I spent most of my early twenties trying to figure out what it all meant. What drives me? Why? Who did I want to be? Why? Did I want this job? Why? Life felt like a rinse and repeat cycle of pursuing difficult experiences, dissecting said experiences with my friends, then coming home to stare at my bedroom ceiling and decide what I thought about all of it. This routine was so persistent that I started ascribing it to my personality — I was an existential person with existential thoughts and I needed to start a Substack to talk about it.
As it turns out, I was just 22. That phase would pass. Eventually I’d be a few years older, feeling like a completely different person and writing about the things I care about instead of the things that confuse me. In transitory phases of life, I think it’s necessary to live messily and go through the motions and pretend you’re the only person in the world concerned with the ‘why’ behind everything. Then one day the mess becomes a story, you start to work things out, and life begins to feel meaningful again.
What constitutes a meaningful life?
We tend to throw around words like ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ quite liberally in the cultural dialogue. We grumble that 21st century life is devoid of meaning, that burnout is caused by a lack of purpose. Every now and then the media goes through a cycle of complaining that our young people lack direction, acting like this is a unique problem of our current era instead of an unavoidable byproduct of being young. I think it’s worth stepping back and articulating what it is we are referencing when we get meta about meaning.
My perspective is this: we engage in a meaningful life when we recognize what fulfills us and take action towards it. This requires a) the self awareness to identify which activities resonate with us and b) the agency to cultivate these sources of fulfillment. Meeting these conditions requires some combination of knowledge, experience, financial freedom, and self belief.
Experiences that feel meaningful to me: traveling with good friends, knowing that we will all feel a little more grown at the end of the trip. Writing an essay and emerging from the process with a better understanding of myself. Engaging with difficult literature that changes how I see the world. I seek to be transformed, and I pursue the experiences that might transform me.
Activities that don’t feel meaningful to me: scrolling for an hour on Instagram. Showing up to an obligatory social commitment when I’m too tired to hold a conversation. Being stuck doing grunt work to meet some metric on someone’s rubric. Killing time in inconsequential ways.
What sticks out to me here is that the experiences that create meaning in my life are not always pleasurable. Traveling with friends can be a struggle, requiring someone to herd the cacophony of group chat threads into an itinerary, someone to compromise on their budget, someone to book the Airbnb and send the Venmo requests. Halfway through the trip, you’re tired, hangry, saying things you don’t mean, one person sleeping in til noon, another coming back from their coffee run before the morning begins. Six months later you’re sitting on the couch together, scrolling through your camera roll and laughing at how silly it was that you hated all these gorgeous photos of yourselves, remembering the fun dinner and the beautiful view and that one inside joke. Writing can also be uncomfortable. To produce good writing I have to be consuming and synthesizing a breadth of information, forcing myself to read a lot, and to read well. Reading well takes practice and a willingness to fight an attention span corroded by social media. But when I manage to jot down the first two paragraphs on the page after sitting with my thoughts all day, or work my way through a Zadie Smith essay full of literary references that are unfamiliar to me, I encounter that familiar sense of meaning, an impression that the effort was worth it, and a desire to do it all over again.
Meaning is something that is cultivated by what we spend time on and how we pay attention to it. Meaning-making requires us to be willing to spend a significant amount of our energy on effortful and novel activities. It takes considerable thought to make a big life change, to engage with a long book, to deepen a friendship. I don’t think I’m articulating a unique sentiment here — though many of us occupy ourselves by mindlessly scrolling or hanging out or doing fake work, I think we all know at heart that how we spend our time determines how fulfilled we feel.
A couple of years ago, I attended a talk by Ken Burns at Fotografiska in New York, where like every other media figure in the internet age, he was asked about the shortening of content and the nation’s waning attention span. He responded:
“Human nature doesn't change. Meaning comes from sustained attention. Even though there is more stuff in the world young people still choose to give sustained attention to things and that gives them their meaning. Meaning accrues in duration. Anything that benefits from that sustained attention will be a good thing. ”
Meaning demands attention. In today’s world of infinite distraction and opportunity, it’s a helpful notion to remember.
—Anita
As always, some music for your time ~ sharing a spring playlist for some almost-April vibes 🍋