This post is third in a series of three articles for artists on "Making Meaning" or "Working Deeply" by writer and creativity coach, Eric Maisel. The series was originally published in his Creativity Newsletter. This one was published August 1, 2006 in Creativity Newsletter # 165
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In this month’s newsletter I wanted to continue our intermittent discussion of the idea of “meaning-making” and the implications of living a life based on the idea of passionately making meaning. I would love your feedback on this month’s piece and I would be pleased to share some of your thoughts in next month’s newsletter.
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Donning the Mantle of Meaning-Maker
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“What man needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” -- Victor Frankl
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It isn’t at all easy to say, “I am a meaning-maker.” First, it sounds a little pompous and arrogant. Who am I to make meaning? How self-important that sounds! Second, it flies in the face of tradition. Most traditions ask you to blend in, serve, and bow to the common will. Third, it isn’t that clear what the phrase means or what you might be agreeing to. For these and other reasons, at least ten of them and each significant, you stop on the threshold of announcing that you are a meaning-maker and take an involuntary step backward. The mantle of meaning-maker is there for you to don but you refuse, consciously or unconsciously objecting.
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TEN OBJECTIONS TO DONNING THE MANTLE
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Let me try to meet your objections one by one. First, here are the ten main objections as a list.
Then we’ll examine each one in turn.
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• Meaning-making is an arrogant idea
• Meaning-making flies in the face of tradition
• Meaning-making is an obscure phrase
• Meaning-making demands too much personal responsibility
• Meaning-making is too much work
• Meaning-making involves too much choosing
• Meaning-making increases core anxiety
• Meaning-making is an invitation to make big mistakes
• Meaning-making guarantees that meaning will never be settled
• Meaning-making is as artificial and subjective an idea as any other idea about meaning
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1. Meaning-making is an arrogant idea
A first objection is that donning the mantle of meaning-maker is somehow an arrogant, pompous, self-important thing to do. At the heart of this objection is a misunderstanding of the difference between standing up for your own cherished beliefs and principles, which you know is not an arrogant thing to do, and acting like you are better than other people, a position you are right to condemn. “I am living by my principles” is not the same thing as “I am better than you are.” Does it feel arrogant to say, “I am living by my principles?” I think it feels exactly the opposite: I think it feels grounded, humble, sincere, and honorable.
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Still, it may feel arrogant. We have so many injunctions against saying “This is what I believe and I wish you wouldn’t try to bully me with your beliefs” that, instead of speaking and acting bravely and sincerely from a place of personal conviction, we retreat to a familiar place of common agreement. Becoming accustomed to that place and feeling safe in that place, taking even a small step into the territory of personal belief feels arrogant and scary. We laugh with the other sophisticated parents about our children’s drinking—only after three of them are killed in a car accident do we say what we believed all along that there was too much drinking going on.
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Yesterday it felt too difficult to say what we knew to be true and today it is easy to say it—but it took a tragedy to unseal our lips. It is not arrogant to speak your truth. It is, however, difficult, and for many reasons. It is difficult, first of all, because it must actually be your truth and not some piety or opinion you are mouthing because it serves you, masks some hatred, avoids responsibility, or in some way pays lip service to principles or ideals while actually only protecting your ego and your self-interest. That is arrogant, to speak as if you were being truthful and feign righteous indignation when in fact you have gone to no deeper, more honorable place than self-interest. Making your own meaning is very different from that, and not arrogant but heroic.
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2. Meaning-making flies in the face of tradition
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A second objection is that to don the mantle of meaning-maker is to break with tradition. Most traditions do indeed point a finger at anyone who announces that he knows what he knows and believes what he believes and you must indeed break with that part of a tradition. Even in a tradition like Zen Buddhism, where a central tenet is that no one should claim more knowledge than anyone else, the very hierarchy that produces Zen Masters supports the unspoken core principle of every institution, that some people are on top and that everyone else should defer to them. So you will need to choose what part of your tradition you can accept—if any.
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We do not like to fly in the face of tradition—the very phrase makes us a little squeamish. Tradition is what we know and it may feel like the glue holding a fragile world together. We say to ourselves, “Yes, it is just a tradition, but no doubt it serves some purpose, so although I don’t really believe in it, I can live with it and, more than that, I need it.” Since donning the mantle of meaning-maker involves choosing where to invest meaning and where to divest meaning, a position that would force you to look at your group’s traditions with a new, more critical eye, and since the possibility of losing those traditions makes you sad, scared, and squeamish, you back off from donning that mantle.
