The Most Important Skill Today | Day 10 of 100
Making One's Own Meaning is More Important Now Than Ever Before
This is day 10 of 100. My goodness - 90 days to go - we've got our work cut out for us! This has been a blast. As we march forward, please let me know what ideas or topics related to meaning you'd be interested in exploring. Thanks for your readership.
My wife and I welcomed our first child into the world in March of 2025. We're loving every minute of it. I've made up so many stupid songs and imagined so many adventures we're going to enjoy. Even the long and lonely hours when it's just me and my little girl up in the middle of the night for a feed, I can almost see myself through the window of her nursery. A dad and his daughter, singing themselves back to sleep. And I think, this is something I not only wanted, but needed.
After a couple months being hunkered down or "in newborn bliss" as my buddy Nathan calls it, we asked our doula to watch the kiddo for a couple afternoons so Elle and I could get out, just us, and think about the future.
I'm thankful to be married to someone who is not only thoughtful about the present, but interested in being intentional about the future. I've already written about time-hopping and how we all have a different relationship with time. I tend to live in the Mythology of the Past and my wife spends a lot of time in the Fantasy of the Future. Now, we can time-hop to our detriment, but there are also strengths to be called upon from each of our temporal tendencies.
I can relive moments in our life, weaving stories about days gone by that add richness and meaning to how far we've come.
My wife paints an exciting, ambitious and attainable picture of the future and marshals the necessary focus and resources to bring it about.
It is her strengths we call upon when thinking about the future for our family.
In our little family visioning session we came up with several different categories to discuss: health, finances, location, career, relationships, and so on.
We've done this before, but just for us (and our dog, Lily). It was very exciting to build out the vision for a future which includes our daughter. What a gift to be parents. We almost weren't.
I recall a moment in our planning session in a big lobby of a beautifully restored building in downtown Austin. Though summer outside, the lobby was chilly and we sat in the 90 degree crook of a big sofa.
Elle then prompts, What do we want our child to learn or be able to do?
We then took time to write our own lists, after which we shared responses with one another.
Many of the same things appeared on both lists: play an instrument, fall in love with fitness, camp, cook, drive a stick shift, SCUBA, ski, develop financial literacy, drive a boat, be a good communicator, write thank you notes, etc.
Looking back on that list, those are all external activities or skills we believe would set our daughter up to be confident and capable across a variety of life situations.
There's also the internal world she's already busy shaping. We talked about how we want to help her tap into kindness above all else - kindness toward herself and others. Curiosity is high up there, as is courage. We also hope to assist her in developing a desire to learn that outweighs the need to do things right or correctly.
However, as I sat down to write this today, I realized there's something missing from the list.
I want her to be able make her own meaning.
I want for her to be a person who can look around and see her ordinary circumstances as an extraordinary opportunity to make meaning for herself and others.
In my work I often engage with college students and young professional groups. Let me start by saying I'm not going to dog on younger folks. As my friend Mark, a brilliant and thoughtful professor, says: the kids are alright. I don't think this generation is any more plagued than any other. We always think this next generation is the most screwed up.
That said, I see a big opportunity for young people today who seem a little lost and cautious about participating in their real lives. Many of them are outsourcing their learning, their social life and their plans for the future. They're looking outside themselves for direction, anxious about their ability to execute just right, and, consequently, choosing to sit back instead of dive in.
They're not participating. They're waiting.
Of course, this isn't just the youth. I know friends of my parents who are still waiting. For what? To be shown the magic and meaning woven into every moment of their ordinary life.
It's people who are separated from the meaning in their midst who begin turning their attention to distractions. When distractions stop working something more insidious begins to take shape: Blame.
When we believe meaning is something we're supposed to find or receive we can get surly when it seems to be hiding or withheld. We then start to blame ourselves, our circumstances, and others.
But when people wake up - when they realize all along they could change the lens through which they're seeing their circumstances, and turn this very moment they wish to escape into a soulful inhabitation of this instance - they tend to stop blaming.
Yeah, they stop blaming because they're too busy creating. They're creating all of the richness in their lives they previously expected the fates or the faceless 'them' to provide.
When a few people do this, it's contagious, just like blame. Next thing you know, people are spending their energy employing the ingredients of meaning (service, connection, personal transformation) to color the days of their lives. Fear and envy and spite and judgement are revealed to be the energy wasters they truly are.
It's not lost on me that I write about my hopes for my daughter on America's Independence Day.
I don't have much to say on the political front other than it's sad to see grown adults who never learned how to make their own meaning blame and pout and hurt others.
When someone is full with a sense of meaning they don't feel the need to minimize others or strip away their humanity.
As I think about how I might help my daughter grow into a woman who is not afraid, a core component seems to be teaching her that it's her responsibility to make her own meaning. Then, to help others do the same.
Look - I'm just a guy, who is now a dad, writing a 100 essays for 100 days about meaning. But, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” sounds like more to me than material well-being. It seems to be a nod to what people long for at their core: the ability to direct their own lives, to break free from imposed meanings, and to craft significance from their own experiences.
I'm still on board with that.