Sometimes I find it easy to slip into the gentle swirl of meaninglessness. At this writing, I’m sitting at a Chipotle Mexican grill restaurant in the center of Colorado. I like Chipotle a lot – their food is good, and, according to their advertising and menus, they seem to be trying to be environmentally responsible (though they still admittedly kill chickens, cows and pigs).
So I eat here probably two or three times a month. But occasionally, in the middle of my meal, I’ll find myself slipping into an existential question - why am I eating? I mean, beyond the immediate biological needs – I’m hungry – or the possible psychological needs – I need to comfort myself, and this food comforts me. What is the purpose behind my eating?
To cut to the chase, why is it important for me to be alive and continue eating? What am I contributing to the world? Why am I here? What is my purpose?
And so, from a simple meal stop, I’m pretty quickly rotating around this whirlpool of existentialism. What’s my purpose? What are the other customers’ purposes? What about the employees?
It’s easy to get distracted by our day-to-day activities. The employees are here, well, because someone needs to make my burrito when I come in, and clean up the table after I’ve had my little existential crisis. In many respects, that’s pretty reasonable and satisfying. Our jobs give us a sense of purpose, at least for a little while.
But I think we all fall into this whirlpool occasionally – when the job, our activities, sometimes even our relationships and beliefs seem to pale and lose meaning. Sometimes it’s just a quiet moment in time, and we quickly re-embrace our world of meaning. Sometimes something disrupts our lives: a death, a traumatic experience. Something can happen that suddenly shifts our understanding of the world, and the world doesn’t make sense to us any longer. We can’t fit what happens into our old view of the world.
I believe that we’re getting to the point where we have so much information coming into our senses – information overload, or perhaps, information overexposure. I believe we increasingly experience these existential crises, though we might not be aware that we’re having them. Typically these are mini-crises, things that we might not even think of as crises - a piece of news, witnessing something disturbing. I think that each of our worlds, and our meaning of the world, is disrupted so often that it’s increasingly difficult to continue to make sense of the world.
When we reach a point where our meaning has become skewed and tattered, we look for something, anything, outside of us to help us make sense of it.
But our construct of the world cannot necessarily be mended by the same source of the destruction of our world. In other words, we cannot entirely rely on the world to create meaning for us, when that world was the initial source of our loss of meaning.
Which leaves us – where? For many of us, it leaves us confused, empty, deeply hurt, angry, scared and resentful. It leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed and raw - at wit's end. The world makes less and less sense. And it’s increasingly difficult to look for and find meaning.
Yet this is where our core thirst lies. We so desperately WANT the world to make sense. But – if you’re like me – there does not seem to be a single unifying perspective out there that will make sense of it all. Or at least, that will make satisfying sense. To me, satisfying sense and meaning incorporates all parts of us – our thoughts, our emotions, our spirituality, our bodily sense. Parts of the world make sense – but what is the deeper connection? The deeper meaning?
I think some religions attempt to provide the meaning – but it’s the satisfying sense that is often lacking for me. (I’m not quite sure how deeply to dive into religion here – I suspect that we will need to – but I’m not going to take that dive just yet.)
At some point, during this line of thinking, I arrive at a state where my meaning starts to erode more radically – as if the blinders are falling off - and I think, “What IS all this? What exactly is going on here?”
Which is the perfect place to be as we delve into this more deeply. I realize I'm talking in absolutes here - talking about a "single unifying perspective", something that will tie every loose end together and provide all the answers. While this is something I think we truly yearn for, I am becoming more and more convinced that the solution - or at least the solution for most - will be less than comprehensive, and, to be honest, that's going to be quite fine. As we dive in, I hope to ease you into the whirlpool with me – and then I hope, too, that we can begin to navigate this river, or ocean, or wherever it is we decide we are, together.
