The Better Question
A tool for your kit
Good morning, philosophers.
Here’s what I’ve been building toward.
Meaning is something your brain makes. It is not a substance waiting to be found. It is not external to your experience. It is your experience — the particular output of a particular mind, shaped by a particular history, processing a particular stream of information.
This is not a diminishment. I want to say that again, more slowly.
The fact that meaning is something you create — not something you discover — doesn’t make it less real. It makes it irreducibly yours. No one can tell you your meaning is wrong, because your meaning is what your mind does with what you’ve been given. It’s the most accurate thing about you.
What changes, when you take this seriously, is the question you ask.
The old question — where is my meaning, what should I be doing, what am I here for — these are the questions of someone searching for an external thing. They carry a particular flavor of anxiety. The anxiety of someone who might be looking in the wrong place.
The better question is: what have I been working with? What information has my life been built on? Whose meanings did I inherit before I had any say? And are those meanings still generating something that feels true — or have they been making something hollow that I’ve been calling purpose for longer than I want to admit?
That question is harder. It requires sitting still with yourself in a way that most of our days aren’t designed to support.
So here’s something small and concrete. In the next few days — not today, there’s no urgency — find one place where you’ve been chasing meaning in a particular direction. A relationship, a project, a version of yourself you’ve been working toward. And ask, honestly: did I choose this, or did I inherit it? Is the meaning I’m making here mine, or is it someone else’s — a parent’s, a culture’s, an old story I’ve never stopped to examine?
You don’t have to do anything with the answer. You just have to be willing to see it.
Meaning doesn’t come from finding the right answer. It comes from being honest enough about the question.
Be well.
Nicely done.
Super great essay. For too many years, I lived in the anxiety mode you described, continually searching for the meaning of my life, within in the confines of "accepted meaning" of high-control religion. Discovering that I can create my own meaning frees me from task-oriented meaning, to living in purpose and meaning found in any situation because of who I am and what I bring to it.