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However the smarter, braver part of you knows that a tradition is only of value if it is of value. It may be your group’s tradition to abort girl fetuses, burn witches at the stake, or damn everyone but members of your group to hell. Even the more innocent-seeming family, community, or religious traditions may exist solely as a function of the ability of some authority (like a father, a President, or a God) to make demands. As an honest person, you know how unrighteous that seems as a reason to honor a tradition. Part of you feels that there is something deeply right about tradition and part of you knows that a given tradition ought to be honored only if it ought to be honored. Be brave and look at your tradition with open eyes. If you must reject it, because you no longer can accept its central tenets, bravely do exactly that. If you wish to retain it, look for the existential thread in your tradition that supports personal meaning-making.
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3. Meaning-making is an obscure phrase
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It is easy to throw up your hands and cry, “I don’t get the idea of meaning-making. How can you make meaning? Either there is meaning or there isn’t. You can’t just make meaning like you can make a car or a violin. No, I don’t get it—so I think I’ll pass!” This objection is at once reasonable and fully disingenuous. It is disingenuous because each of us follows a path of complete mystery already, buying concepts like Holy Spirit, karma, or nirvana without blinking and, more tellingly, knowing in our bones what the phrase “making meaning” signifies. We know perfectly well that it is comprised of ideas like personal responsibility, courage, engagement, and authenticity.
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However, part of the objection is not at all disingenuous. It is the part where we cry out in pain. What we are objecting to is not the obscurity of the phrase but the nature of the universe the phrase posits. We object to a universe where meaning has to be made. We object to a universe that is meaningless until we force it to mean. We object to nature pulling this dirty trick and making us a partner to it, giving us exactly two choices, to not look this reality square in the eye and live as a coward, or to see what is required and live as an absurd hero. It is not the obscurity of the phrase “making meaning” that disturbs us but what it says about life.
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It is hard to meet the objection that we would like life to be other than it is. The way we meet it is with a certain maturity of being, by asking ourselves to face this central reality, that meaning must be made, and all the peripheral realities, that meaning can be lost in the blink of an eye, that meanings change, and all the rest. We understand what this maturity of being feels like and we understand that it is available to us. All we need to do is stand up and embrace it.
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4. Meaning-making demands too much personal responsibility
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How can you smoke two packs a day and claim to be making meaning? How can you kick your dog as a stand-in for your boss and claim to be making meaning? How can you watch television four hours every night when your pet project remains untouched and claim to be making meaning? You can’t—and you know it. As long as you prefer not to take personal responsibility for your life, you will sprint rather than stroll away from the idea of making meaning.
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To protect all the places where we want to abdicate personal responsibility, we create a worldview where personal responsibility is minimized. We cast blame, announce that everything happens for a reason, invoke fate, consult our chart, submit to God’s will. In a host of ways we protect our desire not to take personal responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This is natural—but it does not make us proud. We would love to take that responsibility and make ourselves proud, but we know ourselves too well and doubt that we are equal to the task. We have drifted off too many diets, left too many books unwritten, squandered too many hours, and failed to rise to the occasion more times than we care to remember. Fine. You can leave it at that, remain disappointed in your efforts, and throw in the towel, or you can take a deep breath, locate that place inside of yourself that relishes effort and that takes pride and joy in trying, and cast aside this objection. You can say, “I accept responsibility”—because that is exactly what you’ve always intended.
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5. Meaning-making is too much work
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You want to kick back—you don’t want to make meaning. You want to get the items on your to-do list checked off and be done with work—you don’t want to make meaning after work. You want the company picnic, the Saturday movie, the visit with friends, the things that you do to be just what they are without adding on the taxing matter of whether they are meaningful or not. You don’t want everything you do to come with this added task, of judging its meaningfulness. You don’t want every passing second to come with this added demand, that you invest it with some meaning. Yikes! It makes a person exhausted just thinking about it.
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Fair enough—if you think that ease has value. But no existential person really does, nor do most of the world’s traditions. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, you aren’t offered six Sabbaths and one day of work. It is a tenet of the authentic person to work at the project of life, as that work is life, it is the very way we justify ourselves, create ourselves, and make ourselves proud. It is our obligation and the way we express our love of life. As Ernest Becker put it, “When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we understand the essence of love.”
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We accept that meaning-making is work, but it is the loving work of self-creation. It isn’t slave labor or a life sentence but rather the choice we make about how we intend to live our life. Even if it were slave labor and a life sentence, we might still be able to smile and accept our lot. That is the message in Albert Camus’s famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in which the narrator discovers that he can retain his freedom of attitude even though he is sentenced to an eternity of pushing boulders up a mountain. But, for us, it isn’t slave labor: it is only and exactly the loving work we choose to do to make our life as meaningful as we can possibly make it.
