Meaningness

“Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” (2 Nephi 2:25)

Of all the questions a believing family member has asked me, this is the one that sounds most like love:

“If you throw all that away, what is the purpose in living? I cannot imagine not believing in life after death. How dismal life would be without the light of the gospel!”

It’s a fair question. In fact, for a while, the honest answer was that it was dismal.

I want to tell you what happened to meaning when the church stopped holding it for me. I’ll cover the empty stretch, the idea that got me out of it, and the plain, workable purpose I live by now. If you’re a believer worried about someone you love, I hope this lowers your fear a little. If you’re the one who stepped away and everything has gone gray, I hope it shows you the gray isn’t permanent.

The plan that answers everything

Let me start with what the gospel does well, because it does it very well.

The plan of salvation answers every big question in one stroke. Where did I come from? What am I for? Where am I going? Why does this hurt? There’s an answer for each, and they all fit together. You progress along the covenant path toward eternal life with your family. Every calling, every lesson and every diaper changed in the nursery has a place in that plan.

From inside, a life without it looks dark, empty, lonely and meaningless. That’s how I pictured it too, back when I was a member looking outward.

David Chapman, who writes about this at meaningness.com, has a name for that way of seeing: eternalism. In his words, it’s the stance that “everything has a definite meaning, fixed by an external ordering principle.” God, a cosmic plan, a divine order: something outside us decides what everything means, and our job is to find out and line up with it.

Eternalism conveniently provides a purpose that is clear and simple. I don’t sneer at that. Clear and simple is a gift when you’re raising kids or burying a parent.

But it has a weak point. When the ordering principle goes, it takes all the meaning with it, because all the meaning was hanging on that one hook.

When the hook gives way

When I made room for other ways of seeing the world, nihilism swept in. It seemed there was no purpose or meaning to anything. That was assuredly a difficult transition, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

Nihilism is just the mirror image of eternalism. Eternalism says meaning is fixed and given from outside. Nihilism agrees that real meaning would have to be fixed and given from outside, notices that there doesn’t seem to be any such source, and concludes that nothing means anything.

Chapman’s point, and I think he’s right, is that nihilism starts from an accurate observation and then draws the wrong conclusion. There may be no external, eternal source of meaning. That doesn’t get you to “nothing matters.” He calls the conclusion “wildly implausible,” and in practice almost nobody can live there for long.

I can tell you from the inside why not. Trying to live without purpose, nihilistically, is an unstable path. It leads to anguish and depression. Living with or without purpose turns out to be a choice, and the nihilist choice doesn’t hold weight.

So was the worried believer right that life outside would be dismal? For a while, yes. But it was a transient experience, and what came after is the part I most want you to hear.

Meaning is a mixture

Here’s the idea that got me out. Chapman’s word for it is meaningness: the quality of being meaningful or meaningless.

Meaning isn’t a thing you either have or don’t. It’s a quality, and it’s always mixed. Everything can be described as a mixture of meaning and meaninglessness. They are intertwined and coexist. Meaning is real, and it has a recognizable pattern, but it’s also cloudy and can never be pinned down completely. Chapman’s word for that cloudiness is nebulosity.

That sounds abstract, so here’s something concrete.

People can be awful. Watch any freeway at rush hour. Then an ambulance comes up behind the traffic with its siren going, and hundreds of strangers who were cutting each other off a minute ago all move to the side together. Yes, it’s the law. But if you slow down enough to actually watch it, there’s something almost mystical about it.

Nobody planned that moment to mean anything, and it fits no grand narrative. It just means something.

Miracles do happen and we can embrace them without having to explain them, interpret them, or assign meaning to them within the context of a narrative. There is just meaning.

That’s how I hold spiritual experiences now, too. They don’t have to fit a narrative. They can just be spiritual experiences. You can sit under the trees, or at the beach, or look into the eyes of someone you love, and it means something, without anyone needing to tell you what it’s for.

So I am neither fixated on finding meaning in everything nor do I deny it’s there. I accept that meaning and purpose are often uncertain and ambiguous. There are many layers to the human experience, and I’d rather live in all of them than flatten them into one plan or into nothing.

Enjoyable usefulness

That still leaves the practical question: what do you do on a Tuesday?

Chapman sorts the ways people approach purpose into a few stances. One is the mission: everything you do is in service of a higher, eternal end. Another is materialism: forget the eternal and chase the mundane things, like money, comfort and status. He rejects both. The third is the one I’ve taken as my own: enjoyable usefulness.

In my words: I do what is enjoyable and I do what is useful. Ideally, I do what is simultaneously useful and enjoyable.

That’s it. It’s not glamorous. Teaching my kids something they’ll need. Serving someone who needs a hand. Giving money to a cause I believe in. Reading, writing, a genuine conversation that leaves both people better off. None of it needs to be ultimately meaningful to be worth doing, and since nothing is riding on it eternally, I can try things without the old terror of failing.

I used to spend a lot of energy wondering whether I was on God’s path. Now I spend that time defining my path. Each day is a chance to have happiness now, rather than to earn happiness in the next life, which may or may not arrive.

So what is the purpose in living?

Back to the question I started with, because it deserves a straight answer.

Without the plan of salvation, purpose does get fuzzier. I won’t sell it to you as anything else. It took a real stretch of soul-searching to reimagine mine. But I found that the alternative to an eternal plan isn’t a dismal void. It’s a life with meaning mixed through it, and purpose that I choose.

And in that, you and I are not so different. You believe that men are, that they might have joy. So do I. We just disagree about where the joy comes from and how long it lasts.

If you want to understand how I got from that gray stretch to here, read God Is Dead. And if you’re family, my letter to you says the rest.