Meaning--Finding It and Making It

MEANING—FINDING IT AND MAKING IT

Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D.     1-4-11

Abstract:  What human beings call “meaning” and “having a sense of meaning” in their lives is described, and psychological elements and processes that contribute to meaning are identified.  Suggestions are made for adding meaning to one’s life.

Key Words:  meaning, meaningful, purpose, values, fundamental emotions, fundamental motives

Human beings like to “feel meaning” in their lives, since this is both pleasant and a signal that what we are doing in life is “right” for us.  Our desire for meaning arises when we want our lives to “mean something” or we say “what does it all mean?”

Meaning can be found through both cognitive and emotional means.  We are not biologically given an inbred or automatic cognitive sense of meaning but are on our own to create it.  The desire for cognitive meaning is usually only satisfied by “making sense of things” or seeing “the big picture” in a satisfying way, although we may also engage in activities that seem to “justify” our rationales regarding meaning.  For those seeking cognitive meaning, feeling some success in explaining and understanding reality (human beings, life, the world, the universe, etc.) leads to satisfaction and usually to some sense of meaning (particularly if the person feels that a part of his purpose is to understand and explain).

In the emotional realm, we have some relatively automatic responses that relate to and sometimes “give” meaning.  The desire for emotional meaning leads people to engage in activities “that give my life meaning” so that they can feel that sense of meaning.

The “meaning” that one feels or senses regarding one’s activities or one’s life is brief, can come at any time, is somewhat like a feeling of satisfaction in one’s activities or one’s life but additionally is a sense that one’s actions or life are “right” in the sense that they are right for one and that they demonstrate what one believes in or what one views as important.

Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines “meaning” (in the sense that we are exploring here) as a “significant quality” and defines “meaningful” as “having a meaning or purpose” and “significant.”  (Obviously Webster is not much concerned with human beings’ psychological desires to have “meaning” in their lives, unless “meaning” means nothing more than “significant”!)

Our desire for meaning is most closely connected with our values, and in general if a person is living much of the time in accord with her values, she will feel satisfaction from doing so and will also feel a sense of meaning.  Living a conscious and value-driven life (if those values are freely chosen) will lead most people to feel that they are living meaningful lives.

Our desire for meaning is also closely related to our desire for purpose in life, and many people are sufficiently satisfied with regard to meaning if they have a strong sense of purpose that they feel that they are carrying out (raise children well; lead the community; do God’s will; be who my parents wanted me to be; etc.).  If one feels fated (that one has not chosen one’s purpose but had it imposed on one), then fulfilling one’s purpose is not likely to give one a sense of meaning.  Also, if one feels that one is not carrying out one’s purpose to the best of one’s ability, then there will be little satisfaction or sense of meaning.

On the psychological side of things, I hypothesize that at least a fleeting feeling of meaning physiologically occurs every time we contact (feel) our deeper, more fundamental positive emotions (joy, love/affection, wonder/amazement, relief, contentment, excitement) and every time we feel success at serving and/or gratifying a fundamental motive (to find food, water, air, and a non-harmful environment; to find touch, love, comfort, and empathy; to find physical comfort (and stop or avoid pain/discomfort or bodily damage); to find security (and stop or avoid insecurity); to be in a positive emotional state; to nurture a child; and to have sex).  I suggest that finding things other than these meaningful depends on conditioned or logical connections between them and these fundamentally “meaningful” neural states.  (Making money may feel meaningful or give one’s life meaning, but this is because for the individual it is associated with comfort and/or security.)

As an example, much as we might not like that it is true, many people feel satisfaction and meaning from defending their loved ones by violence.  Directly defending one’s family serves a number of our fundamental motives (continued existence, love, security, positive emotional state, children, sex partner), and these are also felt when we participate in war that we believe is preserving our opportunities to gratify those fundamental motives.

What does “meaning” “mean”?  Sometimes one’s feeling of meaning can be readily understood and “makes sense” to one as it relates to current actions.  For instance, watching our child’s wedding would arouse a sense of meaning in most of us, which we could readily identify as summarizing our satisfaction (and self-satisfaction) with our part in raising the child to this point, as well as our wonder at the process of life creating life over and over.  Defending a loved one against attack would also arouse a strong sense of meaning, relating to the importance to us of the safety of that person.  However, meaning is a deep response, and there will be times when it is only vaguely clear why we are feeling it.  As noted above, we feel “meaning every time we contact (feel) our deeper, more fundamental positive emotions and every time we feel success at serving a fundamental motive.  Many times we experience a number of emotions together or serve several motives at once, so our feeling of meaning at any moment can actually be a mixture of meaning responses.

In Man’s Search for Meaning Victor Frankl emphasizes the value and satisfaction in surviving (even in terrible circumstances) and in helping others to survive and flourish, and from his experiences in concentration camps, he finds these to be the most fundamental sources of meaning.  Many people find sufficient meaning in helping others (Big Brothers, food kitchens, visiting the sick, etc.).

Many people find a strong sense of meaning in participating in large group activities (war, watching football or sermons in a stadium, political rallies, lynching), which probably relates to our sense of safety and gratification in our early lives as part of our families, as well as to our innate tendency to “school” like fish or line up together in parallel in group activities.

In a more general sense, many people feel considerable meaning from being an active part of a valued larger entity or enterprise (church, science, nation, corporation), which again probably originates in our early family experiences.

