Meaning in life

We can’t all be Shakespeare or Kanye West or Bill Gates or Barack Obama or Einstein or Kobe Bryant or Martha Stewart. But we can all be great people.

We all want to be important. It’s a deep need we feel. We want to be an individual, we want to know that we matter, that we are seen and not forgotten. But seen by who? Important to who? How do you get that? If value is a product of being valued, then who is it that we’re chasing, expecting to capture that value?

Is it ourselves? I propose that there is never enough value and importance you can capture from yourself to satisfy yourself. You were already the most important person in the world to you. And whatever great heights you achieve, you’re still you and feel like you. So who then? What people do you need to be seen and recognized by to feel important? How many of them? How do you become important enough to someone to feel like you matter enough to yourself to be happy?

You can die as the most significant person in the world, known to millions, having changed history, and not have been important enough to anyone to actually have anyone who would shed a tear at your graveside or feel your loss personally. And often those who chase those heights have to sacrifice a lot along the way. If meaning and value are only for those who rise to the greatest visibility, then the majority of all humanity is screwed, lost in a pointless scramble to reach the top.

There are seven billion people in the world. Are you really going to bet your happiness in life and your existential worth on you somehow mattering enough for them to care about you and your story? Who are you to them? Most people have a hard enough time really caring about or even seeing anyone beyond themselves. You’ve got seven billion competitors who are just as human as you, and people being born and people dying every minute. Why should they see you? And even if they do, in such a sea of humanity, how long can you expect that to last? Long enough to build the meaning of your life on? Those five minutes of fame pass quickly.

The only real human society that matters, that sticks with you and provides durable meaning, is the actual network of people you touch, that are close to you. If the people who were close to you don’t know you and value you and care for you, and if they never felt your care for and investment in them, you’re a nobody. You’re faceless. You’ve missed out on the most basic level of human value that is available to everyone.

Extremes are worth considering, how the greatest celebrity can feel lonely and empty, and how the lowest menial worker can feel important and fulfilled. But most of us live somewhere in the middle. We’re not really trying to make the list of most influential people in the world. We just want to be more than what we are. So the really relevant question is, how do we do that? What’s the best way? And if we are feeling at a very low ebb, a very low value, how do we begin to climb, when what we desire might seem so far off?

The real foundation of value isn’t to matter to everyone. It’s to matter to someone. Get a job and do well at it. It doesn’t really matter that much what job. It’s a foundation. Just find a job where you can do well and matter to someone. Find a family, or invest in the one you have. That’s a pre-made resource for finding people to whom you can matter. Friends and neighbors are an option, if you have the opoortunity and inclination and space in your life. A church or other social group. You don’t have to matter to everyone, or be the most important person in a place. You just need to find a space where you matter to someone. And that’s a foundation for a life.

What you build on that foundation is up to you. But so many people make the mistake of thinking that the quickest way to value, to a home, is to just start stacking frames on top of each other to reach the highest point possible. Tall towers with shallow foundations fall easily. And a house built on a deep foundation may not rise as high, but it can endure the storms and the centuries and provide a place of meaning and value and significance for you and for others for ages to come.

Great lives provide places of meaning and comfort and protection and inspiration and watering for those around them and those inside them. But however small our lives may seem, we can create that place and find people to bring inside it. And however amazing and cathedral-like and extensive our lives may seem, we can fail to fill that space with anyone, and it can be hollow. Your house can be just as valued by the people within it as the greatest castle of a life, and feel warmer and more intimate if those people are close to you and known to you. And it can endure and keep providing a place of value and consequence for long after you’re gone, if the foundations are deep.

Value isn’t about the work you do. It’s about who you do the work for. Because value only comes from being valued by someone. The value of work done only for yourself is fleeting, because that kind of value is static and is subject to mood, dependent on your own feelings about yourself. But work done for someone or something you love and care about is work that matters and endures and forces you to recognize your value even when you won’t. Even the smallest work rendered to God, to your highest conception of truth and goodness, has infinitely precious value. The question to ask yourself is, what is a truly stable container for my value? Is it your work colleagues? Your high school friends? Society? God? The universe? Your family? Your parents or children? Your friends on social media? Who is it you’re working to impress and be valued by? And who is a stable source and container for that value? And how can you best invest to gain it in them?

A final note on anti-fragility. Life is hard. Life is unpredictable. In fact if there is one thing you can predict, it’s that you’re going to face difficulties, disappointments, and tragedy. At the very least, you and everyone you care about will suffer the tragedy of death. And however late it is in coming, it is always an unwelcome guest. The world will test whatever you try to build in it. Storms will come against the walls of the sheltered garden you build. It’s only a question of when and how big. No engineer builds a dam with the assumption that no floods will ever occur, the questions they ask when designing it are how big, and when. The floods will come.

Whatever you seek to build, it must be at least well founded enough at a fundamental level that a wind that knocks the roof off won’t bring down the whole structure. A life that is dependent on everything going perfectly and achieving everything you hope for is a life that’s fundamentally at the mercy of circumstance. It’s fragile, no matter how impressive it looks.

You may not have time in life to accomplish everything you planned and needed to achieve value. You might get injured or miss your opportunities. You might get sick or suffer a crippling loss. You might get distracted or be forgetful or lazy. You might have your just rewards stolen or ignored. You might do everything right and then lose it all through a random twist of fate (the current pandemic is certainly a good example of that). And the chances that you will do everything right and will do everything you could in life are pretty slim.

Your value in life can’t be dependent on either you doing everything perfectly or on the world doing everything perfectly for you. Both circumstances and yourself are going to disappoint you. How are you ever going to be important enough to make your life have meaning and your value have substance if the whole construction is dependent on things going the way you planned?

This has to be a fundamental concern in our approach to how we build our lives and their value and our importance and how we secure those existential goods that we need to keep going and find meaning in life. We may not be able to impress the world. We may not be able to change it. We may not be able to do a lot of things that we wish we could and feel that we need to to have a life worth being grateful for and happy with. We need a foundation that can endure some storms and some building problems. If we want to build something worth remembering, something likely to last, something to leave behind, to transfer value into the future and to the lives of others.

The question that we have to answer when we seek to build our value is, how will it survive, how will you survive, if the world and yourself turn out to be less than you had hoped? How much of what you have built will still be standing after the floodwaters rise against it? How much of you will still stand after a defeat? What percentage of your peace and happiness will still be there? How much can you truly hold on to during a flood? How much can be rebuilt in the time you have if everything but the foundations goes?