The weirdest part about growing up so far, both in my personal and professional spheres of life, is the dull, yet pervasive, sense of confusion. Questioning whether or not the decisions made thus far have been principled, the learnings from mistakes substantial, the future reasoned, and the process to internal satisfaction understood. Confusion in its many incarnations. Typically slumbering in the back corners of the mind, assuming the same itchy cognitive load as that of a healing papercut - but flooding in during a train ride home after your phone has died, abandoning you to the full force of your own conscience. 

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.” - Jack Kerouac, On The Road

The fundamental questions of human meaning haven’t really changed much since the beginning of civilization - when humanity finally got wealthy enough to begin exploring the self actualization aspect of existence. What is a well-lived life? What is virtue? Why should one sacrifice? How does the society we create fit into these ideas?

In our much more secular and democratic world, it's become harder to answer such questions. Pre-enlightenment we looked towards the monarch, devotion to the City, or the religious leader, devotion to the Church, to define meaning, sacrifice, and virtue. It’s easy to see, even in the modern day, how powerful the City and Church can be in defining something greater than oneself and influencing a person to act against their self-preservational instinct. Referencing the level of corrupt behavior historically displayed by these institutions is not an inditement on how stupid the medieval man was, but rather how emotionally attached a human is to things that offer purpose.

A consequence of the post-enlightenment thought, exemplified by the proliferation of classical liberal values (not the current political sense of the word) in the late 20th century, was the transfiguration of the emotional mortal to the rational individual. The newly minted Homo Econimus. Implying a framework that meaning was found in the social contract and sacrifice was in the context of serving the market. We would have no more holy wars because killing each other over things uneconomic was, naturally, unprofitable. Denying the problematic nature of humanity.

With such a framework in mind, 9/11 should not have happened. After all, the perpetrators were not impoverished farmers in Africa, or destitute nomads in Nepal, but rather western college educated, wealthy oil barons. If Bin Laden was born in America, he would have been a Rockefeller. And surely people of such background would rationally reject the role of violence in finding religious truth in a new globally dependent, market driven society. Yet the terrorist attack did happen, the westernization policies championed by the UN failed, and we are forced to realize that questions of meaning and virtue are not just private questions respectable citizens don’t talk about, but rather fundamental to our existence and capable of creating significant disturbance to the predominant social order. 

I take you on this slight historical detour as it is the same one I went down when realizing the importance of these questions for myself, and it feels like a fun, quixotic parallel between our generation’s bildungsroman, and the general maturation of the human civilization. 

To go from the macro to the micro - after a particularly bad bender of a weekend, I followed my intellectual curiosity and went to a Christian mass. My previous religious exposure was largely limited to Hindu rituals, so this was really my first time experiencing a monotheistic setting. While I’m sure that each church is different, I was quite struck by the welcoming atmosphere, the obvious passion of the church leaders, the honesty of the questions they could explore during a sermon knowing that ultimately we are all equal in the eyes of God, and finally the level of sincerity they seemed to have when answering deep emotional questions. It's quite astonishing to realize that such an institution has survived two millennia of wars, persecution, ridicule, and scandal. This Jesus Christ fella must’ve been a helluva guy. 

When you interact with a truly devout individual, you can’t help but pick up on a profound sense of calm emanating from them. As the Sikh say “Once you realize God knows everything, you’re free.” I crave that sense of peacefulness and meaningfulness badly. Nothing seems to culturally match the epochal return of religion than the juxtaposition of Kanye West’s new album called Jesus is King, where he praises Christian virtue, with current megastar Billie Eilish’s song called “all the good girls go to hell.” Consider this excerpt from Selah on his new album:

“God is King, we the soldiers

Ultrabeam out the solar

When I get to Heaven's gates

I ain’t gotta peek over

Keepin' perfect composure

When I scream at the chauffeur

I ain't mean, I’m just focused

I ain't mean, I'm just focused

Pour the lean out slower

Got us clean out of soda

Before the flood, people judge

They did the same thing to Noah

Everybody wanted Yandhi

Then Jesus Christ did the laundry

They say the week start on Monday

But the strong start on Sunday

Won't be in bondage to any man

John 8:33

We the descendants of Abraham

Ye should be made free

John 8:36

To whom the son set free is free indeed

He saved a wretch like me”

This is some real powerful stuff and a fascinatingly divisive point in culture. 

While Christianity is intellectually interesting in its linear view of time and the virtuous scapegoat figure represented by Jesus Christ, there’s far too much baggage of it as a religion for me to ever truly believe in it. I feel a similar way about most major world religions, and I imagine I’m not alone in that. I don’t doubt that with the changing political and technological global landscape will see a resurgence in the religious, but the social trend is going to manifest in new ways. People are going to look elsewhere for such answers. Unreligious religious entities consisting of fake real prophets. 

I’m reading a book called “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Edward Frankl and in the foreward lies this interesting quote:

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.”

From the caste system in Hinduism, to the virtuous work ethic character in Protestantism, religion was the sole answer in providing meaning for suffering. At a societal level, the religions that succeeded did a fantastic job of aligning meaning with the wellbeing of the civilization. A weird, social, invisible hand. Among the modern, secular individual, perhaps people find the answer in identity politics and in the social war for their definition of justice. The other fairly new, but massive, trend would be the environmental movement, which interestingly enough reasserts moral principles founded upon science as a critique of the market. And like the religious leaders predicting Armageddon brought on by God, the environmentalist marks the end of times through a correction by nature. Both laying the cause on the folly of mankind. 

At the core, my generation is struggling with finding deep meaning. It’s hard to reconcile working on something significant with the eventual heat death of the universe, in love with its cheap devaluation in a world full of options, and in courage where both sacrifice to the City or Church is seen as illogical. Such dissonance leads naturally to confusion. Comedically expressed and consumed in a self deprecating and casually created meme culture. 

I struggle with these questions and have yet to find my personal answer. It does seem though that as social beings, meaning for us is often brought in at the community level, and we derive it from the communities in which we belong and contribute to. Perhaps its an extension of work given meaning in direct relation to the things we humbly accept we love. I see a huge future in social tech that can provide an open platform for people to discover and invest (not only money) into communities that they really believe, and for community leaders to organize. A prediction bolstered by the fact that people are beginning to reject consumerism more to find happiness elsewhere. I am getting increasingly involved in community experiments happening in the blockchain space that try to really go deep on what a community can be. 

I’m blending both the macro and micro trends into this brackish blog post because I find what's happening on the global landscape reflective of what’s going on in the hearts of individuals. Society can’t ignore these questions and must allow for the existence of institutions that do, with also a recognition that they symmetrically explore our emotional, potentially problematic side. 

As always, thank you so much for reading, which in a very real sense gives me meaning for my writing. If the topics here interest you and you’d like to get in touch, you can reach me on Twitter or through my personal email punia101@gmail.com. Have a beautiful 2020 and best of luck on your own personal search for meaning.