Sense of Meaning
In the last post, I noted that giving an abstract response to a general question about the meaning of life is different from giving someone a personal sense of meaning. This is first because “how does life make sense, in general?” is a different question from “how does my life make sense?” Second, although this second question, the question about a person’s own life in particular, is closely related to what gives a person a sense of meaning, it is not exactly the same thing, much like answering the question, “what can I do about this pain in my arm?” will not automatically take away the pain, even if it presents a way to take it away.
The relationship with the particular question is this: the feeling or sense of having meaning does not come from having an abstract answer to a question, even to a particular question. But it does come from the mind’s feeling that it has a good grasp on itself; that it is able to make sense of itself. I discussed this in relation to the idea of predictive processing in an earlier post. The mind will feel that it has good grasp of itself if it feels it has a good handle on what it is going to do in the future. This applies at multiple time scales. For example, a person has a sense of “flow” and tends to feel good about what they are doing at the moment if the mind feels it has a good grasp on what is going happening at fairly short time scales of seconds or minutes. Likewise, a person will feel content on a broader level when the general pattern of their life seems like something that will not break; while on the other hand, the feeling, “this can’t go on,” which is a feeling of discontent, comes from guessing that this pattern will not hold up.
There is no point in objecting that according to this, a person would feel fine in solitary confinement or at any case in prison, since they presumably know what they will be doing for a long time. This is not different in any substantial way from the “dark room” objection to predictive processing, and the objection fails in the same ways. There is one difference in this way: if someone is actually in a dark room, they correctly expect to leave the room. But if someone is in prison or solitary confinement, they may know perfectly well that they are going to stay there. Nonetheless, the mind does not feel that it has a good grasp on its situation, because it expects to react to its circumstances (generally speaking, by escaping if it turns out to be possible, or in various antagonistic ways if it is not), and it does not have a good sense of the details. Someone in a lot of pain may know that they will tend to flail their limbs, clench their teeth, and so on, but generally speaking these reactions are unpredictable in detail; the very opposite of the “flow” state I mentioned above.
General and Particular Meaning
Is there any relationship between these causes of a particular sense of meaning and our general answers to the general question?
There certainly is, if only for the reasons implied here; people who live in these general ways will have a much greater chance of having a particular sense of meaning, if only because the mind will expect these ways of living to continue, while ways of living that exclude these ways will feel much more like something that “can’t go on.”
Of course the details matter. If you have children but they are out of control, your house is a complete mess, and you are too exhausted from work to do anything with your family, you may not only feel depressed, but also that your life is less meaningful. This is related to what I said above about predictability on various time scales. Similarly, people who dedicate themselves to philosophy or other studies will feel more of a sense of meaning if they feel they have a grasp on the big picture, and less if they feel their understanding is fragmented and they have a good sense only for details.