The Meaning of Life – Part 1.

Life has always been about still being here when the sun next rises over the horizon.

But why? What does it all mean? Why are we even here? What is the meaning of life?

I’m actually going to attempt to give you an answer to that question. And it’s not 42, in case you wondered.

Let’s start way back at the start of our journey. Ever since the first single-celled organisms appeared, the overriding problem has been how not to get dismantled by a brutal, indifferent world. We figured out that it helped to find energy, repair damage and generally try to maintain the boundary between what is you and the vastness of what is everything else. Yey, for individualism.

Those way back early versions of you, until about 1.8 million years ago, did not understand any of this survival stuff. They had no mind and therefore no model of themselves trying to desperately keep it together. Strictly speaking, there wasn’t even a ‘you’ yet. Their internal processes simply produced actions that either helped them remain intact or did not. The ones that got it badly wrong are no longer available for comment.

And then, in a long, drawn-out boooooooooom of about 1.5 million years, the modern mind developed, and at some point a primitive you popped up in the story: the product of a long, uneven accumulation of foresight, language, social learning, symbolism and self-awareness. It was also the beginning of all this meaning business we want to uncover here.

The mind’s fundamental job was still survival. It did this by building abstract models of the world, predicting likely outcomes and directing the body away from threats and towards opportunities for survival. However, with all these abstract models infused with lots of uncertainty, probability calculations, predictions and an emotion-based system for setting priorities, survival was a bit old-school and elementary—like a two-year-old attending a class on nonlinear partial differential equations. So the mind developed a much more detailed and responsive measure: well-being.

Well-being is survival in higher resolution. It includes whether we are alive and physically safe, but also whether we will have secure, accessible food, shelter, energy and health every single time the sun rises. And we can add companionship, status, security, confidence and a future that appears worth entering. A change in well-being can warn us about a threat long before that threat steps around the corner with a knife.

It so happened—evolution does what evolution does—that the mind was handed the unique and very mysterious properties of feelings and emotions as part of the mechanism that sets the priority levels of whatever may improve or damage well-being. The strangeness of feelings and emotions—the fearness of fear, the joyness of joy, etc.—doesn’t much matter here. Still, they are what we become aware of when that assailant turns the corner, and chest-pounding fear tells us that the threat has exclusive, front-seat priority.

And so an emotion like desire pulls us towards an opportunity. Anger marks something that has interfered with our well-being and may do so again. Love places another person unusually high in our priorities because what happens to them has become closely connected to what happens to us. And so on.

Ta-dah! This is where meaning comes in.

At the level of lived experience, meaning is the emotion that marks something as making an important difference to well-being. It tells us what to keep close, look after and recall first.

A cup is just a cup until it belonged to someone you loved. Then it has higher meaning. You feel it.

A house is a collection of materials until it contains thirty years of your life. The house is meaningful to you, while for others it’s just another little box on a hillside.

A face in a crowd has meaning because it belongs to the person whose presence makes a significant difference to your life every single day. You love them.

Meaning prevents the mind from treating everything equally. That would be hopelessly inefficient for well-being and its Neanderthal cousin, survival. It makes certain things stand out because losing them, gaining them or changing our relationship with them could make a big difference.

Progress

Before examining meaning in more detail, however, we need to talk about progress. We need to do this because meaning, unlike almost every other category of development we’ve been involved with, has a massive problem.

Body

Let’s start with the physical you. You may have noticed that we are no longer single-celled organisms wriggling around in a puddle. If there is any doubt, please make your way to the nearest mirror or use your phone’s selfie camera. Yes, it’s true. You are many.

A typical adult human body contains roughly 30 trillion human cells, organised into one organism that can think, plan and participate with billions of other organisms in a global civilisation.

That, my dear reader, is tremendous progress.

The body is just one of over 150 major categories, distributed across several thousand more specialised fields, in which we’ve made spectacular progress.

Medicine

Medicine is one example.

There was a time when falling from a tree and badly breaking a leg could inevitably mean never seeing another sunrise. We gradually learnt that the limb could be straightened, supported and given time to heal. We found plants that reduced pain and treated wounds, and we experimented with different ways of helping the body repair itself. Progress.

Disease was a bit more mystifying at first.

When foreign organisms entered the body and caused fever, weakness, swelling and all kinds of unpleasant, smelly fluids, we could see the effects but not the cause. We knew something had happened, but viruses, bacteria and microscopic parasites were still around the corner of the dark alley in which we were standing.

The mind did what it does when part of its model is missing. Gaps in understanding frighten it witless, so it filled in the gap.

The causes became spirits, curses, angry gods, polluted air or an imbalance of bodily fluids. We then tried to influence those causes through prayer, ritual, purging, bloodletting and other treatments that sometimes gave the illness valuable assistance.

