Meaning in Life (the complete series)

The full "meaning in life" series with some refinements in one post

Table of contents:

1. Introduction to Meaning in Life

   1.1 The Meaning Crisis

   1.2 The Psychology of Meaning in Life

2. Coherence

   2.1 What is absurdity?

   2.2 Make Facing Absurdity Meaningful Again

3. Purpose

   3.1 Increasing Purpose in Life

   3.2 Building a Purpose System

   3.3 Being vs Having Goals

   3.4 Completing the Purpose System

4. Significance

   4.1 Virtue Ethics: A Framework for Evaluating your Life

   4.2 What is the Good life?

   4.3 Increasing Marginal Significance

5. Depth

   5.1 Modernity vs Reality

   5.2 Squaring the Circle

   5.3 Renewing the Marriage of Meaning and Reality

6. The Structure of Meaning in Life

   6.1 The Three Lost Orders of Meaning

   6.2 The Digital Substitution

   6.3 The Work of Meaning is Meaning-Full

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1. Introduction to Meaning in Life

“Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.”

– C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

A long month of walking across Spain on the Camino De Santiago has finally passed. The walking offered plenty of time for reflection and this series was at the forefront of my mind upon returning to Ireland, on the topic of Meaning in Life.

There’s nothing more precious than meaning in life and yet, it’s in such short supply these days? Everywhere we look online there seems to be nihilism, cynicism, alienation, despair, and general, meaninglessness? So I figured a new series looking at the psychology and philosophy of Meaning in Life, could be a good way to spend my time (and yours).

1.1 The Meaning Crisis

I wrote a lot about the Meaning Crisis in the previous series (particularly essay three, giving a brief overview of the genealogy from Vervaeke’s work) However, as a brief summary, in Existential Indifference, Tatjana Schnell writes,

“Meaningfulness is defined as a fundamental sense of meaning, based on an appraisal of one’s life as coherent, significant, directed, and belonging. A judgment on one’s life as empty, pointless, and lacking meaning amounts to a crisis of meaning. Although sources of meaning significantly predict both meaningfulness and crisis of meaning, they cannot fully account for them.” (2010, 354)

Christopher Masterpietro writes in ‘A Symptomology of the Meaning Crisis’ that the meaning crisis is a state of meaninglessness. Victor Frankl, Austrian psychologist and holocaust survivor, described this state of meaninglessness as an 'existential vacuum’. The philosophy of the twentieth century was deeply focused on this existential vacuum, and the problem of how we could live meaningful lives in the new mechanistic universe after the loss of the religious cosmos?

Unfortunately, since then, the problem of meaninglessness has only increased, fueled by increasingly digital lives, poor social relationships and the collapse of legacy religions and spiritualities. How can we understand meaning? And increase our own and others? To answer this question we can turn to the field of psychology focused on “meaning in life”.

1.2 The Psychology of Meaning in Life

The scientific conceptualisation of meaning in life considers it a three-part construct, defined as:

“[T]he extent to which one's life is experienced as making sense, as being directed and motivated by valued goals, and as mattering in the world.” (George, L., & Park, C. L, 2016)

This definition can be broken down into three sub-components:

• Coherence: the degree to which people perceive a sense of coherence and understanding regarding their own lives (not absurd).

• Purpose: the extent to which people experience life as being directed and motivated by valued life goals.

• Significance: the degree to which people feel their existence is significant, important, and of value to the world (George & Park, 2016).

John Vervaeke, Canadian Cognitive Scientist and meaning expert, adds a fourth dimension called Depth to this triumvirate:

• Depth: “a sense that one’s life has depth or realness because it connects one to something larger than oneself that has a value and a reality beyond one’s egocentric concerns and individual existence.” John Vervaeke

In the following sections, we will look at each dimension in-depth, the corresponding existential issues for each dimension and finally, discuss strategies for cultivating the dimension in your own life.

2. Coherence

What is Coherence? 

In the psychological literature on meaning in life, “coherence” refers to the sense that one’s life is structured, orderly, and makes sense. It involves the perception that various aspects of one’s life, such as goals, values, experiences, and relationships, fit together in a meaningful and integrated way.

This coherence comes from a feeling that their actions and experiences are interconnected and contribute to a larger, meaningful narrative. Coherence is the ‘cognitive’ dimension of meaning in life, and boils down to life being meaningful to the extent that it “makes sense” to the person living it. A key aspect of coherence is recognising patterns:

“Life is coherent when one is able to discern understandable patterns in it to make the wholeness comprehensible. In other words, meaning as coherence is seen to be about ‘the feeling that one’s experiences or life itself makes sense’” (Heintzelman & King, 2014b,p. 154). 