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6. Meaning-making involves too much choosing
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It is a simple truth, though not very well understood, that choosing provokes anxiety. It can—and often does—make us anxious choosing which new car to buy, whether to accept or reject a new suitor, even whether to go for the cereal that tastes good or the cereal that is good for us. To hurry along all of this choosing, so as to get past the feelings of anxiety that attend to each choice, we make snap decisions (and often call that “using our intuition”). Many of our actions in life occur simply because we will do almost anything not to think too hard about the choices in the front of us.
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Given this ubiquitous dynamic, of avoiding choices at all costs, it is natural that we will not want to make meaning, which amounts to making one choice after another until the end of time. If it is hard enough choosing which cereal to buy, how much harder it will be choosing where to invest your meaning minute after minute and day after day! Better to stay with a simple routine, keep your head down and your clothes clean, move another day closer to retirement, and not think too much about meaning. Better anything than a mountain of choosing!
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This is entirely understandable. But it isn’t authentic. Freedom equals choosing: there is no intellectual freedom, no personal freedom, no human freedom without a commitment to lifelong choosing. When a value that means something to you is involved, you must make a choice—or fail yourself by not choosing. When work that means something to you is at stake, you must choose to do it—or fail yourself by not choosing to do it. Yes, you can orchestrate a way of being that minimizes choosing, rather than frankly and forthrightly considering the countless meaning choices that confront you. That would be far easier—only dishonest.
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7. Meaning-making increases core anxiety
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Isn’t our goal to reduce our experience of anxiety, not increase it? If dark tunnels make us anxious, are we really obliged to explore them? Can’t we just avoid them? How you answer this question determines how you will live your life. If you decide that reducing your experience of anxiety is one of your paramount goals and that avoiding experiences that might provoke anxiety is obviously the wise course, then you might as well sit yourself down in front of the bonbons, the pulpit, or the television set right now and wave meaning-making goodbye.
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Our goal is not to reduce our experience of anxiety: our goal is to live authentically. In order to live authentically, we must consciously and completely embrace anxiety. We must invite anxiety. Our system says that this is irrational but our heart knows that it is exactly right. If we intend to make meaning by writing a great novel, we can’t also hope to flee from the experience of anxiety. If we intend to hunt down a life-saving herb in a mosquito-infested jungle, we can’t also hope to flee from the experience of anxiety. If we intend to stand up for a principle that our whole town rejects, we can’t also hope to flee from the experience of anxiety. In order to accomplish these meaning-making tasks, we are obliged to say, “Okay, anxiety. Bring it on!”
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We tend to lose our taste for roller coasters the older we get. At fourteen we can’t wait to get on the Wild Monkey or the Ultimate Plunge. At forty, we can wait. Likewise, our taste for anxiety does not increase. We mind our grandchildren with an even more watchful eye than we minded our children, we move our money to safer investments, we take fewer risks and invite fewer heart palpitations. This is the natural way. And still, in order to live authentically, we must risk anxiety, brave anxiety, embrace anxiety, and invite anxiety every single day. For a meaning-maker, as much as he might wish for one, there is no retirement from anxiety.
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8. Meaning-making is an invitation to make big mistakes
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What is so soothing about seeking meaning, as opposed to making meaning, is that you can’t make a mistake—by definition. You can go off to India for a year, study with a yogi who turns out to be a fraud, get dysentery, and come home poorer and no wiser, and still you get to call your year excellent, because, although you didn’t find any answers, you were a good, honorable seeker. Nothing is a mistake to a seeker—not banding with bigots, not turning your child over to a guru, not chanting things you do not believe—because every such sin gets washed away in the warm water of innocence in which the seeker fancies himself bathing. A meaning-maker is not so self-servingly innocent. He knows that the thing he is about to embark on may prove a mistake: he owns up to that possibility. He recognizes that he does not need to locate principles and values, that he has them already, and that if he violates them he is making a mistake by his own lights. He doesn’t get to say “I didn’t know,” “I didn’t understand,” and “I was just following.” He knows better than that and is more truthful than that.
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It is not only all right to invite in the possibility of making mistakes, it is the honorable thing to do. Fearing mistakes is a sure road to smallness. To not make a large meaning investment in fighting some injustice because you fear that your time may be wasted, that others may fail you, that others may turn on you, or that it may prove some other sort of “mistake,” is to end up not fighting that injustice and not making meaning. You avoided the “mistake”—but at what cost? Better to accept that life comes with countless missteps, wrong turns, and dead ends. Our desire to don the mantle of meaning-maker should not be extinguished because we fear pratfalls.
