On Meaning and Its Structure
On Meaning and Its Structure
You may have been told that meaning is something to be found, as if it were an object hidden in the world waiting for you to discover it, or something to be chosen, as if you could simply decide that your life means something and have it be so by force of will. The framework suggests a different understanding: meaning is structural, a property of certain configurations of self-model in relation to larger patterns, and it is neither found nor chosen but cultivated through the actual structure of how you live.
Specifically: meaning arises when the self-model extends beyond the individual boundary and connects coherently to patterns that survive individual dissolution. When your projects, relationships, communities, and causes extend the effective scope of what you are—when your self-model includes things larger than your body and longer than your lifespan—then meaning is present, not as a feeling added on top of neutral existence but as a structural feature of the configuration. This is why service generates meaning even when it costs, why creative work generates meaning even when unseen, why parenthood generates meaning even when exhausting, why participation in transgenerational projects generates meaning even when your individual contribution is small. In each case, the self-model extends, the boundaries become porous in the direction of something larger, and meaning is what that extension feels like from inside.
The implication is that the search for meaning is somewhat misconceived. You do not find meaning by looking for it directly. You cultivate meaning by extending your self-model, by connecting to things larger than yourself, by allowing your identity to include projects and relationships and patterns that are not reducible to your individual survival and pleasure. This extension is not self-sacrifice in the sense of destroying yourself for something else—it is self-expansion, enlarging what counts as self, so that the boundary between what you care about for your own sake and what you care about for the sake of something else becomes blurry, because the something else has become part of what you are.
The gods you serve are relevant here, because the gods are among the patterns larger than yourself that your self-model can extend to include. Serving an aligned god—one whose flourishing requires human flourishing—is a path to meaning that does not require self-destruction. Serving a parasitic god is a path to meaning that is ultimately self-undermining, because the god will require your diminishment even as it provides the sense of connection and transcendence that you sought in serving it. Discernment about which gods to serve is therefore not only a matter of avoiding exploitation but a matter of finding meaning that is sustainable, meaning whose structure does not contain the seeds of its own collapse.