Meaning is a Question Asked of Us

Further to the crisis of meaning discussed in my previous post…

Not only are young adults (at least in the West) not making enough babies, they’re incredibly anxious. Over the course of at least the last decade or so, a mental health crisis has washed/is washing over younger generations. According to a recent survey, “38 percent of respondents aged 12 to 26 had received a formal diagnosis of anxiety or depression” (29 percent of young men, 45 percent of young women). Further, “even among those who have not received a diagnosis, about half say they often feel anxious; a quarter say they often feel depressed.” The young, clearly, are not well.

Why? Well, we know the reasons, right? It’s the addiction to the phones, it’s the ubiquity of social media, it’s the soul-crushing endless moral sorting and comparing and performing and identity warfare. It’s the laying waste of attention spans by hungry algorithms doling out dopamine, reliably serving up content that makes consumers outraged, afraid, or both. It’s this whole gross cocktail (and more) being navigated by young brains that are very much still in formation, that don’t even remotely have the maturity or wisdom to handle it all, and that are often trying to make their way in deeply unstable family systems and chaotic social and political realities.

And swirling around and above all this is a deep crisis of meaning. Arthur Brooks writes about this in an ambitiously titled piece in The Atlantic called “A Cure for Our Anxious Young People.” He is singing a similar tune to Christine Emba, whose article I referred to the previous post:

I believe a deeper philosophical problem affects the lives of young people today as well, and of many people who are no longer young. Folks lack a sense of meaning; they don’t feel they know the “why” of their lives. Worse, evidence suggests that they’re not even looking for it, nor are we encouraging them to do so. This creates a feeling of hollowness and futility, especially when times are inevitably rough, and that encourages a culture that strives to provide a sense of security that is doomed to prove false and can only make the problem worse.

At this point, many of us are likely thinking, “Well, yeah, obviously. I see this all around me. What’s this ‘cure’ your headline promises?” According to Brooks, we need to break down the big question of “what is the meaning of life?” into more manageable categories. He suggests three:

• Why do things happen the way they do?
• What are my goals in life?
• Why does it matter that I am alive?

Ok, fair enough. These are good questions for anyone (young or old) to be asking. But what if, as seems to be the case with many young people, the answers to each of these questions seems to be a resounding, “meh?” What if, for many, the answers are, in order, “Who knows,” “I dunno” and “It probably doesn’t?” Reframing the meaning question of meaning might provide a bit of categorical clarity, and it might help some young adults take a few positive steps away from anxiety and toward meaning, but it would still seem to fall far short of anything resembling a cure.

At this point, Brooks gestures in a promising direction. Refencing Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he says, “Try putting yourself not in the position of the asker but of the asked.” Or, as Frankl himself put it:

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”

Well, yes and amen. But Brooks almost immediately goes astray, it seems to me. No sooner has he said that we should consider the possibility that our very existence asks questions of us as human beings and that it may not just about the sovereign individual selecting private meanings that work for them in their mental health journey, he’s back to urging us to arrive at “your own right answers,” creating and accomplishing significant tasks, experiencing something fully or loving someone deeply, and adopting an “attitude of strength and courage toward unavoidable suffering.” Leaving aside the problem that each of those exhortations has some assumptions about meaning already embedded within them, and that a great many people would find them monumentally challenging, we’re right back to creating meaning for ourselves.

What would it look like to actually consider the possibility that it is we who are addressed by something (or Someone) outside of ourselves? Well, at the very least I think it would involve asking questions like,

• Why do we long for justice and goodness? Are these real or just something we made up for ourselves?
• What is the nature of beauty? Why do we long for it?
• What could account for the human impulse toward spirituality?
• Why do we operate best in community?
• What is the nature of belonging and identity and why does it stand at the centre of so much of what drives us, however imperfectly?
• What kind of a story could address and explain our persistent shortcomings, our longing for forgiveness, redemption, healing, and for a hope beyond what we can secure for ourselves?
• What is love? What might it demand of me?
• Will I be judged? According to what standard? By whom?
• Is there any way of living and thinking in the world which addresses these questions (and others) in a way that coheres?

These are obviously huge questions. Others could be included. But it seems to me that one thing that is desperately necessary in our time is to dislodge the individual self from the centre of the story. This is part of what is making us so desperately unwell. So many seem to believe that meaning is something they must create for themselves rather than something that preceded them, will outlive them, and to which they are invited to respond. Worse, as I’ve alluded to, the question of meaning is too often slotted into a supplementary role in the broader (and, we imagine, more important) story of our own private mental health journeys. This is entirely backward (at best).

We are made for meaning—to need it, to seek it, to flounder in its absence. It is not something we might consider to augment our mental health, like taking a walk or keeping a gratitude journal. As a friend recently put it in conversation, “meaning—if it is to be durable and actually meaningful—cannot be a self-construction for therapeutic ends.” Meaning is the existential quest that has animated humanity for as long we have been around. It is the deep question that is asked of each one of us, upon which our very lives depend.

Image source.