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9. Meaning-making guarantees that meaning will never be settled
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When we think about the sort of task that meaning-making is, we conclude—rightly—that our meanings are bound to change as we decide to invest meaning here, remove meaning there, and carefully monitor our meaning investments. How unsettling to be for a war one day and against it the next, as our subjective sense of the war’s meaning changes, or against it one day and for it the next. We know in our bones that these are among the worst sorts of feelings, having our sense of the world turned completely upside down overnight.
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We do not want this—which is why people adopt overarching positions, like always being for their country’s war or always being against their country’s war, so that they can avoid having their meaning equilibrium disturbed. If you fear that meaning will never be settled if you agree to don the mantle of meaning-maker, you are exactly right. You will have opened yourself up to some of the worst feelings imaginable, including feelings of foolishness and despair. But what you lose in safety, you gain in righteousness.
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You can live a settled life, existentially speaking, but only at the cost of your authenticity and integrity. It is really much better, albeit more dangerous, to accept that meaning will never be settled, that meaning is always at risk, that meaning is a problem and a challenge and not a foregone conclusion. Agreeing to this is like agreeing to live in a place like Los Angeles or San Francisco, where small earthquakes occur regularly and the big one is a real threat. It is to agree to earthquakes. There is no reason why you should do this with a smile and no reason why you feel sanguine about surviving all this tumult. It is simply the right course, as to settle meaning for all time is to kill the self.
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10. Meaning-making is as artificial and subjective an idea as any other idea about meaning
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It is quite correct to argue that meaning-making is just an idea and no more valid, true, verifiable, or interesting than other ways of construing life. Maybe there are seventy-five gods, all squabbling, and our best bet is to try to appease them. Maybe greed, ambition, and satisfaction are the answers and the goals of life are to make millions and to sleep with lots of sexy partners. There is no lack of constructions: in fact, there are billions, one for each person. That is exactly the point.
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The philosophical tradition known alternately as structuralism and postmodernism has explored this territory with great energy and perversely difficult language. In one of its less obscure passages, the French structuralist Jean Baudrillard opined, “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” This is Baudrillard’s way of saying that, since the contemporary person has “seen through” the idea of absolute meaning, he is left with billions of meanings, all equally fragile, all equally subjective, all equally fugitive. That is true.
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To say that meaning-making is artificial and subjective is only to say that whatever you choose to believe has the built-in flaw of not being “the absolute truth.” You can’t get around this problem, except by asserting that there is absolute truth. Therefore it is no greater risk to nominate yourself as the sole arbiter of meaning than to take any other position with respect to meaning. That meaning-making is an arbitrary way of naming your life’s path amounts to no objection at all and is entirely met in the following way: “Yes, that’s right.”
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IN THE TRADITIONS
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Throughout human history a majority of people have believed in some sort of divine presence. Many people today still ardently believe in a concept of the divine. Even if you do not want to abandon your religious or spiritual beliefs, there is still ample reason for you to decide to create your own meaning. Teachers in each of great traditions have argued that personal meaning-making in fact demonstrates a believer’s genuine, heartfelt desire to be involved in the world and to take God and life’s mysteries seriously. As the presence of God is a matter of faith and faith provides a background coloration but nothing as simple as a blueprint to follow, you must take it upon yourself to make the meaning in your life.In the Catholic tradition, for instance, Saint Augustine asks believers to don the mantle of meaning-maker in the following passage: Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.
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St. Augustine demands that you actively participate in your life as a dedicated meaning-maker. Not only must you do the work of life and not shirk doing that work, you must figure out what that work is. Even if God has a plan for you, you are not privy to that plan, and so you must operate for all intents and purposes as if you are constructing the plan of your life, in the hope that God’s hand is guiding your personal meaning-making. If you wait for whispers and signs, you may be getting that whisper and that sign from below and not from above. Better to think through where you want to be good, productive, and righteous and invest your meaning there, trusting that God has placed his hand on your shoulder as you made your own choices.
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In the Islamic tradition, it is written in the Koran: “God does not compel a soul To do what is beyond its capacity: It gets what it has earned, And is responsible for what it deserves.”
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This excerpt from the Koran is relevant to our discussion because it reiterates in no uncertain terms that a believer must take responsibility for his actions. You cannot use a divine presence as an excuse or a scapegoat: you earn your righteousness and must think through, and then take responsibility for, your meaning choices. It also addresses the objection that meaning-making is too much work. The Koran articulates great faith in the individual, assuring each one of us that we are capable of doing the work that our meaning intentions lay out for us.
