entry points

on meaning

Carl Moll, Birchwood in Evening Light, 1902,

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We live in a society that shows us many paths to status but very few to meaning. As a child, I internalized that I should strive to be beautiful, thin, intelligent, accomplished and materially comfortable. Ways to accomplish this included eating less, exercising, undergoing various cosmetic interventions, going to a “good” college and working hard at a “good” profession that would allow me to make money. I was taught that doing these things would make me desirable to friends and to a romantic partner who possessed the same status markers; it would make my parents proud of me; I would therefore be “lovable” and “accepted.”

As a child, I wanted to be happy, but the world around me assured me that only path to happiness was the one I laid out above; that if I worked diligently and was “good enough,” I would then qualify for joy. Happiness was the result of achieving, of consuming, of possessing.

All of this now strikes me as tragically bereft. I understand now that while I received an excellent material education, what I was looking for was a spiritual education. I would say that what was lacking was religion, but the truth is that I’m sure I would’ve chafed under the strictures of any Abrahamic religion; I know enough Chinese-Christian kids (my cousins, for one!) to predict all the ways I would’ve rebelled.

Instead, I’d say that what I was looking for throughout my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood was what Romain Rolland called “oceanic feeling” in a letter to Freud in 1927: “the sensation of eternity, of ‘being at one with the external world as a whole.’” In other words, I was looking for the presence of God. The feeling, not the narrative.

Most people are looking for God in one way or another. Certainly all the people I know—certainly everyone in this town where everyone has their personal theory of apocalypse and immortality. We’re all seekers. The problem is there’s a lot of people out there who want to tell you the right way to seek. I never liked that. All my life I’ve hated being told what to do. Any religion that’s going to tell me to obey a guy is losing me right at the door.

As an adult I moved to San Francisco and realized slowly over several years that love is the best entry point to meaning. In high school, when you’re writing your college admission essay you’re supposed to volunteer your own theory of how you’re going to save the world. Truth be told, I never had such grand theories. In the years since, instead of going bigger, I’ve gone even smaller.

I believe that love of others, love of vocation, love of nature are the best ways to connect to oceanic feeling. It’s a big thing to love a single person well for a long time. It’s really hard to find something you really love to work on. Taking care of my friends and writing about it is my best theory of how to save the world.

When I talk about the friendship theory of everything, it’s another way of saying that love is a portal into meaning. A house is just a house until a family lives there. A job is just a job unless you like the people you’re working with.

We are inducted into what we love by the people we trust and care for. I feel incredibly lucky that at 18 I stumbled into a peer group that I liked and admired. I think that’s why SF’s group housing scene works: you can just move into an eight-bedroom Victorian house and know that your roommates will likely be pretty cool because they’re either your friends or your friends of friends. It’s not about the house itself, it’s about the people there and their aspirations and interests and relationships. It’s also how lots of people here find jobs: you work at your friend’s company, you work at a company your friend also works at, someone tells you about something that seems like a good fit.

Directly and indirectly, my friends have helped me find housing, work, romantic love, spirituality. As in, B literally pressed a bag of shrooms into my hand, and said, You have to do this. As in, when I was two years into my Substack and very much wanted to find an additional job, multiple friends said Just focus on writing. If I write a book and five of my friends like it I think that would be enough.

In some corners of the Internet there’s a fascination with traditionalism, and criticism of the ways the openness and optionality of modernity have left people feeling lost. I’ve always felt like, look, I could never be a traditionalist, because I don’t want to give birth to five kids without anesthesia and spend half of my day cleaning up around the farm. I don’t think most of the women who lived in the past and couldn’t vote and couldn’t get married to the person they loved and couldn’t use birth control had such a great time. I think they had a really bad time. But I do believe there’s a way in which culture in the past offered people easier entry points into meaning, and that’s what people today are nostalgic for.

I don’t think our culture does a great job at making good marriages seem possible and aspirational, or parenthood seem desirable and fulfilling, or finding a true vocation seem achievable. Back to the paths to status, not meaning thing—I look back at what I was told to strive for during childhood, and now think, what was any of that supposed to give me? If I was a concert pianist and went to Harvard and became a partner at a law firm, was that supposed to make me happier? Maybe if I genuinely loved piano and Harvard and law. But if not, who is all of that for? We are taught to aspire to prestige, taught to fetishize the idea of the thing instead of enjoying the thing itself. If you raise kids that way, you end up with a generation that prefers porn to sex. It’s Narcissus mesmerized by his own reflection: you’d rather watch yourself looking good than actually live.

Life is not something you perform for the benefit of other people. When you perform for other people, you rob yourself of the chance to relate to them in a real way. Everything collapses inwards, becomes solipsistic: you and the camera, you and the mirror, you and the void. But we need the Other in order to feel real. People are doorways out of solipsism.

I’ve been looking for entry points to meaning for a long time. And I feel like I’m writing for people like me, who are seekers, who are interested in history but don’t want to regress, who don’t resonate with all the things sold to us in modernity, who are looking for structure without masochism. Who want to answer the question of: what if I want to find meaning and belonging without doing anything too weird? Like, what if I don’t want to be obsessed with effective altruism and I don’t want to convert to Islam and I don’t want to go on missionary trips to Chile and I don’t want to prove that the DMT aliens are real and I don’t want to complain about wokeness on Twitter and I don’t want to live in a polyamorous commune and I don’t want to become a monk? I don’t really have any apocalypse theories or immortality theories or afterlife theories and right now I don’t feel like I need them. I believe in the aliveness present in all things. I want to write every day and read books and to be in love and live near all my friends and work on what I know to be true and good. For me, that’s salvation—that’s ambition.

In high school I volunteered for a couple years at a care home for people with dementia. All anyone there ever talked about was their children (I think their spouses were mostly already dead). The ones who had children who visited were happy and the ones who didn’t weren’t. Everything I needed to know about life was revealed to me right there, though it would take me a long time to see it.