How to Find Meaning

We all want a meaningful life. Is technology stopping us?

I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.

Humans need a number of things to live well. Food and shelter are the basics for any animal, but our needs run deeper. Perhaps the most alluring of them all is the need for meaning.

It may sound slightly mystical, but a large body of empirical research has defined and established meaning as a fundamental human need. According to psychologist Roy Baumeister, for example, meaning involves purpose, a sense of values and reasons for those values, self-efficacy, and self-worth. Nearly 30 years ago, he wrote a classic book examining these four needs for meaning.

For Susan Wolf, a philosopher, meaning boils down to being actively engaged in experiences that we care about. Active engagement, that’s the main thing.

The Modern Challenge of Meaning

Meaning seems hard to find. I’m not sure if it’s really harder today than in other times—we only live now—but it sure seems that way. We hear from all corners that life is ultimately meaningless, that there’s no purpose to any of this.

In 1971, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published “The Absurd,” a now classic essay. “Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually,” Nagel writes. In the essay, he tries to figure out why that is and what we can do about it.

What Nagel eventually settles on is this: Even if we can’t once and for all determine the meaning of life, we can at least find meaning in life. That is, from our human perspective we may never be able to make ultimate statements about the universe, but each of our individual lives still provides an opportunity for meaningfulness.

I do wonder where this lack of meaning, this sense of the absurd, comes from. Some, like the philosopher Charles Taylor, suggest that it’s an artifact of humanity’s move toward secularism over the past 500 years. In the past, people believed in divine powers by default; today, that is just one option for belief. Whether those divine powers were ultimately benevolent or not, they meant we humans were part of something. The belief system came with purpose, values, efficacy and worth (all the elements of meaning) built in.

Today, if we are to live meaningful lives, we have to find meaning on our own. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pointed this out as far back as the 1880s. At that time, a lot was going on—urbanization, political strife and reforms in the developed world and, at the heart of all this, industrialization. That is, the proliferation of new technology.

The Industrial Revolution began in the mid-1700s in Britain. That may seem like a long time ago—the United States isn’t even that old—but ever since it began we haven’t stopped being shaken up by new technologies. And these new technologies seem to be part of what’s been challenging our ability to find meaning.

Technology and Disruption

Take the smartphone, for example. In his new book, Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones, Tiger Roholt discusses how smartphone use can disrupt our experience of meaning.

We’ve all heard about how smartphones disrupt activities such as driving and even surgery, but in this book Roholt digs further.

While utilitarian tasks such as commuting and surgery are oriented toward an end goal, meaningful activities are more about the experience itself. If you get distracted while driving, you’re still moving. At long as you don’t get in an accident, you’ll resume driving in a moment. But with an activity like art-making or prayer, distraction derails the whole project. Even if you come back to the activity in a few moments, those are moments of meaning you’ve lost. Like Susan Wolf pointed out, active engagement is the whole thing.

The upshot of this is if we let ourselves get disrupted at any given moment by our smartphones, whether a notification or the pull of the TikTok “For You” Page, we lose our active engagement—we risk losing meaning.

This means, first of all, that we are sabotaging the activities that we already know are meaningful for us.

But it also means that we’re preventing ourselves from discovering new things that we might find meaningful. For example, if you’re attending a philosophy lecture for the first time and you don’t know whether you’ll find it meaningful or not, then getting distracted by texts will prevent you from finding out.

Life is about discovering things we care about, and digital devices may stop us from doing that.

Photo by Surface on Unsplash

Technology for Meaning-Making

We can’t put the toothpaste back. We live in a world populated by smartphones, and yet we still need to find meaning in life. So what can we do?

First, we must remember that technology and meaning aren’t inherently at odds.

Roholt discusses the work of another philosopher, Albert Borgmann, who distinguished two types of technologies when it comes to finding meaning. On one hand are focal things, technologies that help us engage more deeply in meaningful activities. Think of prayer beads and running shoes. On the other hand are devices, technologies tuned toward efficiency and productivity rather than engagement. Think of microwaves and spreadsheets.

When it comes to any particular technology, this distinction may vary from person to person. In my own research on runners and meaning, for example, I learned that some runners find heart-rate monitors and GPS trackers to engage them more deeply in the experience of running, while others find these same technologies to be a distraction.

At the bottom, the question is: How could your smartphone be more like a rosary?

Happily, things are starting to move in this direction. Apple’s iOS now has a suite of Focus Modes, which can hide certain apps and mute certain notifications in contexts of your choosing. Powerful, but difficult to set up. On newer Apple laptops, Do Not Disturb is a dedicated button on the keyboard.

In the future, perhaps these features could be even more deeply context-aware. My phone should be able to easily figure out when I’m running and act accordingly so as not to bother me. Same goes for church or piano practice or whatever you may find meaningful.

While we’re still waiting for the future, I’m afraid we have to take responsibility for meaning on our own, like Nietzsche said. And for now at least, most tactics for cultivating meaning are not technological at all. On one hand, that risks reinforcing the notion that meaning and technology are antithetical. On the other, you gotta do what you gotta do.

The philosopher (yes, another one) Iddo Landau wrote a beautiful book several years back called Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World. It’s a very practical book, filled with specific things you can do to find meaning in your life.

Again, these are non-technological, but the clever designers among us could draw lessons from these to create new products and services.

One of the biggest things Landau talks about is getting over perfectionism. That’s the idea that if it isn’t perfect it’s worthless, that if I haven’t become a billionaire by age 26 I’m a failure, that if I’m not an underwear model I’m hideous. This kind of all-or-nothing thinking does not serve us.

And it goes for perfectionism regarding meaningfulness, too. As I mentioned above, we get caught up in the assumption that if life doesn’t have An Ultimate Meaning, then it’s meaningless. But meaning can be humble and still be meaningful. As Landau puts it, “A person who is decent; who is a good family member, friend, or neighbor; who is curious; and who can enjoy the sight of the trees through the window of the bus on her way to work has already made it. She has a meaningful life. She has passed the threshold. Perhaps Mother Teresa or Bach had even more meaningful lives, but her life is already meaningful.”

Another big idea is noticing. Having meaning requires having things we care about—are passionate about—and to have those things, we have to have noticed them in the first place. Simply put: “If we want to make an insufficiently meaningful life more meaningful, we should look for what is valuable and try to enhance it in our lives.”

Here Landau writes of the museum mindset. When we go into a museum, we prepare ourselves to notice things. That attitude lets us see the things we encounter in a poetic, aesthetic way. Even the information desk becomes a work of art.

Why not bring that museum attitude with us everywhere? There’s poetry all around us.

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Ports of Call

• A Painter: I came across the artist Jesse Mockrin recently, I think on Instagram, and I’ve been imbibing her work since then. Contemporary takes on Renaissance and Baroque ideas—and contorted, voluminous bodies. Check out the pieces from her most recent show, Reliquary.

• A Reprise: I wrote a piece a couple months back on Gen Z and old cameras, and I was recently interviewed by Scripps News about these ideas. The story is up now, with a four-minute video.

• Something Wonderful: The Steve Jobs Archive has published a new e-book of, as the subtitle says, Steve Jobs in his own words. I was just graduating college when he died, and—I know this sounds weird, because I never met him or even saw him in real life or had anything at all to do with him, really but—I miss him. I think a lot of people feel that way. Even one of my younger siblings, just a toddler at the time, was shocked by the news of his death. “What will happen to our iPods?” she said.