Heintzelman & King argue human beings have an adaptive trait that motivates us to aim to detect reliable patterns and connections in the environment and rewards us with an experience of ‘meaning’ when we can find such reliable coherence in our lives: a felt sense of perceiving reliable environmental patterns, the opposite of being awash with uncertainty and anxiety. Empirically, they have shown that encountering coherent patterns in the environment increases people’s self-reports of meaning in life (Heintzelman et al.,2013). 

What does a lack of coherence look like? A life that is disjointed and chaotic and in a word it is the experience of absurdity.

2.1 What is absurdity?

Albert Camus, the Algerian/French philosopher, pursued the question of absurdity in life in the twentieth century.

He used the example of the Myth of Sisyphus to describe what he saw as the absurdity of human life (See the story of sisyphus below) 

In brief, Sisyphus was a Titan King of ancient Greece who killed a lot of his guests and so eventually ran afoul of the God-king Zeus. When Zeus sent death to go and bring Sisyphus to the underworld, Sisyphus, being a crafty guy, tricked Death into chaining himself up and, therefore escaped. However, the consequence of Sisyphus escaping death was that now no one could die and stuff weird, pretty, quick, like Ares, the God of war, slaying whole armies on the battlefield, and they just got up again. Nothing was working as it should, and sooner or later, Sisyphus was caught by Zeus himself (however he did manage to pull the same trick again!). So, for his crime of hubris, believing he was smarter than the Gods, Sisyphus was brought to the underworld and condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity, just to watch said boulder roll back down again. (This is how I feel doing the dishes every evening). 

Camus used the myth of Sisyphus as a way of describing modern human life without a transcendent purpose or reality. If we just die in the end he thinks all our human activity is rolling a boulder up a hill just to watch it roll back down again. It’s a depressing enough vision of the human condition and one which I find comparable to Macbeth in Shakespeare’s work when he says:

“Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” William Shakespeare

This is the worldview of absurdity that inevitably leads to Nihilism. However it is important to note here that both Sisyphus and Macbeth, mythologically speaking, did something wrong - they committed profound sins.

What did they do wrong?

They committed the crime of hubris: trying to become the equal or superior to the Gods. In other words, they wanted a level of power and control over reality that was simply impossible for a finite mortal human being to have, and in trying to attain this impossible goal, they broke the balance of reality for everyone else. For example, Sisyphus chained death and interrupted the natural cycle of life, and Macbeth killed the king and created chaos in the social world of his day.

Could absurdity be a punishment for our moral failings? For our hubris?

2.2 Make Facing Absurdity Meaningful Again 

The fundamental question is - is life absurd? The answer is sometimes. 

Absurdity is the manifestation of uncertainty, chaos, and the unknown - which is more or less guaranteed for finite beings in an infinite world. However, the Tyrant, like Macbeth and Sisyphus, tries to destroy the unknown for good, to attain absolute control over reality (at the same time denying the existence of any super-sceeding reality which would be below). In a Christian sense, you could consider this attempt to be above reality as the definition of sin and what Adam and Eve did in the garden to get us all kicked out.

The world of the tyrant is no different than the ultimate sceptic: there is no reality or intelligible patterns; therefore, there is no order. If there is no order, then yes, reality is fundamentally absurd, and truth and knowledge impossible. There is no rational order for our minds to conform to in the first place so it’s ignorance and opinions all the way down. Is there an alternative?

In Jordan Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning, he provides an alternate character to the tyrant in the hero. The hero mythologically is the figure that stands between order and chaos, the known and the unknown worlds, and these are the two fundamental domains of human experience:

There is order, a relatively predictable known world, and then there is chaos, a state of flux which is unpredictable and, therefore, dangerous and promising.

The hero is the individual who voluntarily leaves behind the state of order, the world of the known, to enter into the unknown and face chaos, and to turn the chaos into habitable order, and bring back the gold they found on the adventure, new information, to the village, the broader social world. 

The hero stands at the border of order and chaos, which is also where ‘meaning’ occurs. The experience of meaning in this case, is Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow-state’, a state of optimal consciousness and experience. Therefore the world of the hero is optimal for our sense of meaning in life and is as much about making coherence as having coherence. To have a completely predictable world would actually not be meaningful, as we need to be at the boundary of the unknown in order to experience meaningful flow states. So far from rendering life incoherent, absurdity is a portal to attaining more meaning. The real meaning of coherence comes from making sense of the unknown, the absurdity - it occurs at the border of order and chaos.

The cost of facing the unknown, the anxiety, the challenge, is the cost of creating more coherence in your life. My argument is that this is redemptive. Redemption comes from the Latin ‘redimere’ meaning ‘to buy back’. The cost of a meaningful life is experiencing the dramatic tension of living at the border of order and chaos. To return to the scientific literature, Heintzelman reported the experimental evidence that the act of making sense and finding coherence actually makes people experience their lives as more meaningful. So, in summary, the more coherent, intelligible things fit together for you, then the more meaningful you find your life.

