Meaning, where are you?

No one should decide what your life is about but you

A surprising number of people want to tell you what life is about. And given their typical certainty, it can be tempting to buy into their answers. I, for one, have long held a very Randian outlook on life — a view where everything is about how well you meet the Platonic ideal of rational being:

"Happiness is possible only to a rational man, … who finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. There's nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that.”

- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt’s speech

It’s a life philosophy wherein being human is about running from our animal instincts, establishing and adhering to an objective, rational value system. (And it’s a worldview that drips from my newsletter, if you haven’t noticed.) But I recently shared this perspective with an old college friend, and he asked me, quite poignantly:

“So your goal for life is efficiency?”

I struggled to respond. I tried to pontificate about adhering to a higher set of values, about pursuing the human ideal, but it was all glaringly shallow. It is just efficiency from a certain vantage, isn’t it? And while efficiency is certainly an interesting skill tree to pursue, it can’t possibly be everything. Efficiency, by definition, can only gain value through something else. It’s tempting to view my life as a striving toward the Randian hero, but I don’t think there’s really much there once you untie your knots (if that’s even ever possible).

So I’ve recently started to revisit my view on meaning, and I’m going to drop some of my thoughts here. While I find it a bit overwhelming to think about something so grand and nebulous as meaning, I think we can actually get quite far by applying to it some very reasonable constraints — e.g., in particular, that such a sense of meaning exists, that such meaning should then be fair and so, that such meaning ought to be possible for everyone, regardless of the circumstances of one’s birth.

So excuse me while I pontificate for a bit and try to reason through this. But in short, my conclusion is pretty self-apparent: meaning must be what you make it to be.

Welcome to my midlife crisis, in newsletter form.

Some very reasonable assumptions

If meaning exists, there’s a principle that measures it.

“If we consider the function of man [is to live] a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity of the soul implying a rational principle … human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue [(adherence to said principle)].”

- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.

The first constraint one can apply to one’s understanding of meaning is simply that such meaning exists. And if you believe that some universal sense of meaning exists, then there must be some principle that defines it (which I ultimately contend should be that you define it for yourself). But, on the other hand, if you believe that such a universal sense of meaning does not exist, then you can still define it for yourself.

If meaning is rational, that principle must be universal, and it must be about consciousness & choice.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
(on finding meaning in Nazi death camps)

The second constraint to apply is that meaning must be rational — one that reflects human values. If this is not true, then of course, again, we can define that meaning for ourselves because have no hope of inferring what it actually is.

But if meaning is rational, we can infer that such a meaning would be fair (well, barring solipsism). And given you did not choose the body in which your consciousness inhabits, meaning should be something attainable for all humans and under all conditions of life¹.

The only two byproducts of human life that could hold under these constraints are choice and consciousness. Moreover, given that meaning must follow some principle, that principle must also be universally acceptable to all humans as well. Therefore, meaning must follow a universally accessible principle, and that principle will pertain to consciousness and choice.

The punchline

That principle must be what you want it to be.

So the final question to answer is this: how do I decide on which principle should govern my choices? Again, for any principle to be the principle, it must be sufficiently self-apparent, otherwise it cannot universally apply to any existence one can dream up. And in that situation, the only principle I can imagine fits this constraint is whatever principle you choose for yourself.²

That said, I don’t think this means you should devolve into pure hedonism and moral bankruptcy. At the risk of sounding quasi-spiritual, I think there is some deep intrinsic sense of judgment that’s present in all of us. There’s a sense of what is correct for you to do. Something that is in line with a deep-seated congruence to who you are. It’s implanted in us, without any real necessity for instruction. My current thinking is that this is what you should be following.

If you’re reductive about it, sure — it’s perhaps simply some biological/social brainwashing, but I’ve nonetheless found that it’s deeply rewarding when I listen to this internal barometer. It’s the only voice that has the capacity to surpass my most regretful biological inclinations — my anger, my pettiness, my ego, my lust, my addiction. It’s knowledge of good and evil, perhaps. I think we just tend to attribute it less significance because its effects are so intangible.

By comparison, for example, reason may too be of somewhat dubious origins, but as it’s the basis of all logic and science and knowledge, it’s quite easy to trust. But judgment is an internal state — there are external manifestations, certainly, but it’s quite difficult to recognize fidelity to this system in anyone else. Principles can be faked, and routinely are. Still, our evolution gave rise to our reason (and that’s awesome), so perhaps it’s not too far of a stretch to believe that judgment too is something as universally fundamental.

And I’m realizing that this is a common thread through philosophy.

• Nietzsche:

  While the Übermensch often gives off this sense in pop culture of the Randian hero, the idea is actually quite different — it’s precisely the idea that one must define for oneself what values to live by:

  • "I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?"

• Emerson:
  This is the theme behind all of his seminal work, “Self-Reliance”.

  • “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.”

• Thoreau:

  • "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

• Viktor Frankl:

  • “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

End

Perhaps this is all a bit obvious. But it’s taken me more an embarrassingly long time to strip myself of enough of my deep-seated biological compulsions + external moral barometers fed to me so that I can think [somewhat] clearly about what meaning is outside of that, and my conclusion is almost astonishingly plain: the fact that you are experiencing your life is what gives life meaning, and you ought to define what that meaning is for yourself. We are not hyper-optimized robots being undermined by our human wrappings. We’re consciousnesses with little else anchoring us in this dark universe.

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This week

• I’ve been reading Nietzsche (lol, if you couldn’t tell), and he’s so wonderful to read slowly. I’ve come to appreciate that he was very careful in his framing of the Übermensch: he called life a “bridge”, recognizing that it wasn’t about being Übermensch, but the “over-going” towards it. And I think this was quite intentional. Life is not the Übermensch or animalism, but the bridge.

1. From this vantage, I’d even argue that the bulk of the more fundamentalist interpretations of popular religions can’t possibly have a precisely correct definition of meaning, as there exist people who have not been exposed to these religions. This would be fundamentally unjust.

Moreover, it shouldn’t be dependent on things out of your control — genetic capabilities or accomplishments, for instance, because these, again, are not within your control. Randian objectivism, for instance, while appealing to me as a relatively capable individual, seems tenuous as well as something universal. While this is not entirely incongruous with choice being of value, there are instances where these objectives can be met without meaningful choice being made.

2. I sometimes wonder if choosing a principle and living by it is just an inevitable consequence of perfect mindfulness. And so, not only would I argue that consciousness is first and foremost, but rationality is a subordinate inevitability that stems from consciousness. And so perhaps that is my secondary conclusion. That meaning doesn’t just require consciousness, but comes from its ideal manifestation.