Life, work and meaning.

[Rum]

I hope you will forgive the self indulgence.

Life has no meaning. It just is. However human beings, I think, find that a very hard notion to accept and even those of us who believe this strongly sometimes automatically look for a story, a narrative and ultimately some sort of justification or perhaps just a point of some sort to what they are about and what they have done with their lives.

My recent experience of being on the receiving end of a new government, new policy, mass redundancy and ultimately the negating of all the work I and those who have worked with and for me has reminded me of this. The work I have done for the last 12 years is totally alien to our new masters. They aren’t interested in it, think it is irrelevant at best and nonsense at worst.

This isn’t a pity party I assure you but it is a reminder that there is no final chapter, where loose ends are tidied up neatly , where mysteries and uncertainties are resolved so that when the words THE END appear at the bottom of the last page, you can sigh and feel a satisfying sense of completeness and closure.

[Bella Fortuna]

No one likes to feel the work they've done for years is irrelevant or unnoticed, Rum, so I'm sorry you seem to have been given the short shrift after all of your dedication.

For my own self, I don't feel my work's a vocation, and have never defined myself by the work I do. Since I have that sense of personal remove, I can do my best while I'm here... but when I retire (which will NEVER be soon enough for me) I will walk away from here and not think of it ever again.

The only meaning in any part of our lives is what we give it.

[JimC]

Interesting post, Rum...

Perhaps for many of us, we will not understsnd fully the degree to which our work has set a framework for our lives until we retire (or are about to retire...)

I know that a big part of my life is thinking of ways to get adolescents actively involved in maths and science, and careful constructing materials that help them on the journey. I won't miss the meetings, the bureaucratic stuff, the commute, the behaviour issues etc., but I will miss that... (and quite a few of my colleages...)

[floppit]

I feel exactly the same re the new masters! My job is periodically under threat and the threat is used. For me though, that it has become about serving the government and not the people who pay for us feels even worse. Not a pity party either - it just is what it is.

Funnily enough the job that had the most meaning for me, the most learning, gave me the most to draw on as a human being, not to mention human understanding (cos we are animals too), it was the job before education. It was the most hedonistic time of my life.

I like a narrative, it goes with liking me and I do. Work, home, that's the narrative in the making and I want it to stay one that i'm ok with. That has meaning to me, more so than position or status.

[Rum]

'Every Child Matters' had a narrative, albeit an artificial one. This was Labour's strategy for improving the lot of kids, both educationally and socially. It was flawed and actually not successful in some respects (though it was ion others). I bought into it when Labour got in. In my later career I had to meet regional advisers so called 'national strategy' bods from the DCSF as was. It all became hugely bureaucratic and performance oriented, which was the down side, and which makes me just a little less angry about what the Tories have done, but I never doubted that all but the most cynical were trying to do their bit to improve things for children.

ECM is no more. Nor is a generation of professionals who oriented their work around it. Such is life. Such is meaning.

[floppit]

It depends where you look Rum. I lived through kids homes changing fro m rambling halls, set back from the road with kids inside screaming the same phrases over and over, even staffed by prison guard temps - they changed to houses in a street, 3 or 4 kids, permission to go in the kitchen and make a cuppa. Even if everything is turned back tomorrow the meaning is no less for those kids, the ones who got the changes. I met some and shit, in your job if you didn't you should have as participation was born.

Take a thousand or a million years and one lifetime is meaningless but something kind or human when it's needed has massive meaning to who it's given.

I can recall the names of the old guys who walked me to school and listened to my tales. They had long past any ambition to change the world but they changed mine for a lifetime, probably munchkin's too.

I think that's why an individual narrative sort of makes more sense to me.

I'd still love to slow roast the tories mind. I think they will have a massive and negative impact on so many people. I find them not just excessively individualistic, also duplicitous. I've become very nervous of the word 'choice'.

