The General Collapse Of Meaning
I spent a chunk of October writing longer-form stuff, including ditties on purpose and belonging, following something I did last year at the holidays on connection between people. I’m kind of a mess as a human being: divorced once, don’t have many friends, seem to alienate or get left behind by lots of people, etc. Can be an asshole when I drink, which thankfully I haven’t been doing as much (or at all) recently. Beyond my own particular limitations, though, I do generally believe that we’re seeing less connection and less sense of belonging among people.
I’m not working a ton these days — some smaller freelance projects — and so I’ve been doing some job-searching, sending out emails, walking the dog, writing, and watching some YouTube. I came across this the other day:
The whole thing about “OMG The World Is So Crazy!” is a little bit “overwhelm” excuse, kinda like people hiding behind “Everything is so busy” (as they know every plot point of every streaming show) or “So busy with the kids!” (as they stick their nose in their phone at every kids’ event). It’s all a bit of a farce, but at the same time, we are scaling burnout and stress — at least in America, but probably in other parts of the world too — and there’s a whole sense of people being “left behind” by “the system,” which older people tend to argue is people “quitting” or “not working hard enough.” It’s a semantic minefield out there.
Putting some definition on “meaning”
This guy in this video defines the idea of “meaning” in 1.0s, 2.0s, that type of linear logic. To him:
Because there’s a gap between “Meaning 2.0” and “Meaning 3.0,” we’re seeing all the normal bad actors kinda rise up:
What happens then is people are searching for this meaning, and they find it in different ways:
That final bullets gets you to stuff like this:
Which then kinda gets you here:
And it’s all not very good for anyone.
The bigger ecosystem
We kinda openly speculate about “the decline of expertise” or “distrust in leadership,” and it’s all an ecosystem tied together with the modern moment. In short, there are:
Is this true for everyone? No. But nothing is true for everyone.
More platforms and opinions + less meaning and opportunity creates a natural gravitational pull to some crazy shit — and I mean that word “crazy” in the context of both ideological prisms, not just Musk and Trump guys. The left is crazy too.
If you take this in only political terms, some people think maybe there’s a “post-Trump” reality, be that as simple as “DeSantis” (might be worse) or some return to a logical liberal order. Right. But as Thomas Edsall lays out here, this is not really possible. We’ve had too much decline in meaning and economic opportunity to ever kinda get back to “normalcy.” COVID was a huge wrench too.
What sets the United States apart are U.S.-specific institutional changes and policy choices that failed to blunt, and in some cases magnified, the consequences of these pressures on the U.S. labor market. The United States has allowed traditional channels of worker voice to atrophy without fostering new institutions or buttressing existing ones. It has permitted the federal minimum wage to recede to near-irrelevance, lowering the floor under the labor market for low-paid workers. It has embraced a policy-driven expansion of free trade with the developing world, Mexico and China in particular, yet failed to direct the gains toward redressing the employment losses and retraining needs of workers.
There’s a million and five similar passages in that Edsall column. I just pulled one.
How do people generally derive “meaning?”
Here are the big buckets I’ve seen from people across 42 years of existence:
All of these have value, but they’re all flawed in some way. Family/kids isn’t always perfect, adds stress and cost, and not everyone can even get there.
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Work is a horrible place to find meaning, especially in at-will work environments where you can be fired for virtually anything and layoffs are common and oh hey did you hear automation is coming?
Religion can be a great source of meaning, but the Bible has 10,000 contradictions, a lot of religion is stand-and-sit people (not understanding the meaning of the words), and organized religion has been in decline for years.
Hobbies are good, but try to find a middle-aged guy juggling family, mortgage, and boss who has a lot of hobbies. It might take a second.
Health is what we should focus on ultimately, but I don’t know if it’s per se a source of “meaning” and look what happened during COVID when you even suggested the idea of overall personal health. People went nuts and shoved a mask in your trachea.
