Making meaning better

Modernity is hard mode

To live a fulfilling life, most humans need to feel conviction that they are a part of, and contributing to, something bigger than themselves. Historically, we’d derive this feeling through activities like making shoes or bread or fishing rods or other goods that those around us found useful, adhering to elaborate rules of diet or dress or speech in obeisance to gods and traditions, and raising children to learn our trades and honor our gods and carry on our traditions.

Somewhat infamously, modern atomized godless capitalist etc society has made it harder to access these traditional paths to purpose and meaning.¹ It’s harder to feel conviction that we are useful to other people, because labor is divided so finely that we can’t intuitively grasp its value: a random admin worker in a mature market economy may in fact provide more practical benefit to other humans than the local carpenter in a village 700 years ago,² but their impact is distributed across millions of people they won’t ever meet and blends chaotically with millions of other micro-impacts from different strangers. It’s harder to feel conviction in our religious practices, because of the thing where we realized religion isn’t actually true.³ We are still hardwired to enjoy our kids, but it’s harder to feel conviction in starting a family when it’s no longer the life path dictated by religion and tradition.⁴

I never really got to experience the normal modern ennui, or grapple with the challenge of creating one’s own meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe in its classic existentialist form. I short-circuited all that when I found EA in high school.

I immediately oriented to the EA canon as pretty much the literal word of God. Part of the gospel was that the point of all this was emphatically not to derive a sense of purpose in life from the practice of EA, but to actually do the best thing, whatever it was and however you felt about it.⁵ But in making this point, early EA evangelists often chose safe punching bags — causes like giving to the opera, or Harvard, or the hypothetical Center for Curing Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies, that their audience would not find particularly meaningful. Meanwhile, the idea that I could save multiple babies every year just by donating a modest amount of the income I could expect to make felt astoundingly meaningful to me. I completely reshaped my life around it.

But over time, I’ve come to derive much less emotional meaning from my practice of EA, even as I increased my actual impact a lot.⁶ It turned out that there’s no simple formula to morality, the most important cause area is extremely abstruse and riddled with fundamental question marks, and most paths to impact probably won’t work and many could easily cause massive harm. And as I learned more and increased my discernment, I came to have significant reservations about pretty much every organization and leader that I would have previously followed energetically and unquestioningly.

And all of this also just…became more of an actual job. My brain is filled not with awe at the importance of the mission and gratitude at being in a position to contribute to it, but preoccupied by emails and office politics and project management. This is as it should be; the point is to do my job well, and stressing about a million details is the bread and butter of doing any job well.

I continue to believe that providing me with a sense of purpose is not the point of my work, and I haven’t stopped doing it.⁷ But in the early days of my EA journey, I had this youthful arrogance that the whole idea of people “needing” to feel a sense of “purpose” or “meaning” was bullshit, that I didn’t care about any of that or indeed understand what it even was. I now think this may have been a bit like a fish loudly announcing that it didn’t believe in water. If anything, I probably crave these things far more than the typical person⁸ — after all, that confession scene from Fleabag was one of the most relatable (and hottest) three minutes of TV in the last decade.

I've been trying to listen more to this need. I've carved out more space for nurturing sources of meaning that don't route through my day job: writing here on Good Bones, participating in more music and ritual in groups, doing beautiful things for my friends and community. But my journey very much feels incomplete. I would like to do for all this Singularity stuff what Carl Sagan did for the scientific materialist understanding of the universe, or what Milton Friedman (and Adam Smith) tried to do for the global market economy. As I build my skill at meaning-making, I hope to close the loop, and ground the actual work I do for the sake of impact in a deeper sense of purpose.

1. Honestly, we have very little evidence about how purposeful or meaningful people’s lives felt in the distant past, and there’s always a temptation to view the past through rose-colored glasses. Many of our ancestors’ lives were probably spiritually bleak in addition to (and because of) being materially deprived, dangerous, and unfree. However, other things being equal, I do believe there is something to the dynamic I’m describing — I’d bet there’s some set of emotional needs it’s harder to fulfill if you have a more secular worldview, more personal choice, weaker life scripts, and more transactional and impersonal relationships.

2. They are very likely adding much more value denominated in dollars, but of course the people these dollars flow to are much richer (and thus stand to benefit much less from marginal consumption) than Medieval peasants.

3. Some takeslingers want us to respond to the modern crisis of meaning by converting to Catholicism so we can RETVRN to a Godly life, but it’s just much less satisfying to try to live by God’s word when you understand in the back of your mind that you made up God so you could have Someone’s word to live by.

4. And comes at the expense of much more entertaining leisure options than our ancestors had.

5. This from Something to Protect has always stuck with me: “Similarly, in Western real life, unhappy people are told that they need a “purpose in life”, so they should pick out an altruistic cause that goes well with their personality, like picking out nice living-room drapes, and this will brighten up their days by adding some color, like nice living-room drapes. You should be careful not to pick something too expensive, though.”

6. Padme: Positive impact, right?

7. Though I did take a few months off in the fall of 2024, in significant part because I had somewhat exhausted my “meaning tank” and had to refill it.

8. Holding comfort and safety roughly equal, it’s plausible that I would have been much happier if I had been raised in some intense religious community that told me exactly what I needed to do to follow the will of God, and I could find no fault in their worldview. I wouldn’t want that, because I want to actually help people and have contact with reality. Also, realistically, such a religious community would have been poor and brutish and it would overall be bad.