Essay 14 - Natural vs Cultivated Meaning

The problem with things that we like naturally, such as ice cream, is that the enjoyment tends not to last. After your third bowl of ice cream, it just is not so wonderful. Or having ice cream for dessert every night will wear thin before the week is out. By contrast cultivated taste delivers more appreciation over time. If you develop a deep appreciation for classical music or renaissance art, it will just keep getting better.

It is the same with meaning. Although, having your first child may be profoundly meaningful, by the time you have changed a hundred diapers and cleaned up more vomit than you ever thought the demanding little noise machine could produce, it just doesn’t seem as meaningful as it did at first. And that graduation from high school or college, that felt so meaningful at the time, begins to fade when you realize everybody on the job you work at graduated as well and most of them are real losers. By the time you hate your job and your coworkers that meaningful buzz you got from graduation is as forgotten as your love for ice cream on the seventh day you had it for dessert.

We try to cultivate our appreciation of things rather than rely on appreciations that we get for free because cultivated appreciation tends to not only endure but to grow over time. Meaning is the same. We try to cultivate meaning rather than rely on meaning we get for free because cultivated meaning tends to not only endure but to grow over time. And if you want your life to be consistently meaningful punctuated by incidences of profound meaning you must cultivate meaning in your life. How exactly do you cultivate meaning? Well keep reading.

This essay is 301 words long and the audio is a little over 2 1/2 minutes.