A recent study on finding meaning in life showed that having meaning follows an “inverted U-shape”. People tend to have little meaning early in life, gain it in mid-life, and then lose it again in later life around 60. Meanwhile, searching for meaning follows a “U-shape” with the young and old both in search of meaning.
This problem of meaning is summed up well by famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.
Tyson, Neil deGrasse. Comment in “I am Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ask Me Anything…” On Reddit. February 29, 2012, 9:08 PM. Online Here.
Over time, as we age, we discover more and more that meaning cannot be found in some great Eureka moment but has to be slowly built up over time as the effort we put in may not generate returns immediately. Rather, it works much like compounding interest with small contributions here and there paying larger dividends down the road.
Indecision and fickleness, in a desire to find meaning, may actually keep you from finding it, like wasting the night flipping from one TV show or movie to another without ever finishing anything.
Even meaning that comes from faith takes time to build. While the world abounds with incredible conversion experiences, what comes after is often more important and far more lasting. A new convert to a faith must learn, join a community, and grow in their faith over years. Likewise with falling in love, it is not the early infatuation that matters, but the long lasting bond built up over years that creates true love. Despite all the happily ever after stories that end in marriage, marriage in only the beginning.
For these reasons, the question of whether meaning is discovered or created is an ill-posed one. Meaning is not like a treasure to be found or a building to be constructed but a seedling to be found in the forest, brought home, replanted and nurtured. Without tender love and care, meaning dies, but it also cannot be synthesized at will.
If you look at Tyson’s own quote, he gains meaning from exercising his sense of wonder and curiosity, but did he create these or were they there to begin with?
I tend to get a lot of meaning in my life from solving problems, turning ideas over in my mind, finding simpler ways of doing things, and expressing what I’ve learned. As far as I know, I’ve always done this, but not always successfully. I did not know enough when I was younger and struggled to reign in my imagination, so my approaches to problems would be fanciful and creative but naive. With age I have developed the knowledge and skill to be productive and perspicacious at least about physics, philosophy, and a couple other subjects.
My thesis here is that each of us is given certain gifts that we have to develop into a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Some of us are given many gifts and some fewer, but all of us have something we can invest and develop further.
Indeed, the English word “talent” comes from the Greek talanton which relates to a parable about just this called the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14–30. In this parable, a master gives his three servants some talents which is a very large sum of money, perhaps $600,000 in today’s money. Servant A gets five talents, servant B gets two, and servant C gets one. The servants are asked to put the money to work while the master is gone.
Upon the master’s return, he finds that servants A and B have doubled their money but servant C, thinking his master harsh and being afraid, buried his talent and did nothing with it. A and B are rewarded while C is punished.
While the theological meaning of the parable is debated, the practical life lesson here is that we are given certain gifts in life and these are not ours to create out of thin air. Some of us have artistic gifts, gifts for science or programming, writing, mathematics, finance, fashion, decorating, building, repairing, and so on. Many of us discover these gifts early on. Sometimes others encourage us in them. Other times we are discouraged.
When we find these gifts they are immensely valuable already but life will punish us if we bury them.
There are a few misconceptions about meaning and talent that I would like to dispel in the following: these are about getting paid, being too old, passion, and feeling stuck in life.
Getting Paid
The modern drumbeat is that you should find your passion. I think this started in the ‘60s with gurus like Alan Watts. A former Episcopal priest turned High Priest of the New Age, I think of him as the hippie Jordan Peterson. Full of advice on how people should live and very appealing to a certain set of young people, he had quite a few of his own problems.
The belief, according to Watts, is that whatever you wanted to do you could do and if you did it enough and got good at it you could charge people for it and make it your career. It’s like the Cat Stevens song “You can do (Whatever!)”
You can do whatever you want to do
Anything you want — you can do
You can ride a tiger or walk the dog
Anything you wish can be true
You can watch the world as it passes by
Or you can make it stop for you
The twin crises of the Great Recession and the Pandemic have put a damper on this thinking but it is still going strong in some classes.
Getting paid is nice of course but hardly relevant to living a life full of meaning. People get paid for all kinds of mundane activities and save their free time for their passions. Some even prefer it that way. St. Paul, for example, made tents for a living, despite being one of the main evangelists for the early Christian church and author of about half the New Testament.
