In the fifth episode of the “art of making meaning” series, we look at why meaning is always subjective and never objective, and what that implies for personal meaning-making. The hunt for objective meaning is a source of depression, whereas an acceptance of the subjectivity of meaning leads to more powerful and authentic living. What are the implications of saying that all meaning is subjective? Tune in and find out.

Good listening!

 

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When our younger daughter came home from college one year she gave me a coffee mug as a present. The motto on the coffee mug read: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” “Isn’t that your philosophy in a nutshell?” she laughed. She was exactly right. “Anonymous” had captured the essence of thousands of years of existential thought: that life is as much a responsibility as a gift and that each of us is honor-bound to create ourselves in our own best image.

I make my meaning—or else I don’t. All that exists until I actively and mindfully make personal meaning is the possibility of meaning and, while I wait to get started, the experience of emptiness. There is the possibility that I will experience the next hour as meaningful, a possibility that turns into a reality only if I make a certain kind of decision and a certain kind of investment. If I don’t make that decision and that investment, I experience myself as going through the motions and wasting my precious time. We’ve all had that experience—for many of us, far too much of the time.

Enjoy this week’s show on the subject of creating personal meaning. Good listening!

 

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Today’s show is the third in a series called “The Art of Meaning Making,” a series that introduces the idea that meaning is not something to seek or something to find but rather something to make. Meaning is a series of decisions, one after another for as long as we live, about what we intend to value and how we intend to stand up in the world.

Making meaning is the art and practice of mindfully and honorably taking into account your motives, your needs, and your values—everything from your need to look good to your need to do good—and, with your nerves quieted and your best self reporting for duty, making heartfelt decisions about how you intend to live your life. Today’s show is called “Crafting Your Life Purpose Statement,” a vital step in this process. Good listening!

 

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Having received zero training in meaning-making, having never heard the phrase, billions of people worldwide move from commute to drudgery to commute to dinner and a few drinks, relentlessly shut down and fairly empty-headed, not because they don’t have a brain, a heart, and other life-saving equipment but because they are completely unschooled in the ways of meaning. They are alive; but they are not engaged in the project of their own life. That is the general rule. And no one has taught them otherwise.

Why aren’t society’s citizens offered any existential training? Because society has as its goal a minimizing of existential thought. A company making widgets hardly wants you to wonder about the meaningfulness of its widget. It wants you to be attracted by the widget’s design and to buy two of them. A Broadway producer wants you to tap your feet; a police officer wants you to obey; a politician wants you to bear arms and lay down your life; a clergyman wants you to vote for his religion by attending his services. None of them are likely to invite you to step back and ponder the meaning of their product, policy, or ideology. You are supposed to buy, to agree, and to not think too hard about anything. That is what society wants and needs from you.

I invite you to listen to the second episode of the “art of making meaning” series, where we learn why making meaning is not a cultural imperative.

 

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