IV.
(this is actually the fourth and final section of this blog - but it’s also the most important part, so I am putting it a the very top - despite being out of order - you can scroll down and read everything in its proper order if you prefer)
With all of that in mind, here is how I try to increase meaning:
Experience as much as I can with others, who are feeling the same excitement. I once spent five consecutive years living in a new city each year, including on three different continents, and solo-travelled for, cumulatively, more than a year. And because almost all of this was experienced alone, or with people I only knew for a short time and don’t actively stay in contact with, almost all of these memories are lost.
Integrate important memories into my life. Don’t just wait until later: actively take notes on what you experienced, create documentation of it, buy souvenirs of important memories, talk about it with the people you experienced it with. Taking more photos is underrated. The right answer is probably to have something like ten digital photo frames around your home, each circulating photos from different eras or kinds of memories. If you don’t have a digital photo frame, it’s probably the easiest single thing you can do today to add meaning to your life.
Make memories more memorable. Instead of a stale party, make it themed. Instead of hosting friends for dinner, host a tasting: buy five pistachio ice creams and rank them. The point is to make something that stands out in your mind and can be referenced again.
Connect the thing you’re doing to something grander. Don’t just read a random book; read all of Tolstoy’s novels. Don’t just put on a Grateful Dead show; listen to all of the shows from 1977. Go to each restaurant on your street, or one restaurant for the cuisine of each Asian country. If you’re going to watch a movie, make it connected: watch all of a director’s films, or the best films of 1997. The thing no longer stands on its own and can be remembered in some broader context.
Create more constraints, so not everything is subject to unlimited choice. Go to more places that feel different, but more than that, go to them and act differently. Don’t work remotely from everywhere while checking your phone constantly. Go somewhere where you only watch old movies on the VHS, where you only eat seafood, where you dance every day, or where you sleep in a tent. Most Friday nights and Saturday mornings I go without my phone or the internet. Every weekend, my fiancée and I spend three or more hours on our carpet drinking tea and just talking. We’ll frequently lie on the carpet and listen to a whole album front to back in silence, with full attention. All of these are attempts to carve out time that feels different from the rest of the week.
Do more things that grow and require effort. Instead of reading the book you’ll forget tomorrow, read the great work that may have an impact on you — push yourself to do something hard.
Go out of your way to support, encourage, raise the ambition, or add value to the people you care about, or people you think are doing great work. The second most meaningful memory for me this year (after getting engaged) was giving what is objectively a very small grant to three smart and ambitious university students, then offering to connect them with anyone in my network, and seeing how happy it made them and how much it impacted them. It’s often remarkably easy and cheap to add significant value to other people’s lives by encouraging them or connecting them with others, and it often leaves you feeling just as good as they do.
Add as many rituals as you can. Rituals help make the routine things you do feel special and part of something grander. This could be singing a particular song before eating a food you love, using a special bowl, or setting certain rules for how you do something. Each time you do a ritual, it’s a clear reminder of what you’re doing, and it makes it feel special and important — and it helps incorporate the Twin Peaks advice: “Every day, once a day, give yourself a present.” I remember every single Yom Kippur, but few other days. Something about fasting, walking in the crisp autumn weather, and eating the same food each time makes the day stand out in my mind more than others.
I.
I spend a lot of time reflecting on meaning. It’s one of the things in life I value the most, and it’s something I think a lot of people underrate, and could actively increase in their own lives.
Every month, three internet friends and I get together to discuss a recent article we found interesting (we call it article club). I’m bad at following rules, so when it was my turn last month, I instead suggested a guided discussion on the topic of meaning. Afterwards I wrote down my personal notes, and I wanted to share them in a very loose form, as a framework for how I think about (and manufacture) meaning in my own life.
The three articles I shared with the group were:
Thoughts on Meaning and Writing by Matt Lakeman
What Do We Mean by Meaning? also by Matt Lakeman, just kidding - by Scott Sumner
What I didn’t share, because I’m a coward, were the two pieces I wrote that made me think most about meaning: what Tea Leaf Green had but JRAD doesn’t and Eric Rohmer’s August and the flattening of temporal and spatial distinctiveness.
Matt’s piece is his personal heuristic for meaning: try to live a life that could be written up as a bullet-point list, like the Wikipedia pages of Steve Bannon or Arnold Schwarzenegger. In practice, that means doing things that will form a memory you can look back upon. His second piece then clarifies that it should be the good kind of memorable, not like living 1.5 years on a deserted island clubbing seals all day. Scott Sumner takes the view that meaning, to him, is time spent consuming art, and everything else in life is just a way to get more time to immerse himself in it.
I am sharing my notes from the evening after our article club finished.
II.
To me, meaning is not just fun or pleasure, but something grander. It’s the concert that feels special and not necessarily the one that was the most fun to be at. It’s the difference between what is ephemeral and what becomes a memory.
I think meaning is built from continuity between the past, present, and future. The thing you’re doing will be referenced again, rather than being a one-off. This is not just about remembering it later. It’s the expectation, while you’re actually doing the thing, that you and the people around you will remember it, that you all, collectively, care about it. If there aren’t other people around you experiencing what you’re going through, if they don’t share the same excitement, then no matter how “special” what you’re involved in is, it won’t feel special.
Meaning increases when there is a sense of growth, of building towards something, when you feel a purpose and are excited about where the thing you’re doing is going.
Meaning increases with novelty, but it also increases with familiarity. You need both. You need the cottage you’ve been to every year of your life, the people you’ve spent 1,000 (or 10,000 hours) with, but also new environments, new adventures, new goals. You can’t always stay in the same place with the same people, but the opposite doesn’t work either: when I started travelling so much, each place felt the same and empty.
