8/23/2025
There has been a lot of thought about what "meaning" means and how to find it, perhaps because I'm in a new country, in a new city with new people, and with the feeling that there's not much to do and yet everything to do.
There's this latent sense of business that is building up in the mind. I need to go to this event, I need to practice Spanish, what if I miss out on meeting interesting people? Why have I been wasting my time without learning anything?
This wandering mindset, and lack of direction brings me back to freshman Philosophy class, when we read Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. What I think Frankl was saying is that our "meaning" is the answer to the question, "What do we live for?" And recently, I'd forgotten there was a satisfactory answer.
Over a spontaneous Friday-night pizza and delicious drapings of ham, cheese, and olives, I posed this question to Yvonne, a career transition coach who I'd met earlier that day at a beachside coworking space full of fellow wanderers.
It struck me that when she answered, Yvonne expressed many of the same doubts I felt. These doubts originated late last year, when I found myself alone in the southern hemisphere, without a clear goal for the first time in years, reading a book about consciousness that made me more curious about reality. Like me, she realized that any answer we could have to the question, "What should I live for?" is a thought we choose to go along with.
When I realized this, I questioned why it makes sense to go in one direction rather than another. The previous identity that I thought I had shriveled because it was structured around goals I no longer took for granted. In other words, my previous sense of meaning was no longer meaningful, and part of me mourned it.
Her answer was also strikingly similar to mine: "To explore," she said. "To see what it's like," "To experience as many ways of living as possible."
I'd been satisfied with this answer originally because it admits doubt. It implicitly asks, "What if I'm wrong that there is no True meaning?" Only one way to find out… see the ways other people live, and maybe I'll find one to be meaningful!
But of course, no matter what answer you find, one could keep on asking, "Why do that?" indefinitely. Then, you're right back where you started.
To avoid this trap of continually doubting the story we tell ourselves about why to live (which I have spent an embarrassing amount of time doing), I believe a more empowering way to answer this question is non-verbal.
In a recent podcast I poked into, Seth Godin, a thought leader on human psychology (in the medium of marketing and business), described a study he did on how people find meaning. He asked people what the best periods of their career were and why, and found that most people cited the same thing: They felt the best when they thought they did good work and that they were appreciated by those around them.
Although Godin posed this question regarding career, I believe that it is applicable to all facets of our lives.
From this study, it appears that we gain meaning when others give us positive feedback, and when our actions align with our internal model of quality. Curiously, this definition of meaning aligns almost exactly with my favorite definition of productivity, developed by Cal Newport: producing work that we think is good and/or that is perceived as good by others. According to Newport, finding this 'productivity' is sufficient for living a meaningful life.
In my own experience, too, when I look back at the other times of my life when I lacked a sense of purpose, it was often when there was no tight feedback loop between what I was producing and getting feedback on it, or when I was producing something that did not meet my standards.
Truth be told, this is not the first time that I have heard, or believed in this philosophy of life. Yet it has resurfaced in yet another form, and it feels fresh. As I wander, lost in the world, it reminds me that I'm not lost in my method of wandering. It begs me to slow down, look around, and enjoy the process.
Notes:
1. This understanding of human motivation -- we're motivated by internal and external measures of quality -- might be a better explanation for why startups that spend more time talking to users are successful: Maybe it's not that they gain more insights than founders who do research on their own, but that they are more motivated because they see that they mean something to others. Therefore, when they face setbacks, they are more likely to keep forging ahead. This forging ahead, in turn means that more of them will be successful.
2. This understanding of meaning might also explain why extraverts tend to have a better sense of wellbeing on average: They are more likely to share their work with others, and therefore get a boost in meaning from the praise of those around them.
3. I have a couple explicit actionable takeaways from this contemplation: I'd like to try harder in order to satisfy my internal model of quality, and take extra effort to make that work known to others. I'd also like to go out of my way to try to appreciate the work of others. This has been non-intuitive for me because I'd never been taught to do that.