Creating meaning when the world screams everything is meaningless
You are a meaning-making machine, and trying to live without meaning can ruin your life. Humans are hard-wired to find stories and meaning. When we lack meaning in our lives, it’s easy to fall into a bitter, nihilistic downward spiral.
Pure nihilism is the understanding that there is no inherent meaning, purpose, or value to anything in the universe. This thought pattern leads some to robust intellectual habits and community building. However, nihilism leads others to deep depression, anger, and political violence.
This isn’t an argument for religion. I am not religious. I left my religion many years ago because I came to see it was as harmful as some of the nihilistic movements in our society.
If you find comfort and community in a religion, and you and your fellow believers are not harming others, you should hold onto that faith.
However, even if you are not religious, you can still create meaning. I’m something of a mystic absurdist. I believe that freedom and joy come from making my own meaning in a universe indifferent to my need for meaning. I’ve chosen to believe there is some creative force out in the universe that wants us to be happy, and that the best way to happiness is to help other people find joy.
One way our human need to find meaning manifests itself is in the delightful, and problematic, trait of apophenia.
Apophenia is the human tendency to see patterns or connections in random things.
Apophenia is one of the reasons we are so prone to conspiracy theories. The universe serves up a ream of data demonstrating a series of random, unconnected coincidences, and our brains immediately focus on two unrelated points and concoct a story before we are consciously aware of what our brains are doing.
This most human condition is also one of the reasons eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. Apophenia means we automatically find patterns and create narratives to explain the presence or absence of non-existent patterns.
However, there is also something beautiful about apophenia. This is why we see shapes in the clouds and Jesus in a piece of toast. It’s also why we anthropomorphize nature in art, poetry, and our everyday conversations.
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Another way to understand apophenia is that it’s the inner poet inside all of us. You see a dragon in the texture of the wall in the kitchen or hear a message on the wind on a fall day because you are a poet looking for ways to make meaning.
If it is up to us to create meaning in this life, who better to do that than a poet? Why not write your own story to have a romantic tilt towards beauty and wonder?
We falsely put poetry on a pedestal. We imagine that poetry is too hard to understand. We pretend that only the highly educated or insane can write a poem. However, as our proclivity towards apophenia demonstrates, inside, we are all poets. You can write poetry without memorizing forms or counting syllables. An essay can be a poem; your life can be lived as a poem.
You can turn the false patterns in the world and transform them into poetry that makes your corner of the world a bit more livable.
Like poetry, we also falsely elevate visual art into the rarified air so that only the talented few are allowed to paint.
But all poets and painters are just imperfect people. They are only special in that they have decided to use their time to make art, something that is also within your reach.
One of the great impressionist painters, Claude Monet, whom we praise as a genius, saw the world through blurry eyes. His cataracts affected his physical vision, and likely his artistic vision as well.
Monet found meaning through art. He painted his own story as seen through his cataracts.
You, too, can create meaning through painting, poetry, writing, dance, or any other art form, regardless of your current skill level or physical attributes.
Earlier, I said that our human need for meaning wasn’t an argument for or against religion. But that need for meaning, that thing inside our brains and souls that creates apophenia, is an argument for art.
No matter what your belief system is, art and writing are for you to use to create the story of your life.
Look for the strange patterns and share the stories you see.
When you write your own story, you aren’t just changing your life. You are also helping those around you enjoy their lives a little more. Every poem or essay you write gives someone else permission to write their story, to recast their life in a different light.
A society where everyone is a writer, where everyone is an artist, will not fall fully into fascism because fascism relies on hopelessness and nihilism to take full control.
Writing and art make your world a better place.
Make your life a work of art
There’s something healing about making beautiful things, even if you only share your art with your closest family and friends.
That doesn’t mean your art needs to be your entire life. You can make art or write without ever going pro. It’s probably not healthy to view yourself solely as a writer or artist.
However, there is something incredible about living your life in such a way that you not only leave behind some works of art, but your life itself becomes a kind of art project.
Imagine living your life in such a way that your actions reinforce the themes you most want to share with the world.
I reinterpret many of the events of my life in my essays, haiku, and poetry comics. By writing my story in this way, I create meaning in my life. I make it easier for me to make all of the small decisions that ensure I live with as much fidelity to my values of kindness and beauty as possible. And all of this makes me a better father — a better human.
I once drove two hours on a dark winter night through a driving rainstorm and windy mountain roads to pick up my teenager had found themselves in an unsafe situation while volunteering as a counselor at an outdoor school.
The adults in charge of the camp were well-meaning, but a little too casual with certain safety guidelines. My child knew they needed to leave for the sake of their mental health.
Once I picked up my child, they told me that the leaders were shocked I found the camp so easily, especially in the rain. They had told my child that they shouldn’t expect me for a couple more hours and that everyone gets lost coming at night.
My child told them I would make it to them easily. I did. They told me they believed in me.
In that moment, the tears from my eyes fell with the rain.
The truth was that I had been to that exact camp many years before when I was a Boy Scout leader. I was also a frequent driver of those windy mountain roads because we often visited family who lived on the Oregon coast, on the other side of those mountains.
A few years later, that same child told me that because they knew I would always help them should they find themself stuck, made them more willing to take risks and try things they would otherwise be too afraid of doing.
I chose to cast that moment, driving through the rain, as one where the universe had been kind enough to prepare me throughout life with small experiences to be able to get to my child when they needed me.
The Buddhist haiku poet Kobayashi Issa wrote:
even wild roses
of a downtrodden land
reach enlightenment
Writing the story of my life gives me hope that the elements of my difficult past can be reshaped in a way to make my present not pleasant, but beautiful. I find happiness in life, not from ease, but from discovering beauty and wonder.
I’m fortunate enough to have my art and my work overlap. But I work to live in such a way that I do more living than working.
I want my life to be a work of art, but I don’t want art to be my whole life.
That is the meaning I have created for my life. Making my life a work of art is the story I am writing for myself. I do this through the literal writing of essays and poems, as well as through the metaphorical writing of my story.
I mindfully examine the events of my past and choose what to take with me, what to disregard, and what to transform into something else. I work to transmute pain into passion and make meaning where the world sees only meaninglessness.
There’s nothing special about me. I’m not gifted in any particular way. I’m just a middle-aged, sweaty, fat, bald guy who chooses to wake up each day and attempt to create meaning and beauty. Sometimes I succeed, more often I fail.
Over time, writing my own story in a way that serves me has gotten easier. But there is always more work to do. This is the work of my life.
What are you going to do with your life? How are you going to write your story?
Today is your chance to write the story of your life again. You can take a fresh approach and use your trauma to power a more beautiful present. And if you later decide you don’t like the story you’ve told, relax — it’s just a first draft. You can always rewrite it later.