3. Purpose

In the psychological literature, purpose is often described as having a meaningful and intentional reason to live, driven by a clear understanding of one’s goals and values (Ryff & Singer, 2008).

Purpose encompasses a sense of direction, a belief that one’s actions are meaningful and contribute to a larger scheme of existence. It goes beyond mere goal-setting and achievement, delving into the more profound questions of why one engages in particular activities and what significance these activities hold in the grander scheme of life. 

There are two ways of looking at purpose in life: as the purpose of life, which is the same as what is the meaning of life and a larger religious or theological question. The second is a more practical version, which is, how do I increase a sense of purpose in my life?

This is the question we will focus on in this section firstly. The absence of purpose is purposelessness.

3.1 Increasing Purpose in Life

“Knowing thyself is the beginning of wisdom…” Socrates

One treatment for depression that Cognitive Behavioural Therapists employ is to get the individual to use a daily planner. In this daily planner, they must write down what they should be doing at every hour of the day. So essentially, you chop your twenty-four hours into hourly blocks and must choose what that hour will be spent doing. A goal for each hour of the day. Even for the time of sleep, the goal for those eight hours is restful sleep. 

This might seem like overkill, but there is a good neurochemical reason for this: our positive emotion system is goal-directed. In other words, positive emotions track your progress towards a valued goal, so if you have a valued goal every hour of the day, you will make a massive jump in your positive emotions and increase your quality of life overall. 

We tend to consider purpose as a broad, overarching point to one’s existence, like the point of my life is to help people lose weight and look great on holidays. In our quest for complete clarity, purpose becomes reduced to a social or economic function, often leaving people burned out and frustrated when their job or hobby doesn’t scratch that transcendent itch. So rather than starting on the big, abstract level of - what is my purpose in life? We will instead start on the immediate, practical and achievable level of daily life. 

3.2 Building a Purpose System

In my early teens, I thought goals were for weirdos. The idea of sitting down and setting goals for myself and pursuing and achieving them seemed fruity, to say the least. However, at the same time, my mental health was falling off the edge of a cliff, my sleep schedule non-existent, and vices bouncing about on my soul like a troop of chimpanzees on a trampoline. The result was a lot of anxiety, depression and a feeling of having little control over my life. Ironically, the answer was humility and reflecting on what the hell I was supposed to be doing and the realisation that peace of mind was the result of discipline and that this mental discipline across time was mediated by consistent goals.  

I’ve constructed one of these goal-systems for my own personal use to maximise my positive emotions as much as possible, and I discovered in the constructing of my own system, that you must address some of those bigger existential questions anyway, which is killing two birds with one schedule. 

Like all great existential journeys, I started constructing this system using Google Calendar. You can use any calendar, but that one was convenient for me. When you open the calendar, you will see time before you, and I don’t mean to be condescending, your life! Those twenty-four hours in the day are what life is. Oftentimes, when we consider purpose, we get all romantic about living in Prague and painting Shetland ponies, but that blank schedule is really what you face everyday upon waking up. 

So, What do you want your day to look like? This was the question I began with. At the time, I was forced to work a brutal customer service job to survive/eat food that was on the schedule for eight hours a day by design. Then, of course, there was the question of waking up at a certain time, eating breakfast, exercising and writing. But firstly, the schedule is where we see the structure of our day and can start to consider what the ideal day looks like for you? Nobody else can answer this question for you, so take a second and consider. 

For me, my ideal day is waking up, training in martial arts for an hour or two, then settling down for several hours of creative work, a nice lunch, more creative work and then an evening with the missus or some sort of socialising. This is the good life for me! It might sound like your worst nightmare but that doesn’t really matter. The point is you pick your ideal day and build your schedule around that! The main body of the schedule will be focused around a typical day, so avoid scheduling in sitting on the beach drinking mojito’s five days a week. 

Your new calendar brain will help you organise yourself beyond minute to minute and instead think in larger time frames across months, years, etc. Flow, essentially the experience of meaning in life, comes from pursuing a valued goal. So, scaffolding your bigger goals in your daily life means you get the juicy bonus points at the boring parts of the day. So, this is where the second part of the system comes in, which is your long-term goal-setting for your life. 

3.3 Being vs Having Goals 

I’m trying to think in decades at the moment, so coming to the end of my twenties, I had certain goals: getting my first play produced, starting podcasting, etc., and these long-term goals structured how I behave daily to achieve them. To be a professional football player, you must spend much of your day playing football. The same is true for any longer-term goals, but we can split them into two categories: Being-goals and having-goals. In my opinion, Being-goals are more important than having-goals. Not that having-goals aren’t important - I want to have a house when I’m older, a family, a golden retriever etc. But a having-goal can be accomplished with no significant transformation of your personality, so is ultimately, not as meaningful as a being-goal. 

A being-goal is focused on what I want to be in the future. For example, I want to be a father. Therefore, I need to find a girlfriend, wife, and relationship that is moving towards the goal of having children. I want to be healthy, so I need to exercise, eat right, and stay away from those delicious cigarettes; you get the point. The being-goals that you decide are the levels of your future self and can be broken down into micro-routines, challenges, and pursuits which guide you towards bringing that ideal vision of life into being, which is the ethical adventure of your life, and feels meaningful in your pursuit.

So, why doesn’t everyone do this? Most people get stuck on being-goals because they can’t decide what they want to be because to decide to be something is to decide to not be everything else - it’s a sacrifice. It’s aggressive, maybe even cruel to the parts of yourself that have other ideas or no ideas at all. But to become who you are going to be, you need to sacrifice who you are now. Choosing your being goals is a kind of death you experience while alive but prepares you for truly living. 

People don’t grapple with these being-goals because they are afraid to make the wrong decision, so keeping the being-goals vague seems like a good alternative, but then you end up as nothing, which is much worse. Not choosing a future self is a guarantee of failure to become anything. You will end up going nowhere! Even thinking about that expression - going nowhere - we use the same cognitive machinery for navigating physical space as we do conceptual space, and so your being-goals are your destination. The type of person you should be is the destination, the type of person you should be. What kind of person should you be?   

The question of who you should be? Is an ethical question; in other words, the question is about the ideal, or what ‘should’ be, rather than what is. Virtue ethics, which I wrote this essay on, argues the central question of all ethics is who should you be? What is your character? What is a good character, and what is a bad character? Who do you get the former and avoid the latter? 

Every Virtue Ethic tradition has a different answer to this question. Confucianism takes the Chinese philosopher Confucius as an answer, the Stoics take Socrates as an ideal personality and guide, and for Christians, this is Jesus. A person who is a historicist or a cultural relativist would say that the person you should be is an arbitrary decision based on your social or cultural location - it’s just whichever group you join, and that’s fine. I’m not a cultural relativist because my research has led to a universal conception of human nature across cultures, and so if human nature is universal across cultures, then so would be ethics - ethics is the perfection of human nature, what we should be. 

In his book The Republic, Plato took on this project by starting with an anthropology of human nature and then proposing ethics as a cultural solution to our natural flaws. He argued for a Wizard of Oz-esque view of virtue ethics, whereby we need courage because we must face danger, we need wisdom because we are inherently foolish, we need temperance because we like eating lots of grub and we need justice to balance our chaotic minds and bring peace to our ailing souls - on the journey we get what we lack and become whole, unified, like the one. I love all that; it’s such a smooth and put-together system. But I won’t bore you with the details; what is important is that when thinking about who you should be, we use role models who embody these virtues. The role models are real but insufficient, and the virtues are perfect but abstract, so by opponent processing the two, you can start to get a grip on the type of person you should be and get a more fine-grained picture of what being a ‘good’ person means - which is really an insight into the Good itself, which by the way is God, which we will discuss in the next essay. I can’t answer that question of who you should be, but I can indicate that it’s a question of great importance and worth considering and paying attention to in your day-to-day life. 

3.4 Completing the Purpose System

Once you have a rough version of who you should be, you can think in broader blocks of time. For example, I’m heading into my thirties, and so is my girlfriend, so this time will involve having children - this means I need money, a job, the ability to pursue my creative projects (help). But these challenges give me a purpose; I need to achieve these things before then, or else! So there are stakes to this game, in this case, my relationship suffering, potentially failing and all the associated horrors of that - so I’m incentivised to do a good job and make progress towards my goals. 

So now we’re in a good position to start looking at setting up our purpose system, I do this in the notes section of my phone (you can write this down wherever is easiest). The purpose system is a running project, it is not just written once and left but a day-to-day running project which you engage in and develop: 

Down the bottom of my note are my longest-term goals, which might be in the next ten or twenty years. Below that, I have my goals for this year, which I chose after doing an annual reflection at Christmas time on the previous year (I use this one from Modern Wisdom - check it out). For example I did my 2022 reflection and choose my goals for 2023 and keep those goals in a list and tick them off as I accomplish them one by one. 

At the front of my notes, I have my weekly schedule. On a Sunday, I write each day of the week and shade in the basic blocks: work, training, and any jobs I’m aware of. I try to think about what my future self needs from me and then I try to schedule this in - this creates harmony between my past, present and future selves, organising oneself across time. 

So you can see a coherence starts to emerge in your life, from the higher level vision of one’s future self to how you act at twelve o’clock on a Tuesday, writing this essay, for example. This purpose structure reduces chaos and keeps you pursuing valued goals, which maximises positive emotion and peace of mind - the normal state of mind is chaos, and goals organise the mind.

In conclusion, we all need a motivational vision of the good, and that vision changes as the stages of life change, so we will frequently be thrown into chaos again and again. there is no silver bullet for this hero’s journey and work. We simply must attend to the gaps in our conceptualisations and rebuild our purpose structure when anomaly emerges, and this is why I think meaning is a warrior practice, it is something you live rather than just an intellectual exercise. It’s a tall order, but human beings thrive with a burden to bear, especially one we share with others as parents, leaders, citizens, and wherever, answering these questions will bring good. I firmly believe addressing these questions puts you in the best place to assist yourself, your culture, and broader civilisation. If you keep fighting, keep making sense, then you get your order back, fleeting as this might, out the other side is the hope that you start to enjoy the challenge and test your mettle against even bigger looming disasters - lord knows our civilisation could do with more people doing that.

4. Significance

The third dimension of meaning in life is called ‘significance’, which has to do with worth, importance and value.

Park and George define significance as ‘a value-laden evaluation of one’s life regarding how important, worthwhile, and inherently valuable it feels.’ Like purpose, significance is about value and finding justification for one’s actions, existence and way of life that extend into the future. It is about evaluating one’s life as a whole, past and present and future and the sense of value that arises when one evaluates one’s life according to some conceptual criteria, which is what we will explore first. This dimension is a critical missing dimension noted for victims of suicide, who feel their life is valueless or not worth living.

4.1 Virtue Ethics: A Framework For Evaluating Your Life

As a young man who has grown up in the culture war of the West, I’ve struggled mercilessly with this question. The question is, what is the ultimate way to live? It is a question of where human value and worth lie. What does true human value look like? 

With a clear ethical framework, we can answer this essential question. 

You can see this ethical confusion in the modern culture that oscillates between the mommy culture of ‘you’re perfect in every single way’ and the harder ascetic, navy-sealesque ‘nobody cares, work harder’ mentality; both are extreme positions. Of course, the truth lies somewhere in between, which coincidentally is where virtue also lies. In the in-between, we can find the golden mean, the roving standard necessary for evaluating human moral character. In fact, an entire tradition of ethics does just that, called ‘Virtue ethics’ (which I previously wrote this essay about here). 

A virtue is a mean between two extremes called vices. These virtues and vices are character traits, habits and dispositions. The good character traits are virtues like honesty, generosity, wisdom, courage, etc., and the bad character traits are called vices like cowardice, foolishness, injustice, gluttony, etc. The virtuous character embodies those best character traits and provides a valuable framework for evaluating our moral failings. Virtue ethics also connects deeply with stories because, of course, stories are about character, good character and bad character, and dramatising the successes and failures of particular virtues and vices. In this view of morality, your favourite TV show is as much a moral exemplar as any other person. It can offer an evaluative framework for art and media and much of our online behaviour and in real life. Virtue ethics is the evaluative framework you are looking for. 

It is a path, a way of self-reflection and self-knowledge, because virtue ethics requires knowledge of virtue and good and bad traits so you can identify the golden mean between them. Sometimes, we believe we are courageous when we are actually reckless, and sometimes, we think we are wise when we are really foolish. Therefore, self-reflection and building self-knowledge are necessary to discern virtue from vice. 

There is a nice element to virtue ethics that accepts our character will be all over the place - that perfect wisdom is essentially impossible for human beings, but that being said, we still need to work to get ourselves in order. I would argue that it is taking part in this self-reflection, taking on the challenge and trying to orient one’s poor character toward the commendable good, not just being the finished product, that is important. As Plato said, “Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow”. 

Virtue ethics encourages you to choose and take actions that align with the virtues. This means making moral decisions and behaving in ways that reflect your values. When you consistently act in accordance with your values, you can experience a sense of significance because you are living in alignment with your deeply held beliefs, that you are meeting the standard - significance is about living a virtuous life, not just a few minutes every now and again. 

The end goal of virtue ethics is called ‘Eudaimonia’, sometimes badly translated as ‘happiness’, but it is more like a good life lived in accord with virtue that results in human moral growth that actualises one’s potential - it’s the joy of a job done well. Virtue ethics is all about the good life and what it means to live a good life, which is universal in some ways but also unavoidably particular. Significance comes from honestly saying we are living the good life, which is what we will look at in the next sections.

4.2 What is the good life?

John Vervaeke, cognitive scientist and creator of awakening from the meaning crisis series, recommends a two-part spiritual exercise for increasing your significance in life. Firstly, ask yourself this question:

“What would you like to exist even if you don’t? And why?” 

Answering this question will reveal what is truly important to you, no bullshit. 

An example answer:

“I would want truth to exist when I don’t, therefore, I need to spend time in my life uncovering and sharing the truth, or at least, exemplifying the pursuit of truth. And why? A world without any truth would be a dark place, there would be no learning, no transformation and no hope. A world without truth would be a world not worth living in for people and that’s sad.” 

So try the exercise yourself, write down the question:

“What would you want to exist when you don’t? And why?”

And then answer it, before tackling the next part. 

4.3 Increasing Marginal Significance

The second spiritual exercise to increase significance in life is asking this question:

“How much do I matter to what matters to me?”

So there’s a duality to this question:

What matters to me?

Which we’ve identified in the first section. 

2. How much do I matter to what matters to me?

It’s easy to say you care about something and then, upon self-reflection, realise that you are entirely divorced from that important thing. We profess family matters to us, but we only see them once a year at Christmas. We profess our career matters to us, but we spend all our time procrastinating and looking at memes on the internet. 

Feeling a lack of significance is because you do not truly matter to what matters to you, but you can! Recognising the marginal gap between what matters to you and your current day-to-day routine allows you to optimise for mattering more to what matters to you. The more time and attention you give to what matters, the more significant your life will feel. 

Try out this spiritual exercise and take what matters to you from the first part and then examine and reflect, how much do you matter to what matters to you!

In conclusion, so much of life is about how we think about it. Recently, I lost a friend to suicide, and I just wish he could have taken on another perspective on his own life, one that included how valuable he was, how many people loved him, and what he still had to offer to all of us and the world. At the funeral, his father gave a speech that was one of the most powerful things I ever saw in my life, a father having to bury his son, and he still managed to remind the people gathered to:

“Remember, you’re important. No, not just important. You are sacred”. 

It’s easy to forget and become lost, but the truth is that each person is a miracle, as complex and deep as the universe itself, a centre of experience and, hence, a center of reality; we have tremendous value, if only we can see it! This isn’t an argument for narcissism or grandiosity but for true appreciation, gratitude and love. You are sacred. Be suspicious of any perspective that tells you otherwise, because any perspective that you are sacred is missing the true significance of human life, and hence, the true significance of yours.

5. Depth 

The fourth dimension of meaning in life is not reported in the psychological literature but was added by Cognitive Scientist John Veraveke, which is called ‘depth’.

He describes depth as the felt sense of being connected to ‘what is most real’. Depth is a part of the normative order like significance, which we discussed in the previous essay. In addition to our lives feeling valuable, important, and worthwhile, we need to feel our lives are connected to something that is actually real. 

Vervaeke argues there is a core human meta-drive to reality, which he calls ‘Onto-normativity’, onto meaning ‘reality’ and normativity relating to what we ought to do. He argues this drive is more important to us than subjective well-being! He uses the example of being in a relationship: would you want to know if your partner is cheating on you? Most people would say ‘yes’, even though learning this truth would radically reduce their subjective well-being. So, in this essay, we will be reflecting on current conflict in reality, some recent developments in thought on reality, and finally, how these developments can help us align meaning and reality-seeking. 

5.1 Modernity vs Reality

“How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him, the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe…Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.”

― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Jung here is pointing out why mediaeval people didn’t suffer from a meaning crisis despite living much more difficult lives than we do these days. Their worldview, pre-Copernican revolution, placed them at the centre of the universe. They knew how to act, why they were valuable and were connected to what was most real (God). The mythos in which they lived provided a meaningful structure within which they could live meaningful lives despite the tragedy of their suffering and torment.

The scientific revolution created a vastly different picture of reality. The discovery of the heliocentric universe indicated that we are not the centre of the universe; in fact, we appear to be some infinitesimal small corner of a material, clock-work, universe, infinitely expanding and started with an impersonal big bang and what is most real is dead matter, like soil at the bottom of reality. The scientific materialistic paradigm is basically a complete inversion of the mediaeval religious worldview and, in the history of human thought, is without precedence. 

In the twenty-first century we live in the wake of this scientific revolution. We cannot explain our consciousness, how we should act (ethics) and why we would have value as such a small part of a big universe? But to try and return to a mediaeval religious worldview is, at best, naive and, at worst, complete self-deception. So we are stuck between this rock and a hard place: what is true is essentially meaningless, and what is meaningful is essentially false? Our modern epistemology and ontology caught us on the horns of a dilemma, truth and nihilism? Or lies and meaning? But could materialism not be wrong about reality? Is there an alternative perspective that affords us both truth and meaning in life? A best of both worlds, so to speak? And that is what we will be exploring in this essay…  

5.2 Squaring The Circle

The problem that has split Philosophy for four hundred years is dualism, the object-subject divide, and hence the problem of perception. The materialist worldview presupposes a naive realism in human perception, that there is a mind-independent world of objects out there and that we record this world like a video camera. The alternative to this position is a naive idealism, that there is nothing really out there in the world but the projected ideas of the mind. Our perception is how we touch and grasp what is real, and so it has deep philosophical implications. In this section, I’ll be arguing for an in-between stance - there is something out there, a reality, that our mind interacts with, but the question of whether the world is simply dead matter, or what matters? Is what we will be addressing. 

