Essay 11 - Finding Meaning

If you are looking for a place to live, it would be nice if you could just go to a website that would pop up information on the perfect place for you. Unfortunately, you must look at what is available, consider all the trade-offs, visit the most promising candidates, and then make a tough decision. After all that, you might still make the wrong choice, or you may make the right choice but not realize it right away. It is a bit of a hit or miss process. Finding meaning is very similar to finding the right place to live.

In the search for meaning, you can adjust the contents of your life or the way you interpret those contents. And, it is difficult, although not impossible, to modify your emotional reaction without modifying at least one of these two.

To modify the contents of your life you need to have different experiences which will be achieved through doing different things, meeting different people, going to different places and so on. There are some experiences that you cannot do anything about, and most people have different degrees of flexibility in being able to change their experiences.

Simple changes include things like reading different books, joining different meetup groups, or taking up new hobbies. More radical changes might include things like moving to a new location, getting a different job, or going in back to school to learn new skills. Sometimes you hear about people who visit monasteries in India in search of meaning. But I would try something simpler first.

To modify your interpretation of your experiences you need to try a variety of references. This part gets really complicated so I will just give a few quick examples. First, if you are a religious person, you already have an external reference point, and you may want to learn more about it. If not, you can look to archetypes which are, in essence, categories of human behavior that show up repeatedly in myths, stories, literature, films and so on. You can be the hero, the wanderer, the driven person, the dedicated spouse and so on. You may want to change both your content and inference but be aware that you are probably not going to find the right thing on the first try. This is something you need to work at. If you find the prospect of finding meaning a bit daunting do not worry just keep reading and we will get into it in a fair amount of detail.

This essay is 425 words long and the audio is about 3 1/2 minutes.