The Meaning of Life – Part 2.

If you haven’t done so, please first read Part 1 of The Meaning of Life. It will help put Part 2 in context.

The Stabilising Force of the Meaning of Life.

Imagine standing in front of a large whiteboard covered with different-coloured dots. You are focused, however, on the red dot you are holding in your hand. This dot represents the fear you are currently experiencing. You then look up at the whiteboard and place the red dot among the other colours. The fear suddenly feels less overpowering because it is now one colour among many. The whiteboard demonstrates the purpose of the meaning OF life.

The meaning of life is the mind looking for a way to bring spiking emotions down far enough so that it can maintain rational decision-making. It is a form of meaning that does not depend entirely on changing people, possessions, roles and circumstances. It sits outside those changes, where it remains stable, dependable and always accessible. If it can also be substantive, it can deal with whatever problem is thrown its way. Just what you need when facing spiking emotions.

That broader context of the meaning of life does not remove fear, anger, shame, grief or any other dark emotion. It places those emotions in the context of many other emotions, such as hope, a sense of belonging and the promise of future joy, which temper the darker emotions so that you remain more rational and can find better solutions.

Losing a job no longer means the mind is narrowly focused on the loss and its consequences. It means the mind can use the fear as motivation while remaining able to look much more widely and deeply at the opportunities the change in circumstances has opened up. And it allows you to do so until the problem is solved, rather than slipping back into panic mode or dulling the mind with medication.

The end of a relationship does not mean that love and personal growth were pointless. The meaning of life allows you to see that one structure through which they occurred has ended and that others remain possible. Getting control over the anger, disappointment and constant circling around the pain point means your mind is much better positioned to look for alternative means of fulfilment in a calm, positive and hopeful frame of mind.

The death of a parent does not mean that the massive gap in love and support can never again be filled. Instead, it becomes a void that the meaning of life fills with beautiful memories, an awareness of that person’s continuing influence and the positive difference they made to your life—one you have an opportunity to pay forward in their name. They, in effect, continue to live through you, in your thoughts and in what you mean to others. The void does not completely disappear, but it becomes part of a much bigger, unfolding, beautiful, inspiring and hope-filled narrative.

The event remains painful, but it is no longer the whole story. The emotional spike is modulated by a larger context in which hope and future action remain possible.

Stalled Progress

We recognised the value of knowing the meaning of life thousands of years ago. We produced an enormous number of metaphysical models we could use when things went off the rails. Life was a divine plan, a cycle of rebirth or preparation for another form of existence.

These models helped stabilise emotions by locating individual suffering within something larger and more permanent. They were the large whiteboards onto which we could place our spiking emotions when they disrupted our ability to function.

But unlike our bodies, medicine, cosmology and the other hundred and fifty or so categories in which we made progress to improve well-being (see Part 1), these models made little reliable progress. And that was a problem because, as with all the other categories, our earlier ideas were partial, inadequate and ripe for incredible discoveries and improved effectiveness.

The problem was not a lack of effort. We tried. We really, really tried. The problem was that our survival-based framework for understanding the world didn’t allow us to see the answer that sat outside that bubble. And try as we might, we just couldn’t find a crack in the framework that’s been 4.2 billion years in the making.

Science, as marvellous as it is, created an additional difficulty.

Its success came from concentrating on features of reality that could be observed and measured objectively. This worked brilliantly for matter, disease and planetary motion. Meaning and well-being, however, belonged to subjective experience and did not appear in the physical description.

From this, many philosophers drew the conclusion that the universe contains no inherent meaning and that humans must create it for themselves. In other words, we discarded the search for the meaning OF life and focused our attention on stabilising the meaning of things IN life. And those not wholly satisfied with this approach clung to the dated metaphysical models that never progressed much beyond their ancient form.

Making Progress on the Meaning of Life

The usefulness of the meaning of life in modulating emotions remains. It is not just highly spiking emotions that can be regulated through this property, but all emotions.

It is, of course, possible that there simply isn’t a meaning of life. That would be troubling because our society is really struggling with meaning. There is no single proof of this, but there are several converging signs: widespread loneliness and weakened social connection, low trust in public institutions, high levels of workplace disengagement and stress, and persistent deaths linked to suicide and substance misuse. Together, these suggest that many people possess material means yet lack belonging, purpose, shared direction or a convincing reason to endure—strong evidence that modern society is experiencing not merely distress, but a crisis of meaning.

It’s personal

I have long struggled with a lack of substantive meaning, especially since leaving religion behind, and this has been one of the great inscrutabilities I have thought about for decades.

I believe I might have found a solution: a secular meaning of life that we ought to have developed alongside the tremendous progress we made in science, if only we had managed to see beyond the survival bubble some two thousand years ago.

I call this theory Flowmonics.

Flowmonics begins with a fundamental definition: the meaning of something is the kind of difference it makes. The meaning of life is therefore the kind of difference life, taken as a whole, makes to reality. If something changes nothing, affects nothing and leaves no trace, it’s hard to say it has any meaning at all.

Here I will quote directly from my book.

So when we ask about the meaning of life, we are really asking: what difference will life, taken as a whole, make to reality? What changes will exist because life existed? That answer will be the meaning of life.

