“I read your latest essay.” Arms crossed, eyes ablaze. “I don’t think you get it. At. All. I really don’t.”
I’d met Sophie, one of my mentees, for what I’d thought was going to be a pleasant chat over good coffee on a perfect autumn day.
“Meaning,” she muttered, staring darkly into her cup. And then glaring at me, continued, “What planet are you on? I’ve got student debt, credit card debt, an underpaid so-called job that makes me nauseous, a broken car, and a failing relationship.”
“Meaning,” she said again. This time, with scorn and a sneer. “Is a luxury. One that I can’t afford — and probably never will be able to. That’s reality outside the gilded cage and ivory tower. Get it?”.
Many of us, I’d bet, feel like this: in a hardscrabble age of austerity, the search for meaning is an unaffordable self-indulgence, the torrid affair that painfully breaks up the quietly satisfying marriage, an idly romantic daydream, the jackpot whose price is misfortune; that if one is to survive another lost decade, searching for meaning is something like mining the fools’ gold of life.
But she wasn’t done with me yet. “What about the Mumbai slum-dweller?,” she challenged, raising her eyebrows. “Should he seek meaning? Is he going to find a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s candy factory of meaning amidst the rubbish heaps? Isn’t it a ludicrous fantasy to ask those struggling to eke out subsistence to live on meaning? Can you fill your belly and your wallet with meaning? Isn’t meaning just the ultimate first world problem, just another saccharine flavor of: hey, which color leather should I choose for my new luxury SUV to match my plush designer handbag?”
Man, let me tell you. I felt a little like Chris Rock going to the bar only to get waterboarded by the genetically engineered nightmare child of John Boehner, Dick Cheney, the ghost of Ted Nugent, and Darth Maul.
Most of us, I’d bet, are something like naive Maslovians — we subscribe to a theory of human motivation, and human values, that line up altogether too neatly with Maslow’s famous pyramid, without considering the deeper nuances of his insights. The naïve Maslovian story goes something like this: choose your lower needs over your higher wants, and you’ll lead a materially rich — but emotionally and spiritually unsatisfying life. Meaning is a luxury — but it’s one, like a good watch, car, or handbag, you’d be wise to enjoy at some point.
I’d like to tell a different story: one in which meaning isn’t merely a luxury, but a necessity. While it’s true that we must fill our bellies, and our minds, it’s equally — if not more — vital that we should fill, to the very brim, our lives. With the searing sense that they have counted in human terms; with the mighty grace and quiet power of meaning.
What happens in a society that calls meaning a luxury — like a fleet of private jets, a dalliance reserved for the ranks of the idle rich?
As “consumers” we shop for the “everyday low price” — without regard for the vitality the butcher, the baker, and the barber bring to our communities, our families, and our lives.
As citizens, we reduce our civic selves to “voting” for the “candidate” who represents our most immediate, narrowest, perhaps self-destructive self-interest — the common good be damned.
As “workers,” “executives,” or “leaders,” we become little more than instruments serving the glacial goals of blind machines; puppets of shareholders, marionettes of markets, much less than thinking, feeling, judging beings, who stand tall for a more enduring and worthy ethos, even in the face of adversity, hardship, and disaster.
And so our economies, societies, and polities; our cities and towns; our culture and principles; our imagined future and intended present begin to fray and buckle and crack. That, of course, is the timeless parable of right here, right now, the dismal, failed status quo.
Meaning, then, is something like a responsibility — not merely a need. It resides and resounds, like the human experience, between us. It transcends the narrow confines of the self — and connects us, through the power of grace and purpose, to the human world around us. It is the act of investing in what we profess to care about; in caring about what we profess to love; in not merely “expressing our values,” but valuing that which is worthwhile in lasting human terms, and so arcing the trajectory of not just our own tiny lives, but those of the people around us, towards the just-glimpsed sunrise of mattering.
Let me put that more sharply. “Let the devil take the hindmost” — it’s famously the perfect expression of every great bubble through human history; and when meaning is a luxury, not a necessity, just another urge to satisfy, not a responsibility to master, our set of human action sums to something like a furiously pumped-up futility bubble; of the banal, trivial, and false, filled to bursting point, at the expense of the worthy, noble, and true. We become con men stalking the dull gray perimeter of human potential, dime-store looters of the fullness of the human self; Ponzi-schemers of the human soul, inflating a bubble of Machiavellian narcissism, which, when it bursts, leaves us with little more than hazy memories of lives which as if they’ve barely touched the sunlit peaks of living — because the unforgiving truth is that they haven’t. When meaning comes last, we sleepwalk through our lives, zombies pirouetting in an empty theatre of choice.
The revolutionary psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon once famously wrote of “the wretched of the earth.” The slum-dwellers and migrant workers; the indentured servants and child labourers; the subsistence farmers and the three billion who live on less than $2.50 a day: these are today’s wretched of the suffering, straining earth. They’re as invisible to you and I, in our glittering business-class titanium bubbles, as the earth is to the distant stars; just so much human rubble that we cruise past, over, beyond.
To deny one responsibility is to deny one the power of agency. And to suggest that the slum-dweller, the migrant worker, the forgotten billions, can’t and shouldn’t be concerned with meaning is to relegate the wretched of the earth to mere consumers; to rob them of their fuller potential; to reduce “them” to less than fully human — and so, in the process, to draw a crude distinction, to dehumanize “us” as mere vessels of need, rather than authors of destiny — in the rawest sense.
For meaning is the essence of what it means to be human; you and I, homo sapiens, search constantly for tiny flickers of meaning in every tangle and buzz of the world around us, and it defines our experience not just as living things — but as human beings.
It isn’t a first world problem — but a human challenge. Should one see it as a luxury — and McFood, mega-malls, and debt payments as the necessity — one is mistaking the cubefarm for the open road; the kiss for the feeling; the price for the point.
You and I, each and every one of us, have not merely the slack-jawed consumer’s need to live pleasurably, but the enduring human responsibility to live lives that matter. Not for the sake of our own evanescent self-gratification, but for the enduring obligation of fulfilling, one tiny act of furious purpose at a time, the humbling privilege of life.
“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves,” Fanon once famously argued. If you and I, despite our iStuff and internet, our wealth and tranquility, are oppressed — not merely relegated by the failure of our institutions to McFutures, stagnation, and lost generations, but subjugated by a broken paradigm of what it means to live well, to becoming emotionally stunted, socially blunted, willing to embrace, like an old friend, the diminution of the fullness of our potential — then perhaps it’s by denigrating meaning, the essence of the human experience, to the status of a sumptuous handbag or a shiny watch that we became something like our own perfect army of oppressors.
And perhaps the greatest injustice we can do to the world’s wretched is to ask them to be consumers first, and humans last; to invite them to join us in this nihilistically relentless spin cycle of self-loathing, where “they,” for now, can merely hope to be disposable “workers” who make trinkets to satisfy “our” insatiably empty appetites; perhaps the greatest tiny act of grace we can offer one another, rich or poor, is the promise of better lives, in the fullest, truest, and noblest — not merely the narrowest, emptiest, and falsest — sense. Perhaps that’s what love — and revolution — is.
No — you can’t fill your belly with meaning. Nor can you fill a life with McJunk. Yes — when it comes to life, especially in the teeth of great adversity, one must be savagely pragmatic, relentlessly realistic, hard-nosed, tough-jawed. And there’s little more pragmatic than, especially under the Medusa’s gaze of misfortune and hardship, looking up, just for a moment, and breathing in the sky.
UMAIR HAQUE
Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He is ranked one of the world's most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. Follow him on twitter @umairh.