[Ilovelucy]

Borrowing from the sentiment of the OP and the spirit of the title, I would say that one of the prices of post-modern, democratic, capitalistic life is the loss of meaning. A hunter gatherer tribe may face challenges that we do not, but they do not have a lack of meaning in their lives. Everything they do feeds into the life of the tribe and is reflected. The day's kill is eaten together, the product of one's work is there for all to see and appreciate. You live in huts that were built by yourself or your forefathers, not by contractors. You eat food that was hunted and gathered by yourself and your loved ones, not slaughtered in steel sheds and sent to Tescos, or grown by exploited farmers in third world countries. We work for the financial betterment of faceless shareholders, invisible money trickles into our current accounts as the deluge settles in offshore accounts. The music in our lives is not the music we make ourselves, it is the corporate, disembodied tunes relayed by experts through radio speakers or stylish white earphones. The songs we sing are tailored towards demographics, they are not the songs we write to celebrate the histories of our bloodlines. To shake the hands that stitched our clothes we'd have to get a flight to China and interrupt an epic standing shift. Perhaps this isn't the annulment of meaning, but rather its fracturing?

Many speak of a God shaped hole in our world, but a meaning shaped hole. Of course the protection that our societies offer (but only to the moderately well off) shouldn't be sniffed at, but the pay off for all this great stuff is a loss of connection to the food we eat, the people we share our societies with, the clothes we wear, the earth we live on. It all seems to come from a faceless void and vanishes again in the same way. All the connections are hidden. Perhaps religion, as we see it in the post agricultural, post industrial world, is the first failed attempt to re-ignite the connections that are lost within the highly specialised, yet highly isolated, roles we take within our large societies?

[JimC]

Borrowing from the sentiment of the OP and the spirit of the title, I would say that one of the prices of post-modern, democratic, capitalistic life is the loss of meaning. A hunter gatherer tribe may face challenges that we do not, but they do not have a lack of meaning in their lives. Everything they do feeds into the life of the tribe and is reflected. The day's kill is eaten together, the product of one's work is there for all to see and appreciate. You live in huts that were built by yourself or your forefathers, not by contractors. You eat food that was hunted and gathered by yourself and your loved ones, not slaughtered in steel sheds and sent to Tescos, or grown by exploited farmers in third world countries. We work for the financial betterment of faceless shareholders, invisible money trickles into our current accounts as the deluge settles in offshore accounts. The music in our lives is not the music we make ourselves, it is the corporate, disembodied tunes relayed by experts through radio speakers or stylish white earphones. The songs we sing are tailored towards demographics, they are not the songs we write to celebrate the histories of our bloodlines. To shake the hands that stitched our clothes we'd have to get a flight to China and interrupt an epic standing shift. Perhaps this isn't the annulment of meaning, but rather its fracturing?

Many speak of a God shaped hole in our world, but a meaning shaped hole. Of course the protection that our societies offer (but only to the moderately well off) shouldn't be sniffed at, but the pay off for all this great stuff is a loss of connection to the food we eat, the people we share our societies with, the clothes we wear, the earth we live on. It all seems to come from a faceless void and vanishes again in the same way. All the connections are hidden. Perhaps religion, as we see it in the post agricultural, post industrial world, is the first failed attempt to re-ignite the connections that are lost within the highly specialised, yet highly isolated, roles we take within our large societies?

I think there is a lot of truth in this, although I also think we are psychologically flexible enough to imbue at least some aspects of our complex lives with the same emotionally satisfying meaning you imply. A business man working to nail an important contract may get some of the same satisfaction as a hunter gatherer at the end of a sucessful hunt... When I successfully teach a group of adolescents how to solve quadratic equations, my feeling of satisfaction might be an echo of the feeling of an elder of the tribe who had communicated how to chip stone arrow points to his group of adolescents...

[hadespussercats]

I agree with you that life in general has no meaning, but I would add "except the meaning we give it." We can try to write our own stories, adjusting them for when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune set a plot-line on its ear.

I was laid off a few days ago-- just in time for the holidays (merry merry), and I've found out some news recently that could complicate matters still further. So what I've been asking myself this weekend is, "If this were a story, what would I like to have happen next?" And see what I can do to bring it about. It might not work, but what's a good story without some conflict and hints of incipient doom? I'm hoping this heroine wins out in the end, anyway; and if looking at my life in this fashion helps me through rough times and makes me feel empowered, it can't be all bad, right?

[JimC]

I agree with you that life in general has no meaning, but I would add "except the meaning we give it." We can try to write our own stories, adjusting them for when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune set a plot-line on its ear.