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In the Hindu tradition, widely held to be the most pluralistic of the major world religions, the Hindu Saint Ramakrishna explained, “Let each man follow his own path. If he sincerely and ardently wishes to know God, peace be unto him! He will surely reach Him.” Ramakrishna, a teacher believed to have attained Enlightenment, announces with no hedging that there is no external power who is making decisions about what is the “right thing” to dedicate yourself to and no single way to make meaning. Any activity can become meaningful to you when you decide that it should be so—and will take you in the direction you hope to go, that of meaning and righteousness.
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To the lingering question always posed to existentialists, “Well, what if I decide to invest meaning in kicking puppies and eating babies?”, Ramakrishna is again clear: all will be well “if he sincerely and ardently wishes to know God.” That is, all will be well if you sincerely and ardently put into play your best principles and highest moral sense. Creating pain and suffering in puppies and babies is not likely to strike you as positive and so you would foreswear those activities, because your moral sense is built right into you. When you actively make meaning, you are tuning in to that moral sense. You do not have to worry that personal meaning-making will lead to your immorality, unless you fear that you are intrinsically immoral or inherently unable to tell a right thing from a wrong thing.
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In the Buddhist tradition, the following passage from the Buddha (in the Kalama Sutta) is telling:“Yes, Kalamas, it is proper that you have doubt, that you have perplexity, for a doubt has arisen in a matter which is doubtful. Now, look you Kalamas, do not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay…. But, O Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome and wrong, and bad, then give them up... and when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them.”
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The Buddha puts it simply and clearly: You must decide for yourself what you want to believe and where you want to invest meaning, and then you must commit to what you have chosen. The work you choose will not be beyond you; as the excerpt from the Koran insisted, you have been given the capacity to sufficiently choose and commit. Nor should you be afraid of taking a wrong step, because, as Ramakrishna explained, any path has the potential to be the right path. Yes, you will be uncertain at times. Yes, there will come moments when you need to reevaluate your individual meaning investments.
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But the existential threads in every tradition suggest that you have faith that what you choose for yourself is right for you and that you have the ability to accomplish the arduous work of personal meaning-making. It may be scary, but this cycle of committing yourself and reevaluating your commitments is, according to every tradition, living!
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DONNING THE MANTLE
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If you want to don the mantle of meaning-maker but feel reluctant, one or more of these objections are likely at play—and maybe all ten of them. These are worrisome objections and it is perfectly understandable that you might find yourself unwilling to set off on a course of constant choosing, earthquake meaning shifts, unmitigated personal responsibility, and all the rest. Still, you know your own truth. Isn’t this the path you always envisioned for yourself?
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If it is, you might try to meet these ten objections one by one, simply and forthrightly, in your own language. This is how I might meet them. What arguments or language would you use?
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• Meaning-making is an arrogant idea
.......“I am just living as I see fit.”
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• Meaning-making flies in the face of tradition
.......“Yes, it does.”
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• Meaning-making is an obscure phrase
.......“No, I understand what it means.”
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• Meaning-making demands too much personal responsibility
.......“No, being responsible appeals to me.”
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• Meaning-making is too much work
.......“Yes, it is a lot of work, but it is the right work and the only work.”
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• Meaning-making involves too much choosing
.......“It does! I don’t know if I am equal to all this choosing—I can only try.”
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• Meaning-making increases core anxiety
.......“It does and it doesn’t. In a way, it actually reduces it.”
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• Meaning-making is an invitation to make big mistakes
.......“Yes, it is, I suppose.”
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• Meaning-making guarantees that meaning will never be settled
.......“I always knew that about life.”
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• Meaning-making is as artificial and subjective an idea as any other idea about meaning
......."Of course it is. And I embrace it as the way that makes the most sense to me.”
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If I have met your objections—or if you have met your own objections—it is time to don the mantle of meaning-maker. You can do this by saying out loud, “I am a meaning maker, with all that entails.” You might make your commitment more real by going out and purchasing some absurd garment, donning it, and feeling different. You might make your commitment more real by walking up to people and, by way of introduction, announcing, “I make my meaning!” Or you might do nothing fanciful: you might just stand up.
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That is the essential action and the essential position.
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© Eric Maisel, 2006. All rights reserved.
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Eric Maisel is also the author of many books on creativity. Information about them is available:
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A listing of creativity books by other authors recommended by Eric Maisel is available:
