Meaning Is a Spiral, Not a Destination

One of the biggest, ongoing crises in my life has been a lack of meaning.

If I parent, I journal, I make art (alone, at 2 am, without showing anyone)… I’m doing ostensibly meaningful stuff.

But it feels like I’m not existing at all.

I spent many years trying to “find” meaning. And I no longer think it can be found.

Meaning is created, in the living, in the doing. But also in the sharing.

Society Isn’t Helping

The world has changed radically in the last few decades alone – we have access to amazing AI intelligence, a world of knowledge at our fingertips online, the potential for constant connectivity. You know this story.

Everything could be amazing, but instead, our lives are sh*t.

We seem to be getting stupider and more disconnected instead.

Why?

Because we’ve lost some of the fundamental “background” conditions of human life. Things that were always there, so we took them for granted. Things that created MEANING.

Where Did Ancient Humans Find Meaning?

Ancient humans lived in nature. They spent most of their time sitting around, feeling the wind on their skin, watching the shadows of clouds track across the grasslands, listening for the rustle of animals in the brush. There was abundant silence and quiet, in that slow, ambient background of nature.

They lived with other people, for the most part. One of our strongest assets as a species has always been our penchant for connecting with each other. Our nomadic ancestors may have gone on long solo hunts, but they would come back to a tribe.

There was also NEED. Sitting around staring at the sky, you’d notice you are hungry, chilly, you need things to hunt, you could be making tools. There may have been only a pile of sticks and rocks next to you, but you were motivated to MAKE THINGS out of it.

And not only did they need to use the things they made, and try them out and see if they worked, they could happily run to a fellow tribesman, give him the cool tool they just invented, and enjoy the smile on his face as he went around whacking things more effectively with it.

This whole process is something we’ve lost.

Adam Smith Breaks Meaning

One of the inventors of factory capitalism, Adam Smith, gave the example of a pin-maker. Alone, having to do each step of the process all day, a craftsman can only make 20-30 pins a day. Having to shape the metal, stretch it, cut it, finish it.

But if assembly line principles are applied, and there are four people, one to shape, one to stretch, one to cut, one to finish – they can get 200 done in a day.

This is very efficient, and helpful for Smith because he gets to pay all these dudes a portion of what the pins are worth and keep the rest for himself, for doing nothing but organizing.

But the workers, in moving from craftsmanship to the factory, have also lost something important.

The craftsman also has to SELL his work. He has to go out and talk to real customers. He sees how good each pin is. He can remember how he made that bent one while he was distractedly thinking about his Aunt Petunia last Thursday, or how the especially sharp one was the result of his new grinder.

And not only is he in touch with the result of his labor – how good it is – but he also gets to hear how it affects people. He gets the smiles when someone buys. He gets thanks from a happy return customer. He gets criticism from the guy who bought the Aunt-Petunia pin.

He may even belong to a guild of fellow pinmakers who share strategies. His craft is embedded in a community.

And that is one of the things we’ve lost in getting meaning through our work.

The Hidden Ingredient in Meaning-Making

One of the amazing things about the internet in general, about places like Substack, is that it creates a space where we can give each other feedback and support. Just like our long-lost tribes – we can show someone what we made and see how it lands. They can tell us what they liked or didn’t like. We have a stick to measure it against.

Did I make a good thing? Should I grow and try harder? First, I have to see how it landed for other people.

The mirror of other people is what makes us grow through the process.

And that is how creativity makes meaning.

My mistake was to think I could hide my creativity in a cupboard. With the rest of my personality.

That felt like a slow death.

Creativity has to go out into the world and connect with other humans. And then come back to us somehow and tell us how it went.

That’s how we know what it means. That’s how the meaning is created.

It’s not just that the meaning is “shared”, although that helps. It has to do with the space needed to see our own reflection.

Why Do We Need to See Ourselves?

I think this is really the crux of something like “self-expression”. We are trying to get what is inside of us out, in a way that we can see it, examine it, love it, understand it, and ultimately grow through it.

Our creations become a mirror.

But you can’t see yourself in the mirror if your eyeball is up against the glass. You need a bit of space for a reflection to be coherent.

That’s why we can’t see ourselves best. We need other people to see us and tell us what they see. To reflect us back to ourselves. So that we can learn who we are, what it means, how it feels, and grow.

More than anything, we need other people to understand us, so we can understand ourselves too.

Meaning As a Creative Cycle

If meaning-making was a cycle, perhaps it would look like this:

1. stillness and space

2. need

3. creativity

4. sharing, feedback, and testing

5. community and understanding

6. growing through the process

7. back to the stillness again

Writing, art, creating things… and sharing them… and getting feedback… and learning through it…

That’s how we make meaning.

That is the process humans need to come to see ourselves, share meaningful connections, and grow.

Like the meaning of words… maybe meaning was never meant to exist in isolation.

And society sucks so much today because we are systematically losing meaning. And it will get worse unless we take steps to protect it.

So what do we DO? Here are some random ideas, based on what I’m trying:

1. Deliberately protect stillness and quiet in your day. Get out in nature, go for a walk, stare at a wall, meditate, read, think, watch snails, hide your phone.

2. Develop a sensitivity to what people need again by buying and having less. Notice the wants, but don’t be so fast to fill them. Learn to be okay with wanting and not getting.

3. Create. Write, draw, paint, code, build things, fix things, cook things, grow things, make up crazy stories and tell people about them. Play.

4. Share what you make with other humans and ask for feedback. Not in a clinical way, but the same way you would give someone snacks you made. Make more things that you’re excited to share.

5. Build a community of people working on the same problems who understand yours and can help you see them better.

6. Invest enough of yourself into what you create, trying to make things that people love and can use – so that it hurts if things don’t work, and you have a goal to grow towards. Build the skills and understandings, both inner and outer, that you need to make the thing better – and better yourself in the process.

7. Then head back to the stillness to find inspiration again.

Building meaning, like all processes of growth, is ultimately a cycle.

We make it from sunlight and dust, send it out into the universe, are amazed by what oddments come back, are changed by the process, and try to do better next time.

And we’re in a world that is constantly bleeding away what we need to make this happen.

Recreating the conditions for this cycle of creative meaning is the great work of our age.

Happy writing.

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