At this point, however, another question naturally appears. The mind asking this question is not neutral—it cares about its own well-being. So alongside the cosmic question sits a personal one: will the difference life makes to the universe also matter to me? In other words, what difference will life make to reality, and how will that difference affect my experience?

To answer that fully, we must include emotions. Emotions are the mind’s way of assigning priority; they tell us what feels significant. So it is not enough to know that life will make a difference. We also want to know that we will FEEL that difference as worthwhile—that it can be experienced as positive, meaningful or at least deeply satisfying.

So now the big question is this: is there a pattern outside me that suggests life will make a difference to reality in a way that will feel worthwhile to me?

The answer is: I think there is.

Flowmonics proposes that objective matter and subjective experience emerge from the same fundamental information-like elements. This is a form of what can be called Neutral Monism. Different arrangements of these fundamental elements create the physical structures we observe, as well as the experiences occurring within minds. Meaning is therefore not an imaginary substance added by humans to an otherwise meaningless universe. It is part of the same foundational reality from which mind and matter emerge.

This does not mean our physical universe or the broader reality is conscious, as some assert. It means a tiny part of reality—a synthesis of matter and non-matter-mind—became conscious and caused meaning to emerge.

It’s a bit like a tiny protrusion in an otherwise flat, unified field. The next question is: what difference does this little bump make to the field of reality? It certainly introduced a host of new features into reality, such as abstract modelling, individualism, survival, hope and love. But so what?

To answer the “so what”, we need to uncover whether what life introduced into reality has a trajectory that gets life as a whole to a place that will feel worthwhile to us—the meaning of life.

Here is a possible trajectory:

Exploding stars introduced heavy elements into reality. The heavy elements formed new stars with planets around them. On some of those planets, molecules formed and eventually organised into cells. Cells formed organisms. Organisms developed minds. Minds formed tribes, cultures and civilisations. So some life (us) seems to follow a trajectory towards ever larger, more stable systems through coordinated collaboration — from a simple molecule to a global civilisation that is around 560,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 560 sextillion, collaborating cells.

Is that a trajectory? I think so.

And what we’re integrating is not just ourselves, but matter, knowledge, abilities, relational connections and experiences into a unified system capable of realising the highest possible well-being.

However, five hundred and sixty sextillion cells collaborating on a tiny planet around an average star that can be wiped out in an instant by some wayward rock hurtling through space is still not much in the bigger scheme of things. A mere blip in cosmic time. If we want the meaning of life to be a stabilising force for our emotions, we need something a lot bigger and more impressive.

So what happens if we try to project the trajectory that got us here into the far future? In one reading, that seems to suggest the integration of all matter, all possible knowledge, all possible power, all conscious minds and all experiences into one unified field. The little protrusion that is conscious life progresses until it spreads throughout all of reality, achieving perfect well-being. I explain in more detail in my book how this seemingly improbable feat could become possible by accessing the grammar of reality.

I also show, most importantly, that there is a fully secular, logically consistent, though speculative, possibility that the mind might remain a stable, functional structure that could continue beyond the demise of the physical body and its brain. This is what Neutral Monism points to. If true, it would mean you and I will be there when life achieves its full meaning — when it fully realises the difference it makes to large-scale reality.

That, I propose, is the secular meaning of life.

Faith

Whether life’s meaning is as described above and whether the mind persists after decoupling from the brain do not really matter as much as you might imagine. What matters is whether the Flowmonics belief system is believable. The fact that Zeus, Ra, Yahweh, Odin, Pachacamac or any of the thousands of other supernatural entities we conjured from our imagination never existed made little difference to the fact that those metaphysical narratives were able to help people stabilise their emotions and still do so for some today.

What is important about what I am proposing is whether there is enough logical reason to believe that such a secular belief system might be true, and then to decide to take it on faith because of the benefits it offers. That, for the most part, is how religion works. Flowmonics, however, is not a religion. There are no gods or supernatural realms involved. That would require a significant burden of proof we don’t need because … well, we don’t need it. The belief system can be adequately explained and function perfectly without such imaginary entities being involved.

Also, ask yourself what the alternative is. Maybe you are one of those people who don’t need an extra function to stabilise your emotions when you are under severe and sustained pressure. That’s wonderful. You’re probably fine. I wish I had the strength you have to look into the void and not be frightened by it.

Or maybe you’re OK with that millennia-old belief system and don’t ask too many questions, or you’re capable of finding answers that feel adequate enough for you to stick with it. That’s kind of OK for as long as it works for you.

Or maybe you’ve been so disappointed by other belief systems that promised but never delivered that you would rather face the trauma of spiking emotions that burn your fingers again. That’s not that fine, but I understand where you’re coming from. I’ve been there too.

My suggestion is to read the book that you can find HERE and see if it connects with you. I wrote it to resolve my own crisis of meaning and bring my emotions under greater control by constructing a comprehensive, integrated metaphysical framework, and by discovering that intelligent action, love and survival do not require the possessive and fear-driven forms of attachment produced by a mind organised around separation.

Maybe it will do the same for you.