One of the biggest impediments to meaning is how, in modern life, everything starts to feel the same. Physical spaces now all resemble each other, and the time we spend on the internet, on the same devices in every one of those spaces, causes a flattening of space and time. Each moment, each day, and each place blurs into the next, so we don’t form distinct memories.
On average, people probably remember and reference the memories they have from ages 14 to 18 a bazillion times more than those from 24 to 28, and I doubt that’s because fewer enjoyable things happened in the later years.
I am very struck by these two Knausgaard quotes:
“You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning... The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.”
“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it... Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.”
At 15, everything you do is with other people, who are then also there to reminisce about everything that happened. There is more novelty, because most of what you’re doing, you’re doing for the first time. Everything you do feels like you’re growing, building towards something and has purpose. And you have much less control over your life, so there are more constraints on you, which makes each thing you do more different from the next. At 15 this all happens without intention. But as an adult, you need to manufacture it — and I think most people don’t even realize this is something they can control.
III.
I’ve read a lot of books about groups of people who get stranded somewhere and need to dedicate all their resources to surviving and getting home, or who are eg racing to be the first to reach the South Pole. On their journeys, their lives have so much meaning that it oozes out of them. But when they succeed or finally make it home, the rest of their lives are sad, because they can never replicate the intensity of what they felt during that time.
A milder version happens when someone decides to run a marathon or race a triathlon (or create a start-up). They feel a great sense of meaning: novelty, purpose, hard work, something to be excited about, the feeling of progress, and often a group to share it with. It really does have meaning. It’s a way to experience what meaning really feels like.
But for most people, this source of meaning isn’t sustainable, because you can’t keep growing forever. Eventually there’s no more novelty and no more progress. And once you can’t dedicate an increasing amount of time and keep up the paces you once did, the feeling is gone and you no longer want to run or race. This is not what you want in life.
Something sad is that at some point, friend groups go from creation mode to maintenance mode to recollection mode, where no new memories are created and the group only exists to reminisce about old times. It reminds me of Phish, my favourite band, who broke up in 2004 and got back together in 2009. They’ve now been back together for as much time as they existed in their original incarnation, but the band and fans still almost entirely live off memories from the first incarnation of its career, as if their post-2009 life was something only to be experienced, but not remembered. This is really tough, because the ability to create new memories that you actually reference shouldn’t have to fade after you graduate from school.
IV.
With all of that in mind, here is how I try to increase meaning:
Experience as much as I can with others, who are feeling the same excitement. I once spent five consecutive years living in a new city each year, including on three different continents, and solo-travelled for, cumulatively, more than a year. And because almost all of this was experienced alone, or with people I only knew for a short time and don’t actively stay in contact with, almost all of these memories are lost.
Integrate important memories into my life. Don’t just wait until later: actively take notes on what you experienced, create documentation of it, buy souvenirs of important memories, talk about it with the people you experienced it with. Taking more photos is underrated. The right answer is probably to have something like ten digital photo frames around your home, each circulating photos from different eras or kinds of memories. If you don’t have a digital photo frame, it’s probably the easiest single thing you can do today to add meaning to your life.
Make memories more memorable. Instead of a stale party, make it themed. Instead of hosting friends for dinner, host a tasting: buy five pistachio ice creams and rank them. The point is to make something that stands out in your mind and can be referenced again.
Connect the thing you’re doing to something grander. Don’t just read a random book; read all of Tolstoy’s novels. Don’t just put on a Grateful Dead show; listen to all of the shows from 1977. Go to each restaurant on your street, or one restaurant for the cuisine of each Asian country. If you’re going to watch a movie, make it connected: watch all of a director’s films, or the best films of 1997. The thing no longer stands on its own and can be remembered in some broader context.
Create more constraints, so not everything is subject to unlimited choice. Go to more places that feel different, but more than that, go to them and act differently. Don’t work remotely from everywhere while checking your phone constantly. Go somewhere where you only watch old movies on the VHS, where you only eat seafood, where you dance every day, or where you sleep in a tent. Most Friday nights and Saturday mornings I go without my phone or the internet. Every weekend, my fiancée and I spend three or more hours on our carpet drinking tea and just talking. We’ll frequently lie on the carpet and listen to a whole album front to back in silence, with full attention. All of these are attempts to carve out time that feels different from the rest of the week.
Do more things that grow and require effort. Instead of reading the book you’ll forget tomorrow, read the great work that may have an impact on you — push yourself to do something hard.
Go out of your way to support, encourage, raise the ambition, or add value to the people you care about, or people you think are doing great work. The second most meaningful memory for me this year (after getting engaged) was giving what is objectively a very small grant to three smart and ambitious university students, then offering to connect them with anyone in my network, and seeing how happy it made them and how much it impacted them. It’s often remarkably easy and cheap to add significant value to other people’s lives by encouraging them or connecting them with others, and it often leaves you feeling just as good as they do.
Add as many rituals as you can. Rituals help make the routine things you do feel special and part of something grander. This could be singing a particular song before eating a food you love, using a body movement to signify its beginning, or setting certain rules for how you do something. Each time you do a ritual, it’s a clear reminder of what you’re doing, and it makes it feel special and important — and it helps incorporate the Twin Peaks advice: “Every day, once a day, give yourself a present.” I remember every single Yom Kippur, but few other days. Something about fasting, walking in the crisp autumn weather, and eating the same food each time makes the day stand out in my mind more than others.
Make each Friday feel like Friday, each August feel like August, and each moment feel distinct.