Still, we kept trying.

We observed which herbs appeared to help. We compared patients. We examined bodies. We developed instruments that allowed us to see what had previously been invisible. Slowly, the model improved.

We moved from supernatural explanations and bodily humours to anatomy, germ theory, antisepsis, anaesthesia, vaccination, antibiotics, transplantation, gene-based treatments and robotic surgery.

That’s progress.

Better models produced better predictions. Better predictions allowed better action. Well-being improved, emotional uncertainty fell, and more of us survived.

Cosmology

Medicine asks how we survive the body.

Cosmology asks how we survive the world.

From the perspective of a tiny creature living on the surface of an unimaginably large rock, surrounded at night by tiny points of light that appear when the very large point of light has disappeared behind the horizon, the world is not easy to figure out. And we needed to figure it out because that same rock sometimes shook violently; our food on it would suddenly just die; violent storms raged across its surface; and blinding lights took potshots at us, accompanied by a lot of senseless roaring in the sky.

The basics seemed obvious enough. The ground did not appear to move. The sun crossed the sky. The Moon and stars moved around us. Wherever we stood, the visible world arranged itself around our position.

It therefore made sense to place Earth at the centre.

This was not simply human vanity. It was the most natural model available from the evidence we had. It also turned an immense and uncertain environment into a structure directly connected to our survival. It was progress.

The universe was about us because the mind’s model of the universe was built for us.

But some things did not add up. The planets wandered in peculiar ways. Predictions failed. And so we continued to model, explore, test and discover. Eventually, we developed different ideas, better mathematics and instruments capable of testing them.

The Earth became a planet orbiting the sun. The sun became one star among hundreds of billions in the Milky Way. The Milky Way became one galaxy among innumerable others. We discovered that the universe is expanding, that planets orbit other stars and that reality extends far beyond anything our original survival model needed to contain.

We did not merely collect more facts about the sky. We became better at predicting seasons, movement, position and physical events. That gave us navigation, calendars, satellites, communications and a more reliable understanding of the environment in which survival takes place. Remarkable progress.

The point is we made progress everywhere but in one important area—meaning.

A Crisis of Meaning

There are two forms of meaning serving very different purposes. There are the meaningful things IN our lives, and then there is the meaning OF life. We know a lot about the former. The latter is a problem because, for reasons we will come to, we got badly stuck in our attempts to progress our understanding of it.

As mentioned earlier, meaning is the emotion that marks something as making an important difference to well-being. The people, projects, places and possibilities that matter to us organise our priorities. They tell us what to protect, what to pursue and where to go if we need help.

The problem is that they all belong to a changing world. Yes, who would have guessed?

A career can provide income, identity, status, routine and a sense of usefulness. Then an AI system replaces you and every other person in your position; the market fills up with others like you; your sense of utility and worth takes a nosedive; and you move into a meaning crisis.

A relationship can become the emotional centre of life. You feel secure, anchored and enveloped by love, support and understanding. Then the other person changes, leaves or dies, and you go into a multidimensional meaning crisis.

These sources of meaning are also frequently relational. Their value depends on continuing differences being made. A friendship requires attention. A family requires care. A career requires some exchange between effort and reward. Love is not a financial transaction, but it does require a flow of presence, recognition, affection and trust.

The things that give well-being a stable, workable structure are therefore always at risk. That’s a problem.

When one disappears, the mind’s model can change suddenly. Something it had treated as a reliable source of future well-being is gone. The emotions responsible for protecting that well-being increase their priority. A solution must be found. NOW!

And so the emotions driving that urgency spike.

A person loses a job, and fear says they had better focus all their attention on restoring security, status or a useful future.

A partner leaves, and anger says years of love and effort have led nowhere, so focus on not repeating that waste of time, attention and effort.

A parent dies, and grief says that an irreplaceable part of the world has disappeared, so focus on finding ways to fill the tremendous gap they left behind.

Emotions are important. Their function is critical to our decision-making. But there is “this is important”, and then there is them screaming like a banshee through a megaphone. During a spike, the mind gives the event so much priority that it can become the sole focus of attention. One loss fills the whole model.

The problem with the banshee-level priority is that the mind can barely contemplate anything except the screaming. And that means it is unable to consider the full range of possibilities for solving the cause of the meaning crisis. The mind becomes much less rational and much more emotion-driven. And, for the most part, that’s not good for well-being, which is not good for survival. 

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I will continue this essay in The Meaning of Life – Part 2, where I will reveal a secular-based theory for the meaning of life that offers all the stabilising force of a substantive religion without gods, spirits or the supernatural being involved.