The Hidden Gift in Meaninglessness
Photograph of a small Golden Retriever puppy sitting in a field of grass. She’s looking off to the side and out into the distance with a delightfully thoughtful and maybe even wistful look on her face. There’s a thought bubble above her head that says “sigh… I don’t even know what I am anymore.”
What would you say that’s a picture of? You might say “it’s a dog,” or “a puppy,” or maybe “the primary source of all poop that I pick up.” Or maybe you’d say it’s “a best friend,” or that it’s “cute.” And maybe you’d say “it’s food.”
Those are wildly different relationships to the same thing, aren’t they? So, which of those is it really?
In the movie Birdman, Michael Keaton’s character has a quote on his mirror that offers a clue to this sort of conundrum.
A screenshot from the movie Birdman where Michael Keaton is sitting in his dressing room in front of his mirror. He looks troubled. There’s a small printout in the corner of his mirror which reads “A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.”
That’s a pretty pithy and memorable way to say that the actuality of something is not what we think or say about it. And taking that a step further, what we think about something and what that thing actually is frequently has nothing in common.
Every person is observing life from a unique perspective, and this is easy to understand because every one of us is literally occupying a unique position in the universe. And this isn’t just a philosophical statement — that’s the way it is for everything. Where you’re standing in a house determines how much of the house you can see, and what is true of your ability to see the entirety of that house is true about life as a whole.
We can only see what we can see from where we’re standing, and every single one of us has a slightly different view.
The cup and the baby buffalo
Before we talk about the cup and the baby buffalo story you’re probably familiar with, the image below does a great job of showing how our perspectives can dramatically affect what we’re perceiving.
A grayscale illustration of a cylindrical object floating in the corner of a plain room. There are two walls behind it that show the shadows of the object from two different light sources. On the right wall, the shadow that appears makes the object look like it’s round, but on the left wall, the shadow makes it appear that the object is square. This illustration demonstrates that how things appear from a certain perspective is not always an accurate impression of what it actually is.
From where Person A is standing, they’d say “it’s a square,” but from Person B’s position, they’d say “Wait, what?! It’s a circle!” Cue a century-long bloody war about the “true” nature of the floating object.
Ok, now let’s talk about the story of the cup and the baby buffalo. The story goes that a baby buffalo was walking through a field when it encountered a cup, and she was really curious about this new object. It was unlike anything she’d seen before.
What was it?! Some sort of weird cactus? A rock? You and I know that a cup is for holding liquid, but this was completely lost on the baby buffalo.
A colorful cartoon drawing of baby buffalo standing in a field of grass with friendly green hills off in the distance. Puffy white clouds are floating in a soft blue sky, and there’s a coffee mug on the grass in front of the baby buffalo with the words “I love muffins” printed on it. The baby buffalo is looking at the coffee mug and saying “huh” in a curious and perplexed fashion.
Ok, to be fair, that wasn’t really from a well-known story — I just made it up because I wanted to draw a baby buffalo. But the point of the story is that a cup is only a cup to you and me because we’ve created a story about it, and we’re both agreeing to participate in that story together.
If a thing is a thing to both you and me, it’s only that thing because both of us are agreeing on a particular story about it.
Pop quiz!
So, have you picked up on the radically profound implication here? I’ll give you a hint (or, you know… the answer):
Nothing in existence has any inherent meaning.
That isn’t a nihilistic statement, and I think it’s important to clarify that “meaning” and “value” are different things. Just because something doesn’t have meaning built into it doesn’t mean that it’s “meaningless” or lacks inherent value, it just means that it’s up to us to decide what that thing means to us.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait. So we can choose what the things we encounter and experience mean to us?!” -Bob from Accounting
Correct.
The universe is a big, huge, giant, infinite, and constantly transforming Rorschach blot
In clinical settings, Rorschach blots help show how a patient’s mind is interpreting the world by revealing the subjective meaning they give to a meaningless blob of ink. This projection of meaning is exactly the same as what we’re doing automatically, all the time, with everything that we encounter.
A photograph of a Rorschach blot. It’s black ink smeared on a white piece of paper that’s been folded in half to smoosh the ink into an abstract shape. When they folded the paper with wet ink on it, it created a mirrored pattern of the ink as it spread out across the paper.
You and I are meaning generating and projecting creatures, and the delay between our seeing something and giving it meaning is so small that it’s practically imperceptible to us. This is a remarkable power with staggering implications, but so few people navigate the world with a conscious awareness that this is what they’re doing.
So many of us move through our lives feeling knocked around by the world’s demands of us, believing we have to be what society’s narrative or our culture says about us. We’ve all been handed countless misguided fantasies, many of them first showing up when we were still very small, and these fictions were delivered with authority as though they were facts.
Fictions like:
You’re a girl, and your emotions make you unreasonable… so you can’t be good at math or science.
You’re a boy, and your emotions make you weak… so you need to stuff them down and be aggressive and dominant.
Young people are beautiful and interesting… but your value diminishes as you age.
Old people are slow and inconvenient… they’re obsolete and just taking up space."
I innocently believed elements of those stories for such a long time because they were hammered into me by everyone around me and the cultural myths I was surrounded by (e.g., movies, TV shows, advertisements, the news, and what my parents and their friends said). It took me so many years to locate those informational weeds and pull them up, but through that process, I realized I have the power to choose what stories I keep, and which I discard.
We inherit information from others that is not of our making. A great deal of it is beautiful, useful, and helpful, and a great deal of it is not. It’s not easy to master the art of consciously choosing how we’re going to define the events of our lives and what information we’re going to allow into our psyche, but it also wasn’t easy when we learned how to read, speak, or walk. But those things are probably so easy for you now that you don’t even notice when you’re doing them.
Life is what we make of it. That’s not just a bumper sticker platitude, it’s a profound fact about this beautiful “life” thing we currently find ourselves blessed to experience. So today, let’s think about how we can tell ourselves some better stories. I promise that I will, and I hope that you will, too.
Until next time, be kind to yourself, to each other, and venture fearlessly into the awesomeness that is your life.
Question for you...
Were you already familiar with the idea that nothing has inherent meaning before reading this post? If you were, do you find that idea comforting? If you weren’t, is that idea something that makes sense to you? I’d love to hear about it in a comment below. 👇🏻