Finally, people often feel meaning or find life meaningful when they do something that means something to someone else.  We probably learn this from pleasing our parents, and it extends to finding meaning in serving any valued authority (Pope, parent, boss).

In summary, an activity is experienced as meaningful or a life as full of meaning if it embodies and expresses our values, sense of purpose, and/or what we think to be important.  We feel a sense of meaning or meaningfulness when we become aware of how our actions or our lives are “right” for us and are demonstrating what we believe is important in life.  Our values, sense of purpose, and what we think to be important are constructed as we grow up to be consistent with, serve, and express our fundamental emotions and motives.

DIFFICULTIES IN FINDING MEANING IN LIFE

There are a number of circumstances that can make it difficult to experience a satisfying sense of meaning.

1. First of all, if one is not in touch with (willing to feel) one’s deeper emotions, then one will to that extent reduce one’s opportunities to feel meaning.  And, if one is holding back from or sabotaging one’s efforts to satisfy one’s fundamental motives, to that extent one limits one’s opportunities to feel meaning.  Any life circumstances that cause one to avoid one’s feelings or to fail to satisfy one’s needs will reduce one’s chances of feeling meaning.  For many in our modern cultures, it is tempting to live by more superficial values such as status and monetary value, while telling ourselves that we “really” believe deeper and more eternal values.  Unfortunately you cannot do both.  Where you put your daily energies will determine your opportunities to feel meaning in your life.

2. If one has been raised to present a false front to the world, then it will be more difficult to identify aspects of self and activities that are truly aligned with what is fundamentally important to all human beings (our fundamental motives).

3. If one has been raised by someone who is bitterly disappointed in life, it may be hard to believe that it is worthwhile to risk being disappointed oneself, and one will shy away from the things about which one could be passionate and activities that could be experienced as meaningful.

4. If one has been exposed largely to superficial representations regarding meaning (emotions that are largely pretended, values such as money and status that are ultimately unsatisfying, etc.), then one may come to believe that meaning itself is false (and, of course, if one pursues those superficial emotions and values, one will keep oneself away from emotions and motives that could lead to a feeling of meaning).

5. Some people assume that things must be perfect in order to be meaningful or before one can feel any satisfaction.  Human life being what it is, no matter how we accommodate or try to fool ourselves, it is certainly never perfect!

6. A few people “see through” our human “making” of meaning, perceiving correctly that our very natures determine what we think of as meaningful.  If this is true, then what we experience as “meaning” is not related to any larger or more stable, moral, or consistent set of meaning or values outside ourselves, and this appears to these people to make any confidence or “belief” in what feels meaningful to us too tenuous and uncertain to trust.  The most common way of relating meaning to something outside our human frame of reference is to believe that “true” values are determined by God or some other super-human entity or force, and that the only “real” meaning relates to those revealed values.  Another way is to seek “eternal” or timeless values and to strive for their fulfillment.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO ADD MORE MEANING TO YOUR LIFE

If you would like to feel more of a sense of meaning about your activities and your life, here are some things to focus on.

1. Think seriously about what you believe is most important in life (money, power, status, religious belief, family, achievement, sports, helping others, etc.).  Write them down.

2. Write down the values you hold most dear (strength, loving kindness, honesty, responsibility, etc.).

3. Consider and write down what you believe your life’s purpose to be (or your primary purpose in life).  Why are you here?

4. Ask yourself whether you live by your values and what you think is important in life, and whether you consistently focus your energies on what you consider your purpose in life to be.

5. If you are living by your values and putting energy consistently into your purpose, but you still don’t feel much sense of meaning, ask yourself whether you might not be giving yourself enough credit and whether you give yourself opportunity to reflect on yourself and how you are living so that you could appreciate what you are doing and have a sense of meaning about yourself and your actions.

6. If you are not living by your values or furthering your purpose in life, ask yourself why not.  Are you too busy with other things (which might suggest that you actually think those other things are more important).

7. Create a plan for living in a manner more consistent with your values, your purpose, and what you believe in.  This might involve relating to people differently, changing who you have around you, changing jobs, going back to church, taking up a creative activity (or just taking time off to create this plan).

8. If the above steps do not seem to be working for you, ask yourself whether you might be denying the possibility of meaning in order to avoid being disappointed or because you have concluded that there is no such thing as meaning or that “everything is meaningless.”  Such conclusions may arise when one has been disappointed in people, activities, or institutions that were supposed to have meaning or supposed be better than they actually turned out to be (e.g., leaving the Catholic Church because of sexual abuse of others by priests; leaving the church in disappointment because God has “let” your loved one die; or abandoning your own behavioral control after being devastated by finding out that your parent has been breaking rules even while preaching the importance of those rules and trying to appear to be an upright and righteous person).  If you are wary of meaning or feel hurt about disappointments, you will need to make your peace with these existential issues before you will be able to engage in life on a positive basis again (through psychotherapy, pastoral counseling, revivification of your religious foundations, or some hard personal explorations and discipline).

Give yourself some time to consider these steps and to make some changes.  Come back to these issues over and over (revisit them once a month?) until you become clear about what you want to do and how to get there.

To find more meaning in life, organize your actions and your life around our deepest and most fundamental human emotions, and focus on living by and expressing your most treasured values.  Meaning is found in acting to express and further what we think is most important in life and to live out what we perceive to be our purpose.

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