The method of empirical science presupposes that our minds are of such a substance that reality is intelligible to us; thus, through observation, experiment, and repeatability, we are capable of coming to the truth. However, this connection between mind and reality, which affords intelligibility, cannot be proven by the scientific method because the scientific method presupposes it. It’s like how you can’t have an experiment to prove the validity of experiments; because the validity of experiments is presupposed in every experiment. The same is true for an argument; you cannot argue for the intelligibility of reality because every argument presupposes that reality is intelligible; otherwise, if reality was not intelligible to us, no argument could ever be shown to be true or false. The entirety of human knowledge and the possibility of truth rests on this first correspondence between mind and reality that we cannot prove because it is the basis of proof itself…

But now, this first presupposition is being questioned from within science itself… Donald Hoffman, Cognitive scientist, wrote a book called “The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes”. He should have rephrased this as the case against naive realism, as the case against reality can be misinterpreted into a matrix-like simulation theory.

His argument is a derivative of Alvin Platinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, which is essentially that if we are evolved animals, our perceptual systems evolved for survival and reproduction not an accurate representation of the nature of objective reality. Hoffman claims to have proved this is the case mathematically, that the odds we evolved for perceiving objective reality are nearly zero. His argument is in good company with the burgeoning counter-enlightenment online. If we don’t simply perceive material objects as they are, then reality is going to be more complicated than materialist or physicalist accounts. Of course we know this from Quantum Physics, that ultimately Newtonian physics is going to be wrong, but what does this mean for individual perception? 

Enter Jordan Peterson. In the first line of his first book, Maps of Meaning, Peterson addressed this exact problem:

“The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, or as a place of things.” MOP, Peterson. 

He argued, evolutionarily, that human beings exist in the world as a forum for action, in other words, we live in a world of ‘what matters’, not matter. He argues that our perceptual and action systems are set up for survival and reproduction, not objective reality.

He gives the example of a cliff, which is perceived as a ‘falling-off place’ before it is considered as an igneous rock formation eroded by the sea and wind aka a cliff. The advanced, technical, scientific interpretation of the cliff came much later, and is a limit case of our grasping the cliff as a falling off place that threatens our survival.

Peterson argues that human beings live in this highly functional imaginary schema but that reality is not equivalent to the functional conceptual model we make of it, and that this mistake is like confusing the map for the terrain. 

He argues our successful adaptation proves that we understand the reality in which we are in. In this case, there is a mind-independent reality, but we know this reality by conforming our being to the environment, within and without, in action, not simply naming and categorising the world.

The current scientific model inappropriately prioritises the later of categorising and naming things as truth. But in this expanded model of truth, Peterson brings back myths, rituals, and religion because these are all means of successful human adaptation to the changing environment. He argues our successful adaptation to the environment constitutes an embodied truth: if we were simply deluded, we would be less successful at adaptation, like a person crossing a busy motorway while blindfolded is likely to be less successful. 

Dr Iain McGilchrist, who I recently had on the podcast, makes a convergent argument with Peterson and Vervaeke based on brain hemispheric differences. Mcgilchrist argues that the two hemispheres are two fundamentally different types of attention and that that attention meets the world out there, but it’s a two-way relationship. He argues how we attend creates the world around us, and provides an example of a mountain near his home on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

This mountain was, in mythology, a home of the gods; but then for sailors, it was an indication of a difficult stretch of sailing ahead, and then for modern geologists, it is a unique type of igneous rock. What we see in the mountain betrays our values, and to prioritise one canonical interpretation, the geologists, for example, is a kind of tyranny of perspective, which in Mcgilcrist’s argument, this is a tyranny of the left brain. 

McGilchrist argues that the left brain is for grabbing and manipulating the world. The left brain re-presents things to consciousness, which means it creates a model and map that is deeply functional but is not the reality itself. This model creates an appearance of reality that is eternally fixed, predetermined, made of parts, inanimate, etc. He then goes on to argue that the left brain divides but cannot be put back together and that the right brain is superior at transmitting reality because it can integrate the whole rather than the parts and considers nothing as certain. The left brain is like a hand for grabbing things but it doesn’t understand the broader picture of the parts which it is grabbing. 

McGilchrist argues that the binary thinking of our current culture, and maybe our brain hemispheres, biases us to the conceptual map rather than reality, and that actually, what we take to be a separate domain of scientific literal truth is a limit case of truth in general. Representation is a limit case of what is real, stasis is a limit case of motion, as Heraclitus says, we cannot step into the same river twice, and that literal language is a limited case of metaphor and not a separate domain. He argues, similarly to CS Lewis, that all language is metaphorical; even the word ‘abstract’ means ‘being dragged away’ - it is a physical metaphor. So, he argues that scientific materialism has taken the limit case of isolated, static, literal truths to be the whole of truth, but that this is merely a part of a bigger picture and confuses the map for the terrain.  