Success metrics? Those have been flawed for literally generations. The goal of humanity was centered around community, and now it’s centered around convenience. The goal is to run and hide behind a gate, literally and metaphorically. In fact, I shared this video just yesterday on here:
What’s the real “tea” on finding meaning, then?
It’s different for everyone. Some people get it from God. Some get it from their kids. Some get it from their boss. Some get it from heroin (that doesn’t last successfully for that long). But it’s inherently an individual thing.
One decent approach I’ve seen is called The Four-Way Win.
There are six million and five approaches to being more productive and more happy — entire sections of bookstores, people fly all over the world speaking about it, Oprah essentially became a billionaire by talking to others about it, etc. You can walk more. You can download some apps. You can eliminate “time sinks.” You can use personal analytics. You can “batch” tasks. You can be an Essentialist. There’s really no one “catch-all” answer to this stuff; you figure out what works for you and you roll with that.
Here’s an idea from Stewart Friedman, who teaches at Wharton. It’s interesting and logical, although perhaps his take on Harvard Business Review does link to his books a couple of times. But hey, we’re all game for a little self-promotion, right? (Especially if the ideas have value.)
Alright, so … here’s the HBR article. Let’s break this down.
Friedman believes there are four essential domains to life:
So far this is all logical. You could maybe quibble with the wording (“family” as opposed to “home”), but I think everyone understands this framework.
A ‘Four-Way Win’ is when you integrate the areas to an extent, and then make a tweak that essentially benefits all of them. Simple in thought, right? Harder in execution. (Here’s another Friedman article on designing Four-Way Win experiments.)
In 2005, Friedman’s team analyzed 300 business professionals and the results are within this graph:
So the basic result, then, is like this:
Cool, right? The concern is that this was based on 300 individuals, and done in 2005. 300 people is a relatively small sample size and 2005 was pre-crash; attitudes about work post-crash are a little different, because I’d argue more people are worried about their performance and not losing their job, especially if they’re close to retirement. Even though it’s extraordinarily hard to fire people in America (as one example), people always seem to use that fear and put more of their life into work — and less into what should matter, i.e. family, community, and self.
Friedman himself lists the barriers to seeking Four-Way Wins as fear, ignorance, and guilt. That’s a good list, if terrifying. I’d honestly also add “human nature.” People come up with one set of beliefs (likely from their parents/primary caregivers), and those beliefs adjust because of their friends and experiences. Thing is, a lot of your friends tend to be clustered socioeconomically, and your experiences could be broad — but might not be — and that’s why there’s this fear that maybe we’re all entering a “filter bubble” (or “algorithm bubble”). I think it takes a long time for people to change their belief about what they need to be doing at work — people tend to put a lot of emphasis there, which is why you end up seeing couples adopt “no screen” policies at night or whatever. Couples shouldn’t have to do that; the reason it happens is because work becomes a priority relative to family, community, and self. This happens often, especially in the middle class.
If you take the Friedman work on face, then all you’re trying to do is align the four areas. You don’t necessarily have to prioritize work less; you just need to bring it into a context with the other three areas. Here’s how Friedman himself summarizes:
Barriers to creating meaningful changes in where you focus your attention — your most precious resource — are real, and there are ways to surmount them. Take action that’s within your control and that you believe will benefit the people who matter most to you in all the different parts of your life, gather data on your impact, and continually adjust so you’re increasingly able to do what’s good for you and for them. Your mindset will shift as you start to see more opportunities for realistic four-way wins. You just have to look for them, as a leader, in all parts of your life, by doing the basics: Envision a better future and bring others along with you.
The last line is awesome: Envision a better future and bring others along with you.
Shouldn’t we all be chasing that?
This requires work on your part: figure out what you want to focus on, how you want to track it, how you want to evaluate it, etc. You need to do that and, in the process, take time away from answering e-mails from stakeholders and the like. It’s challenging. But if you even remotely believe those satisfaction/performance numbers, why not try?
What else would you say about “meaning?”