Why the Language You Use Matters
An Excerpt from Life Purpose Boot Camp by Eric Maisel
Many folks also have given little or no thought to the language they use to discuss meaning with themselves. People typically get stymied trying to answer the question, “What would it be meaningful to do next?” because it is the wrong question to ask. Embedded in that question is the idea that the experience of meaning can be guaranteed. The logic of such a sentence is, “Certain things are meaningful, so let me choose one and get me some meaning.”
But nothing is necessarily meaningful. Playing with your infant child might feel tremendously meaningful one day and more like a chore the next day. Working on your novel might feel poignantly meaningful today and completely pointless tomorrow. Your teaching job might feel meaningful during your first five years of teaching and empty and burdensome in your twentieth. “What would it be meaningful to do?” has an implicit guarantee built into it that life can’t possibly meet.
That’s why in natural psychology we use two phrases, meaning opportunities and meaning investments, to help avoid even a whiff of that guarantee. We paint a different picture of meaning. Meaning is something we can aim for and try to create by investing our time, energy, and human resources in a given effort, activity, initiative, or way of being. It is also something that we can wish for by seizing some meaning opportunity, crossing our fingers, and hoping for the best. By making meaning investments and by seizing meaning opportunities we actively organize our day around making meaning.
To get to this evolved understanding, that you can hope for meaning and try to make meaning but not guarantee meaning, you may have to change your beliefs, move to a place of acceptance and surrender about the human condition, and heal a lot of regret that it has taken you so long to reach this understanding. There will still be necessary elaborations, refinements, and steps to take. But that is a wonderful starting place: arriving at the understanding that meaning is a psychological experience, that it comes and goes, that it is less important than your life purposes and your values and principles, and that you can organize your day around making meaning investments, seizing meaning opportunities, and engaging in value-based meaning-making.
Let me repeat this point to underscore it. Why not use the phrase do something meaningful instead of the more awkward-sounding seize meaning opportunities, make meaning investments, and make value-based meaning? Isn’t do some-thing meaningful a more natural, straightforward way to say the same thing? Actually, it isn’t. That phrase has embedded in it the idea that a prospective choice is already known to be meaningful and will prove to be meaningful. But we can’t know that.
To pretend we can know that choosing anthropology or engineering as our life work will feel consistently meaningful, that choosing this man or this woman as our mate will feel consistently meaningful, that choosing this value over that value or this principle over that principle will feel consistently meaningful is to set ourselves up for existential pain. We can’t know such things, any more than we can know that something we intend to try will always prove awesome or joyful. Psychological experiences are not guaranteed. To imagine that they can be is to be on the wrong footing with life.
Consider some analogies. When a person says, “Let me do something joyful,” she expects that thing to feel joyful. When a person says, “Let me do something calming,” she expects that thing to calm her. When a person says, “Let me do something exciting,” she expects that thing to prove exciting. In these cases, the individual is disappointed if she doesn’t experience joy, if she isn’t calmed, or if she doesn’t have an exciting time. She feels she has wasted her time. Worse yet, she can be thrown into doubt about whether she even knows what things produce joy, calmness, or excitement. The absence of the hoped-for experience produces a small crisis.
This becomes a big crisis if you are hoping for the experience of meaning. It is a big crisis if you spend two years writing a novel, three years in a training program, or five years in a doctoral program and do not experience meaning either as you proceed or, worse yet, as you finish. Throughout you can say to yourself, “Okay, this doesn’t feel meaningful now but it will in the end” and soothe yourself a little. But at the end, now that you have a finished novel, a certificate, or a degree and you still aren’t experiencing meaning, now, that is a genuine crisis.
Let’s look at this matter the other way around. Say that you are contemplating working on your novel, making travel arrangements to attend a protest march, preparing to mind your colicky grandchild, looking for funding for your start-up business, or planning not to drink alcohol for a month. You know for certain that the thing you are contemplating is not going to feel particularly meaningful and may amount to something between slogging hard work and full-out frustration. If you know this in your heart, how can you say, “This is going to prove meaningful”? But you can say, “As a value-based meaning-maker I am doing this because it aligns with my values, principles, and life purposes; I intend to make a real investment in doing this; and maybe, just maybe, it will ultimately prove to be a meaning opportunity.” The latter takes longer to say but is ever so much wiser!
Eric Maisel, PhD, is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of Life Purpose Boot Camp and numerous other titles including Mastering Creative Anxiety, Brainstorm, Coaching the Artist Within, and Rethinking Depression. Visit him online at ericmaisel.com.
Adapted from the book Life Purpose Boot Camp ©2014 by Eric Maisel. Published with permission of New World Library.com.