Searching for Meaning in the “Meaningless”

Why I think there is no such thing as anything meaningless

Photo by Grant Jacobson on Unsplash

I read something recently that stuck with me. It was describing people finding meaning in the meaningless. So I stopped to ask myself, what is meaningless?

I think the answer is simple. Anything “meaningless” can have meaning when viewed from the right angle and with the right information at hand. Any collection of physical things is meaningless, unless you define them in terms that you understand. The ideas of matter, physics, etc. is all easier to grasp because the meaning can be physically verified by multiple people. I will define this as Physical Meaning.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

So that is one class of “meaningless”. Let’s examine another. Imagine all of the event that have happened to you in the past week. If that is all the structure I provide, there is a jumble of events that may or may not be related. So let’s add some more structure. Take those events, put them in chronological order, and look for cause/effect chains. Some cause/effect chains will be more obvious than others, but that is okay. We are able to understand meaning by carefully framing our environment in a certain way. I will define this as…