Essay 12 - Looking Deeper

Joe and June are simple people. Their lives have gone extraordinarily smoothly. They have their comfortable routines and have met all their challenges easily. Their lives meet their expectations and they have suffered no setbacks, crises, or catastrophes. They are happy, content, lucky, and very, very unusual.

You might ask “Why should I worry about all this meaning of life stuff? Why do I need to delve more deeply into things?” The answer is - you should not. In fact, there are only two reasons why anybody should. The first one is if you feel the need for more meaning in your life due, perhaps, to a lack or loss of meaning. This could be due to a slow erosion, over years, where life used to make sense but that feeling that life makes sense has simply diminished over time. The second reason is that a crisis of some kind has made you question everything. Before the crisis, life felt fine. Now it feels empty and pointless.

If you do not feel any need for greater meaning in your life, then why pursue it? Why would you eat if you are not hungry or try to sleep if you are not sleepy? The pursuit of meaning is a human drive and, if that drive is satisfied, why do something different? If Joe and June are happy, why should they bother?

The unfortunate answer to that question is that things might change. We often hear about people who were living comfortable satisfying lives and then just woke up one morning to find that life no longer seemed to have any compelling purpose. We also hear about people who are living idyllic lives until their peace was shattered by a crisis of some kind. Going back to the analogy with hunger, we might ask – why eat lunch if you are not that hungry? The answer is that you might not get a chance to eat later, and you do not want to wait until you are feeble from hunger to realize that you should have eaten something.

Looking deeper and finding meaning in your life may very well help you get through a crisis if one were to occur. You can of course wait for the crisis and react when it does occur. And it may never occur. It really depends on what kind of person you are. I know what kind of person I am, but it is not up to me to judge the prudence of others on this complex issue.

If you are satisfied with the meaning in your life and do not anticipate anything that might upset it, then you may want to put this book aside and find something more entertaining to read. If that is not the case, you may want to keep reading. In the next few essays, we will take on the pursuit of meaning more seriously and a little more deeply.

This essay is 493 words long and the audio is just short of 4 minutes.