The Pursuit of Meaning is Meaningless
You don’t need meaning. Meaning is only useful if you’re living in three distinct timelines – the past, the present, the future. You aren’t. If you think you are, you’re revisiting your past and envisioning futures that haven’t happened. You’re only living now. If there’s no meaning now, there’s no meaning in the past, and there’s certainly no meaning in the future.
The search for meaning is meaningless. It’s never ending and futile.
If you could measure meaning today, there would be a point to it. But you can’t. It’s somewhere off in the distance. And when you get there, there won’t be more meaning. Meaning doesn’t stack. The future will be another moment, much like the moment you’re experiencing right now.
Something you can feel daily is fulfillment. You can engage in work that matters. Mattering is what you’re truly looking for, not meaning. Finding what matters now is what’s going to contribute to fulfillment. Fulfillment can stack. You can look back on a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade of engaging in fulfilling work.
If you can’t experience it now, it doesn’t exist. You can experience fulfillment now. You can’t experience meaning now. Because you’re always in pursuit of it. Meaning is always deferred, somewhere, someplace, in some time you can’t even get to right now. Whatever you’re in pursuit of, you can’t experience, because it doesn’t exist.
Focus on the experience of now. Make now matter. That’s where the juice is.
