If You’re Looking For The Meaning Of Life, Start By Looking In The Right Place

Changing this expectation can change everything else.

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” — Mark Twain

If you watch Sherlock, you may recall an episode where a woman takes care of ancient teapots for a museum.

She painstakingly performs ancient rituals every day, so the teapots don’t dry out.

Watching it the other night, I was struck by a thought.

Is anything in modern life as meaningful as that teapot was to the ancients?

Most things we have these days can be instantly replaced. Even family heirlooms don’t hold the same cache they once did, since undeleted Facebook pages can keep departed relatives close.

Ask yourself, are you hanging onto your grandmother’s wedding ring because of the connection to her? Or because you might need to sell it one day?

Hundreds of years ago, a teapot wasn’t something you could pop out to the dollar store and grab.

If you broke it, it was a big deal.

It was understood that possessions equaled skills plus time plus resources. We had to find ways to take care of our things and teach the next generation to do the same.

So we devised ways to transfer knowledge.

Rituals and routines were information handed down in practices that people could remember. This ensured security for future generations.

Which is why we’re hard-wired to crave them.

I see that with the toddlers every day.

They learn to attach meaning to the things around them and shape their perceptions on that.

Consistency is critical in this process; there’s safety in knowing what to expect. You may not realize it, but this carries over into your adult life.

You always need it.

You love holidays for more than just presents, and the same goes for weddings and birthdays.

There’s comfort in celebrating the same things in the same way.

Since routine and rituals make us feel safe and grounded, how do we facilitate that in a world where everything is replaceable?

One way would be with new rituals, but that may be problematic in our modern world.

It seems this brave new world is built around worthlessness instead of worthiness, which might have something to do with why people are so depressed.

Don’t believe me?

Think about the last time you had quality anything.

Quality customer service, quality care, quality food, a quality product? Something without planned obsolescence embedded in it. Something that wasn’t produced in the absolute cheapest way possible.

We’ve become so used to worthlessness that it doesn’t even register anymore.

How many times has this happened to you?

You buy some cheap piece of crap from the dollar store and hope it lasts just as long as you need it. Then you throw it away. If it breaks, you don’t even return it, you just throw it out and get another. Sure, you’re annoyed, but that’s about it.

When was the last time you returned something to the dollar store? My bet is never.

It’s this story of worthlessness that gets communicated a thousand times a day. It surrounds and consumes us.

It seeps into our DNA and becomes the story of our lives.

We don’t even have rituals around work anymore, employment has become meaningless.

Corporations used to take care of workers, it was just expected. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought hard for unions, pensions, and a living wage.

But somehow, that progress slipped through our fingers — now the money that trickles down to most of us vanishes like vapor on hot tarmac.

There was a time if you were the right gender and color…

You got a job, a wage that increased with the cost of living, the security of a full-time contract, and a pension. You even got a gift when you retired.

That value no longer exists. It’s been sucked out like marrow from a bone, robbing it of stem cells. Leaving our cultural body starving for life-giving oxygen and healing platelets.

Emboldened and enabled by corrupt, greedy politicians, CEO’s and shareholders tighten the tap of the trickle evermore.

People work twice as hard for half the money, everyone is exhausted.

Women are still abandoned within and without marriages, loaded down by the stress and impossible workload of childrearing. Often alone, they work twice as hard for about 13% less than their male counterparts.

System racism keeps people who should be able to comfortably raise families, exhausted. It rigs the system in every aspect of life and creates an alternate reality for people of color.

The message? You are worthless.

So if we can’t value ourselves, can we value our children?

With the village banned from the child-raising arena, bereft of elders guiding us with wisdom, exhausted parents become trapped by what’s easy or what soothes their pain.

Instead of instilling values and character, parental servitude and obtuseness seem to be the new guiding principles.

And this debasing of our human experience reaches both ends of the age spectrum.

Once you hit a certain age, you disappear entirely from the zeitgeist. That which you created, you’re suddenly excluded from.

Even survival of the species seems to be important only in theory.

We’ve been so far removed from nature that the very thing we rely upon for life itself no longer has meaning in everyday life. The ice caps melt, species disappear, water becomes saturated with oil. None of this destruction is meaningful because it’s not raining down directly onto us.

Yet.

Advertisers distract us from the truth deferring long term awareness to short term pleasure. And it works.

So, where does meaning come from?

Before the luxuries of the modern world, nature was meaningful in that it was all-consuming. You had to attach meaning to it because you were at its mercy. Society was important because it was your lifeline. Things were sacred because they were scarce.

The goalposts have moved now, the game has changed.

We’re living in an opposite world to the one we evolved in, no wonder we’re so lost.

Where do we look now?

It feels like we’re becoming aware that it’s time to reimagine what we want to be, recalibrate for the world we’re in, and start over.

That it’s dawning on us that institutions and corporations are not gods or godly. They can be reimagined.

That as we come in contact with ignorance and spiritual inertia, our need for wisdom and enlightenment is highlighted.

It suddenly dawns on us that we can’t look to the outside world for meaning.

As this happens, we begin to realize that we might have to start to look inward to figure out what’s real and what we can accept.

That to change what’s toxic and unhelpful, we start with ourselves.

We begin by taking personal responsibility for creating the meaning of our life.

This is the time to create new rituals, new reverence, and new relationships with ourselves, our things, and our world.

This is the time to do it because if we don’t, we might not get another chance.

Instead of looking to the world for meaning, look to yourself to inject meaning into the world.

That’s how it’s always been done, we assign meaning and work backward from there.

In this way, you have the power, are in charge, and control the outcome.

To create meaning in a meaningless world, you just have to start with yourself.

Thanks so much for reading!

If you or someone you know wants to begin a daily journaling habit with purpose, in a lighthearted, fun way you might want to check out my book on Amazon called: How To Be Wise AF: A 30-day journalling adventure to your inner Guru

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