship between things and between ideas.

Earlier today, Mrs. Denmarkguy and I were having a conversation about people and how those who have been traumatized often "Loop."

Looping is the process by which someone ends up telling the same story over and over and over again, with only very slight variations between each telling.

In truth, we've all been traumatized. In one way, or another. Heck, being removed from our mother's comfortable warm womb and thrown into the harsh light of existence itself is a massive trauma. We shy away from the idea of trauma because we equate it with being victims. But that's not necessarily so!

I allowed as how my own preference for writing everything down in my journals — or in my blogs, for the past 20 years — and keeping fairly detailed logs of what happens every day likely has to do with my own trauma as I was growing up... which could best be summarized as a categorical "denial of voice."

As someone who regularly had their feelings, thoughts and words denied as "absolute rubbish!" and "nonsense, you're not feeling that way!" my only way to log the fact that I had actually been alive as an autonomous being was to — in the moment when I had such thoughts — simply write them down. When they were there in my journal, I could refer back to them and know that they really had happened; that they weren't just figments of my imagination that had been "overwritten" by somebody else for whom my particular interpretation was either uncomfortable/inconvenient or not what they wanted to fit into their reality.

And so, I write.

Perhaps even somewhat compulsively.

Do do I do it because it informs my life with meaning? Does it make me feel significant? Perhaps, but not exactly. Perhaps the true answer lies closer to a sense of doing something that I have gotten to really enjoy and then — in some small way — harboring a vain hope that it might offer a point of connection to others.

Again, it's an individual thing, but I find authentic "connection" to be more significant than meaning, itself!

Thanks for visiting, and have a beautiful week ahead!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — NOT posted anywhere else!)
Created at 2024-01-21 18:36 PST
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