I was laid off a few days ago-- just in time for the holidays (merry merry), and I've found out some news recently that could complicate matters still further. So what I've been asking myself this weekend is, "If this were a story, what would I like to have happen next?" And see what I can do to bring it about. It might not work, but what's a good story without some conflict and hints of incipient doom? I'm hoping this heroine wins out in the end, anyway; and if looking at my life in this fashion helps me through rough times and makes me feel empowered, it can't be all bad, right?

I hope you steer your own personal narrative to a satisfying conclusion...

Wait, that sounds like a personal finish!

I meant a conclusion to this volume of a many-volumed set...

[Tero]

Can I cut and paste? I thunk this out once.

How do you deal with life's blows?

Well, we atheists have feelings. So we have to collect loved ones around and have kids just like the rest. I have two. And a minimal support crew. I am an only child, and pretty much all are dead and gone, all but one cousin and her offspring. And one aunt, all that I want to remember of my birthplace, who has Alzheimer's.

I look at chickadees in the morning...happy and singing despite being a day away from the end at any point in life (they last that long without food), put out some bird seed and forget work troubles for the weekend.

Religion was never soothing for me...merely a good cop bad cop act, father and son.

added from a different old entry:
There is no intellectual purpose to life. But it is a fun ride. Enjoy, don't complain. Philosophy is a futile exercise.

[Santa_Claus]

Life has no meaning. It just is. However human beings, I think, find that a very hard notion to accept and even those of us who believe this strongly sometimes automatically look for a story, a narrative and ultimately some sort of justification or perhaps just a point of some sort to what they are about and what they have done with their lives.

but how much more disturbing if life had a meaning dependent on something or folk other than simply yourself?

you'd have to bow down and kiss some ring

[hadespussercats]

I agree with you that life in general has no meaning, but I would add "except the meaning we give it." We can try to write our own stories, adjusting them for when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune set a plot-line on its ear.

I was laid off a few days ago-- just in time for the holidays (merry merry), and I've found out some news recently that could complicate matters still further. So what I've been asking myself this weekend is, "If this were a story, what would I like to have happen next?" And see what I can do to bring it about. It might not work, but what's a good story without some conflict and hints of incipient doom? I'm hoping this heroine wins out in the end, anyway; and if looking at my life in this fashion helps me through rough times and makes me feel empowered, it can't be all bad, right?

I hope you steer your own personal narrative to a satisfying conclusion...

Wait, that sounds like a personal finish!

I meant a conclusion to this volume of a many-volumed set...

Thank you, you sentimental bloke! Here's to more exciting volumes for all of us who want them!

(and here's to more satisfying conclusions for all of us, too! )

[hiyymer]

'Every Child Matters' had a narrative, albeit an artificial one. This was Labour's strategy for improving the lot of kids, both educationally and socially. It was flawed and actually not successful in some respects (though it was ion others). I bought into it when Labour got in. In my later career I had to meet regional advisers so called 'national strategy' bods from the DCSF as was. It all became hugely bureaucratic and performance oriented, which was the down side, and which makes me just a little less angry about what the Tories have done, but I never doubted that all but the most cynical were trying to do their bit to improve things for children.

ECM is no more. Nor is a generation of professionals who oriented their work around it. Such is life. Such is meaning.

To me the meaning is always there, but it isn't rational. It is true that from the point of view of reason and science life is a meaningless dance; a tyranny of cause and effect and the laws of nature. But we don't live in what really is. We live in the experience created by our brain/body; the feelings compulsions motives desires wants intentions that are the conscious evidence of the human organism's meaning and purpose; it's need to respond to the world in such a way that it survives. Life inside the mechanism is chock full of meaning. It's just that it is all irrational and subjective and we don't decide what we want.

Be present to what you want. Strip away the considerations, the reasons, the need to make sense. Just see the pure passion that arises from your state of being human. Did you "buy into" making kids' lives better because it seemed like a good "idea", or is it really what you want. Did you make some kids' lives better? So why apologize. Why mourn the end of the agreement. Is it still what you want? Do it some more. Start up a non-profit. Enroll other people. Is it still what you stand for or not? Maybe not. Then find something else.