Meaning

This is kind of connected to the last post... in that it's tied to my thoughts about experiencing as a way to find meaning... rather than trying to find meaning through stories or data or success or what have you.

I'm reading The Myth of the Normal by Gabor Mate and his son Daniel Mate. In one of the chapters they discuss the loss of meaning. In talking of the lessons of the pandemic, he says that what he draws from it is the importance of connection, which the globalised materialistic culture has drained from modern life. Without connection, they say we suffer a spiritual impoverishment which impacts health dramatically (mental and physical). There's an absence of social feeling, of belonging to a common enterprise with a shared destiny. They say that love, trust, social conscious and engagements are inevitable casualties of a culture that prizes acquisition above all else. Pathology cannot but ensue, they argue, from a society that derides social connectedness. Connectedness, they seem to suggest, is intimately linked with meaningfulness.

Here's a good bit: if a gene or virus were found that caused the same negative impact on well-being as disconnection the news would bellow from every headline - but we think it is normal to be mere individuals, striving to obtain private goals. They say humans need belonging, relatedness or connectedness; autonomy, a sense of control in one's life; mastery or competence; genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition or the regard of others; trust, a sense of having the personal and social resources to sustain one through life and purpose, meaning, transcendence (knowing oneself as part of something larger than one's isolated, self-centred concerns).

Basically, the book suggests that our culture normalises the absence of all this. In response, we get sick, get addicted and get depressed, anxious, hyper and so on.

I think this makes it kind of complicated. Consider a fox. She doesn't think of these abstract terms, she just lives, breeds, eats, gets injured, heals (or not), rests, cares for cubs, plays with cubs, fails to catch something, gets sick, gets well (or not) and dies. So did we. But now we have all this other shit in the way - work, performance, ideologies and beliefs and information. Instead of relying on what we can know directly - senses and experiences - we have to learn stuff that somebody else may or may not have known directly. We have all these concepts that get in the way and we ask ourselves question that distance us from what we are experiencing (do I really want to be here? is this right for me? what do others think?)

We are separated from our environment and so we think of it as THE environment. A thing that can be defined in words and numbers. Because we have lost the ability to experience it. If we experienced it we would know what was wrong (there's no space! the air is polluted! the water is polluted! the birds are silent!). If we experienced it we would be filled with meaning because what is just is what it means.

I'm talking shite.

But when I watched the muntjac in the photo, I knew she was vigilant in case of danger - there were moments of stress - but then she would eat and the stress had gone. She was just eating. She was connected to place, had control of her actions, was competent to find food and hear predators, her sense of self was dependent on no externals, she could trust her senses and she had purpose - simply, to live.