In Cognitive science, Veraveke argues that relevance realisation occurs before our perception of objects, that there is an infinite number of ways and so we identify relevant features before we identify the facts, which means at the bottom of our perception is a valuing process - an implicit judgement of what is valuable and what is not. In other words, to be a cognitive agent, you must see the world through an implicit frame of value - which refutes naive realism. What we are seeing is not just the objects but the aspects of the objects that are relevant to our embodied cognition. Based on these observations, Vervaeke expands our ways of knowing reality to what he calls the four P’s (Propositions, Perspectives, Procedures and Participation), which adds skills, perspectives and character traits to how we know the world and hence also brings back mythology, ritual, religion, etc, as optimised for these non-propositional ways of knowing reality. 

Vervaeke argues that we are locked into a propositional tyranny, the idea that truth is simply correspondence between propositions and objects, ignoring all these other ways of knowing that are at play underneath our propositional consciousness. The materialist paradigm is an oversimplification of what is actually going on in perception and hence how we encounter reality is radically different from what was thought by 18th and 19th century empiricists. 

5.3 Renewing The Marriage of Meaning & Reality

At the root of this new understanding of ourselves and our connection to reality is the Socratic paradox: 

“I know that I know nothing”

To overcome our inherent evolved perceptual difficulties, self-deception and self-deception, a fundamental axiom of self-examination, self-correction and dialogue to bootstrap our vision beyond the merely re-presented is necessary. It is inevitable from this perspective on truth, whereby our connection with reality is dependent upon our pursuit of truth, that the truth is approached asymptotically or in Platonic thinking we ascend “degrees” of truth. Our knowing the truth is like the digits of a pie, whereby we gain increasing resolution with each digit but cannot ‘finish’ the sequence. But the increasing resolution is still a real development in our connection to reality that is not merely psychological.

This pursuit of reality occurs at the edge of our knowledge, at the border of order and chaos, which is where meaning occurs - meaning is an instinct that is tracking our optimal development. Hence as we are becoming realer, we know reality by becoming like it, as Vervaeke argues, we connect to reality through self-realisation. This implies that we feel a felt sense of connecting to what is real when we let go of our illusions and pursue reality beyond, becoming real-er ourselves, which is a process that is ultimately unfinishable, but our developing relationship with truth is ultimately meaningful.

6. The Structure of Meaning in Life

Over the last four points, we've spent time elucidating the psychology of meaning in life and highlighting some of the modern philosophical problems that are getting in the way of achieving it. In this essay, I will briefly revisit these four dimensions of meaning in life and elucidate their overarching structure to hopefully provide some insight into meaning in general. 

6.1 The Three Loss Orders of Meaning

In his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series, Vervaeke argued the meaning crisis comes from the loss of three orders: the nomological, narrative, and normative, and that these three orders correspond to the four dimensions of meaning in life: 

• Nomological order (Coherence) ensures there is a world out there governed by laws and rules which we can understand and grasp. 

• Narrative order (purpose) is that there is some overarching purpose to life which orients us into the future.

• Normative order (Significance & Depth) is that we are connected to something with higher value than our egocentric concerns and that that thing we are connected to is real. 

6.2 The Digital Substitution

An interesting example from Vervaeke that can help you grasp how these three orders interact and reinforce each other comes from video games. Video games, and I'm including social media as a video game, have a version of these three orders built into them: 

• Nomological order: the game has rules and laws which you can learn and observe as you play that make sense of the world. 

• Narrative order: the game has a storyline and missions and goals to pursue.

• Normative order: you can literally 'level-up'; see how you are progressing and improving as you play. 

Without these three orders built-in, the game would become senseless, and your attention would wane - our attention is optimised for this meaningful edge. Vervaeke argues this is why many people opt for the digital world over the physical world, as the virtual world can provide this meaningful order that our current culture does not (Cults and ideologies also offer low-resolution versions of these three orders).

6.3 The Work of Meaning is Meaning-Full

What does this mean for meaning?

Meaning is about levels of connection: connection to a world that makes sense, connection to a goal or mission, connection to others, and connection to something valuable beyond yourself. Therefore, increasing meaning in life is about increasing connections, but these physical connections, they are cognitive connections. The literature on meaning in life identifies building meaning as the critical human cognitive activity (animals don’t have meaning in life). Therefore, meaning comes from your interpretation of life.

Some interpretations are meaningful; others are not. Considering what we said above about cults, some interpretations are meaningful but false? But does that mean some interpretations are both meaningful and true?

This was the sweet spot that ancient philosophy sought: the optimal way of life results from the optimal interpretation of life. Hence, it is the job of art and philosophy to improve our interpretation of life and our connections and sense of meaning in life. Therefore, we can improve our interpretation of life by doing philosophy and art.

The current meaning crisis is a creative and philosophical call to action to generate a better interpretation, individually and collectively. In other words, the loss of meaning is an opportunity to find a deeper source of meaning! This work of a new interpretation that is both meaningful and true is the fight of our generation. Suffering, tragedy, and death equalise us all; therefore, the quest for meaning unites us all.