When you do get paid for something you like doing, as I have been, you will often find that you have new problems. If it’s in a creative field, you have the problem of how to keep your success going. Even if you’ve been successful for a long time, you always have to be concerned about running out of ideas or no longer being popular anymore. This is a problem whether you get paid or not but in the former case you might be worried about your income as well as your waning talents.
If it’s a more steady type of job, then there are other problems. Many jobs are essentially “patronage” based in that you have some entity paying your salary versus, say, a lot of different people contributing to it. In those cases, who ever is paying the bills gets to decide, to some extent, what you should be doing. Other than being independently wealthy, there are few ways to escape the need to answer to somebody.
Another issue with getting paid is a moral one. Once you are being paid for something that gives your life meaning, you can also be paid for similar things that don’t feel right. For example, suppose your passion is acting and you’re paid to be in a commercial for Baby Seal Clubbing Inc.? Is it worth it to take your career to the next level? This can happen even in the most mundane areas of life because evil abounds in this world.
The Cat Stevens mantra is true, you can do what you want as long as you can also find a way to pay the bills in a way that feels right to you, but the “what” and the “way” may not be the same thing, not ever, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Being Too Old
When it comes to careers people often ask if they are too old to fill-in-the-blank: go to college, start a business, change careers, or what have you. But young people rarely ask if they are too young.
Older people tend to fall into the fallacy of sunk costs. They feel that they have invested so much in their current lives or careers that it isn’t worth it to make a change. The opposite is true. If you are invested in something that has no value to you any more, you should by all means extract yourself before you lose any more time or effort to it.
Young people, meanwhile, are often itching to become invested in something so they can start working their way up. This is also a fallacy, an even bigger one, because investing yourself in something before you really understand yourself or what you want can lead to just as much wasted time and energy as sticking with something you no longer value.
How many people go into debt these days getting college degrees they later find they never wanted or worse flunking out because they weren’t ready for college yet? How many young people try to start businesses without knowing the first thing about how money works let alone business? They don’t end up like Mark Zuckerberg most of the time. “Older” folks, around 45, are far more likely to succeed in starting a business according to statistics.
Indeed, there is a theory about genius that suggests that, while there are some young geniuses, there are also many older ones, and they have distinct ways of looking at the world from one another. Young geniuses are people like Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso while older ones are Mark Twain and Jackson Pollock.
The young ones tend to latch on to a new concept that overturns the existing order. They are able to carry their idea forward quickly before the competition seizes on it and get the benefit of being on the ground floor as their ideas become popular. They also tend to flame out as they get older and others take their conceptual ideas farther than they can. Thus, they end up riding the coattails of their younger selves.
Older geniuses, by contrast, tend to build up their ideas piecemeal over a long period of time, having different ideas sometimes years apart and putting them together slowly. They are tinkerers and experimenters, proceeding by trial and error. The end result of their tinkering is a product that is wholly their own if only because it is the result of a life time of work rather than a flash of brilliance. You can think of these as the Doc. Browns (from Back to the Future) of the world who fail over and over only to finally succeed later in life.
If this shows one thing, it is that failure is not a reason to give up but only a reason to learn, move on, and not make the same mistakes again.
Passion
Despite a number of advocates for finding your passion such as Steve Jobs, passion is grown rather than found. It is the result of nurturing a nascent talent, making mistakes and learning from failure and finally finding success that creates true passion. This goes along with why people who are older are more likely to have found their passion, not because they have been looking longer, but because they have been building and learning longer.
Most of the things that people attempt that are worth doing are difficult and when you are learning they don’t feel good to do because you make a lot of mistakes, you get lost, and you need mentorship which can make you feel inadequate. It is only after a lifetime of practice and struggle that you develop the skill to being able to do something effortlessly, to enter that “flow” state of being that is the source of true passion.
This is in contrast to infatuation or being enamored of something which can happen at an early age and may lead to true passion or could lead to self-destruction if the infatuation is with something that is a poor fit. The difference between infatuation and passion is learning and understanding. Passion must be earned by making mistakes and through continual growth. But if you become infatuated with something that is extremely competitive and you lack the drive or motivation to become really good at it, to achieve mastery, then you will be continually frustrated your whole life.
