Why meaning comes and goes- 4 common traps to avoid.

Meaning is something we don’t often pay attention to until we’ve lost it. We wake up one morning and can’t find our mojo. Or we can’t see the point anymore in something that used to motivate us. Chances are we’ve lost our sense of meaning. In this article I share what I’ve learnt about why meaning comes and goes and some of the common traps that can cause loss of meaning.

The Purpose Trap

When it comes to purpose, I’ve come full circle. In my early career as a corporate brand strategist, I would help organisations find and articulate their purpose. Then as a sustainability consultant, I worked to ensure that those organisation’s purposes helped make a positive impact in the world. As a coach, I worked with leaders to find their ‘why?’, their ‘true north’, to step into their authentic leadership. All the while, I struggled to ‘land’ my own purpose into a short and snappy statement. My purpose was always clear but never specific, consistent but constantly changing. What I’ve come to learn is that purpose is part of the picture but not all of it. To only focus on purpose is too narrow a lens.

Too often meaning gets confused with or narrowed down to purpose. This is problematic in two ways. Firstly, not everyone has a clear purpose in life, and this doesn’t mean their life is meaningless. Secondly, even if we do have an inspiring purpose it doesn’t guarantee that we will have a meaningful experience in our day to day. Ask any teacher, nurse or burnt out corporate employee.

Whilst purpose is important because it gives us direction and something worthwhile to strive towards, it is not everything. If the gap between our purpose and our reality is too big, we experience a loss of meaning. Either we are so consumed by our everyday reality that we have no sense of where our life is going, or we’ve set ourselves such an inspiring purpose that we don’t know where to start making it happen or worse it feels like an unrealistic dream. This is the purpose trap.

It’s a trap because we’re tying up our sense of meaning with a concept or idea that exists some point in the future. Meaning is not an idea or a concept it is a feeling. It’s an experience. This leads us to the second trap.

The Happiness Trap

Meaning is a feeling and like most feelings, meaning is often difficult to understand, explain, and put into words. Meaning is something we feel inside, not something we think. When an experience is meaningful, we feel a sense of wellbeing, fulfilment, we feel at ease, we might say ‘things feel just right’. On the other hand, when an experience is meaningless, we feel sad, stressed, lonely, un-motivated, lacking in confidence or simply we have a gut feeling telling us ‘this isn’t right’.

The problem is that we tend to take the positive feelings for granted. Happiness has become the norm. Today’s cultural messaging in advertising, social media and the wellness industry emphasises the importance of being happy.

So when we don’t feel great or experience negative feelings, we think that something is wrong, broken or that there’s problem that needs to be fixed. We look for the source of our discomfort and we get rid of it. We change jobs; we end relationships, we move homes… This might do the trick, but more often than not the problem comes with us to our next job, home or relationship. We’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water.

As I’ve learnt to focus less on happiness and more on experiencing meaning, I found that I actually feel more content and satisfied with my life. Meaning can be found and created in the most difficult of times. Like the tide that comes in and out, our experience of meaning varies day to day, and over time. It responds to the natural creative tensions that life brings. Through meaning-based coaching and using frameworks such as The Map of Meaning, we can learn to understand our own sources of meaning, and manage the dynamics and patterns in our life that generate or destroy meaning. We can avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater, or falling into the happiness trap.

The Influencer Trap

Today we are bombarded with aspirational life-style messages from influencers. This is just a modern day manifestation of a problem that has always been: our tendency to compare ourselves with others.

Whilst other people can be a great source of ideas and inspiration, if we allow our life choices to be influenced mostly by other people we are going to run into trouble. This includes well-intentioned people who care deeply about us like our parents, friends, colleagues or teachers.

Whilst there are some key dimensions that contribute to meaningful human experience, meaning is a deeply personal experience. We don’t all experience meaning the same way. We can’t judge someone else’s sense of meaning. This is why we can’t be given meaning by someone else.

So if we want to experience more meaning in life, we need to connect to our ‘inner meaning’. We need to get to know our personal sources of meaning and pursue those. I know that I can be particularly vulnerable to comparing myself to others. This has led me in the past to make career and lifestyle choices that in the end didn’t feel meaningful. We need to constantly ask ourselves: “Am I becoming the person I want to be through the choices I am making?” Which leads us nicely to the next trap.

The ‘Busy’ness Trap

I could call this the success trap. Our modern society tends to value industry, achievement, activity, doing more (often with less), getting things done, growth, wealth, consumption. Being productive, being busy, in short ‘doing things’ has become so engrained in who we are that when we stop ‘doing’ we can be left wondering who we are. Many of us experienced this at the start of the 2019 Covid pandemic. As we locked-down and isolated in our homes, we were cut off from our usual work and social activities. For some this was a period of creative reinvention, for many others it was a period of deep loss, challenge and uncomfortable introspection.

Getting the balance right between who we are being and what we are doing, is key to experiencing meaning day-to-day. Since the first lockdown I’ve been resisting going back to my previous patterns, to the tyranny of ‘busy’ness. I’ve been exploring “how can I BE myself and DO what matters?” It has involved slowing down, asking myself “what’s enough?” and not comparing myself to others. It’s much harder than it sounds and I’m still learning…or un-learning.

If you’d like to find ways to create more meaning in your life or work, you can join Meaning Makers 2024 a 12-week meaning-based coaching program. I will be guiding a group of 12 people in an exploration of how to listen to your inner meaning, build new skills and habits to experience more meaning every day, avoid those traps and create a Meaning Action Plan for 2024. Starting 11th January 2024.

This blog is edited from a medium article I posted in 2022