Take an example of music. If you want to be a professional musician, woe is you, it is not easy. Serious people practice about 4–6 hours a day and a lot of that practice is not fun, playing easy stuff you enjoy, not if you want to be good. It is doing drills and etudes. It is practicing the same technique over and over again until you feel crazy. An infatuation with music that does not come with a drive to practice like that can be incredibly hard on the self-esteem (if you are not comfortable with remaining an amateur like yours truly). The same goes for writing, art, and even science.
One common piece of advice is to “collect rejections”. Nice advice but if you aren’t getting better to the point where you are getting some acceptances then something is wrong. You should learn from each rejection. Likewise, the advice “live as if it is the last day of your life” might help keep you focused on what you value, but if you are a decent person you probably won’t spend that time working on your career. We invest in our gifts precisely because we expect to live to see them come to fruition, but we also don’t ignore all our other values in order to achieve success.
So, why would somebody put in all this work if it’s not their passion? Well, sometimes infatuation helps here. After all, people get married based on infatuation and oftentimes stay married a life time because they put in the work. Maybe it didn’t feel like work all that much but it surely wouldn’t succeed without it. Likewise, with any passion, it just takes a little bit to get you going and a little bit more to keep you going until you make it.
Thus, while an early infatuation may lead to a true passion, finding your passion is a wild goose chase. You have to build your passion out of the intersection of innate gifts you have, what enamors you, and what you have the will to practice even when it is hard. Unless you are a Mozart, it will take time.
Feeling Stuck in Life
Even those of us who have had every opportunity given us can feel sometimes like George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life. The protagonist of this surprisingly dark 1946 Christmas movie comes to his wits’ end feeling like he is a complete failure and nearly killing himself, only to discover through heavenly intervention that he actually had a great life. I think there is a lot of comfort to take here that we all touch many people in our lives and if we are true to who we are and our values then we can say we had a wonderful life no matter where we ended up. It is only those of us who choose to do evil in the world for our own gain, the Mr. Potters of the world, who are truly poor.
Nevertheless, this is small comfort when you are searching for meaning. How many of us have a guardian angel who can make it plain to us?
Feeling stuck can derive from a few sources. The first is the sunk costs fallacy mentioned above. Just because you are invested doesn’t mean you can’t make a change. There is no better time than now to start. The second comes from getting paid. You feel like you can’t do something because you have a day job that you need to keep because you have a family to support, bills to pay, college debt to pay off, etc. If you want to be a writer or artist, you can’t just quit your job and do it unless you have a very supportive spouse or are independently wealthy. You have to do it in your spare time.
It’s worth looking, in those cases, at whether your day job takes up too much of your time. Is your commute too long? Maybe you are too tired at the end of the day. Maybe you can explore telecommuting, part time work, or more flexible hours or, if not, find a more flexible job. If it is something you need to go to school for, you can look into night or distance learning or even taking out cost of living loans (if you can expect to pay them back later pretty easily). Anything you do will take discipline and effort, passion won’t see you through because it’s not really there yet no matter how excited you are about it.
The worst thing you can do in this situation is dwell on your past mistakes. I say this from considerable experience. All it does is build bitterness, resentment, and self-hatred. This often comes from jumping into things too young. When you are young, you make a lot more mistakes and so have a lot more things you can regret when you are older. That is why it is best not to make really long term commitments when you are in your 20’s. (I am generally an opponent of taking on a lot of college debt for this reason. No college degree is worth a lifetime of debt.)
Even the worst mistakes, however, can be redeemed (not undone for what is done is done) through effort and the right mindset. For better or worse, it can help if you think of everything in your life having happened for a reason. It may not be true but, then again, it may be and even if it is not you can learn from every mistake even the hardest ones, but if you dwell in regret you become only bitter not wiser.
What Gifts are for
In the end, our gifts are there for others not for us. In the Parable of the Talents, the two servants do not own the original talents or whatever they earned. They belong to their master. Their own reward is not the talents themselves but joy. Likewise, the disobedient servant that buried his talent receives the opposite, pain and suffering. Thus, your reward for nurturing your gifts is not the value in money or fame or success that they generate but the joy you receive from sharing those gifts with others. In the end, we cannot take our talents with us. Thus, they are not the end but the means to obtain meaning in life. That is, they are the means to enact your values in the world and see their impact on others. Even if that impact isn’t directly apparent, you received those gifts for just that purpose and, therefore, in nurturing them your reward is meaning and beyond that joy.