[This post is the twenty-second and last in a multi-part series called Everything You Thought You Knew About Meaning is Wrong. To be in touch about it, you can always reach me at [email protected] or visit me at https://ericmaisel.com/. Please enjoy the series!]
How many people today are close to finding a bridge and jumping off of it? And how often have they found themselves there, at that terrible precipice, because they have misunderstood meaning?
Existential philosophers have argued that it is your right to find yourself on that bridge and existential novelists often use that motif and image in their works. Think, for instance, of the protagonist of Albert Camus’s novel The Fall, who never recovers from failing to intervene when he comes upon a woman dressed in black leaning over the edge of a bridge. Shouldn’t he have helped her understand that whatever she was feeling ought not to amount to a death sentence? The protagonist’s main weapon, irony, can’t begin to take the sting out of his failure.
Suicide is a right, existentialists argue, it is a feature of our essential freedom, and not only is it a legitimate choice but a hard one not to make, given the realities of living. At the same time, they wish that you would walk yourself off that bridge, that you would opt for life instead of death, because they have hope for you, hope that your yourself may not be currently feeling. They believe in you, the individual, and want you to live.
When a man stands on the side of a bridge, just about ready to jump, he is recapitulating the whole of human misery while staggering with his personal pain. His reasons for ending his life will likely sound like “I can’t take this any longer” and “Nothing matters” and “Life is a cheat.” Underneath his reasons are a certain conclusion, that “life is just like this,” and a certain permission, that “I can decide what to do about that.” His conclusion is as cold as that ocean beneath him and his permission is as vast as that ocean.
We all nod: “Of course.” Life is just like that and each person is free to decide. But it is also possible to step off that bridge rather than jump off of it. That choice is also available. A person lucky enough to get meaning right may be able to say the following to himself: “When life is feeling meaningful, that is just a feeling. But when life is feeling meaningless, that too is just a feeling. I do not need to jump off of a bridge because of a feeling. I can stride off this bridge, in the direction of living. I can march my way back to a deal with life, where I take it as it comes and give it what I have. I do not have to make what I suspect is a huge mistake just because of a feeling!”
Bill, a successful accountant, explained in an email how he had weathered exactly this situation, his encounter with that bridge. He wrote:
I am in debt to you as you have provided me with a framework that saved my life. I was on a bridge in August of 2012, where I was convinced that the only logical thing to do was to jump, since this life is a cosmic joke anyway. It sounded crazy to people who know me … I have a beautiful wife of twenty-two years, three grade-school kids, an MBA, I’m an experienced sales professional … I have a good life. But I had just left the Christian worldview and didn’t know what to embrace, and the complete chaos that followed led me to that bridge.
A dear childhood friend talked me down off of the bridge via text messaging and rushed me to a hospital where I got an up-close view of what passes for ‘help’ from mental care experts. I checked myself out after my second group session, where I’d witnessed the psychologist brow-beating and berating a confused young woman. I spoke out and told him he was no better than the green, cold-calling salesman I’d been fifteen years before, in his case trying to sell the ‘disease’ of depression. I got out of there … and not too long after that, I encountered your work.
I thought I would drop you a line and let you know that a full thirteen months after me thinking that jumping off of a bridge sounded like the most logical thing to do, that I am doing great! In fact, my wife Joan said to me this morning, “This has been one of the best weeks of our marriage.” Can you believe that?! After twenty-two years together, and after putting her through hell, things have turned around that much.
It wasn’t easy, but I took your vision to heart, that I had to identify what was important to me and live those choices, that meaning could be made—well, coaxed into existence—simply by living my life purposes, that if on a given day no meaning appeared, so be it, that was just the absence of a feeling … I’ve been living all of those ideas. Not always with ease or grace … but so much so that I can say that life is good.
People who survive jumping off a bridge report that the instant they leap, they know that they have made a terrible mistake. Ah, if, in flight, a person who has jumped could somehow catch themselves, catapult themselves back to the railing, and stride off that bridge instead! My hope is that if everyone could better understand the nature of meaning—that it is a feeling and that the anguish they are experiencing is also a feeling, not a death sentence—they might never approach that bridge in the first place. Or, if they did approach it, they would shake their head at the last moment, vote for life, and stride off that bridge back in the direction of possibility.
This is the last post of the “meaning” series. I hope you’ve enjoyed the twenty-two posts. Please be in touch to [email protected] with your thoughts or comments.
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READ PART ONE HERE: Everything You Thought You Knew About Meaning Is Wrong: The Even Harder Problem
READ PART TWO: On Craving the Feeling of Meaning
READ PART THREE: Why ‘Is Life Meaningful?’ Is the Wrong Question
READ PART FOUR: Meaning Has Its Reasons
READ PART FIVE: The Cost of Meaning
READ PART SIX: Meaning Has Its Rhythms
READ PART SEVEN: Robbed of Purpose
READ PART EIGHT: Meaning as Nature’s Motivational Tool
READ PART NINE: Your Golden Meaning Opportunities
READ PART TEN: One Golden Meaning Opportunity: Stewardship
READ PART ELEVEN: One Golden Meaning Opportunity: Experimentation
Read Part Twelve: One Golden Meaning Opportunity: Self-Actualization
Read Part Thirteen: One Golden Meaning Opportunity: Appreciation
Read Part Fourteen: Two Golden Meaning Opportunities: Achievement and Excellence
Read Part Fifteen: Three Golden Meaning Opportunities: Service, Good Works, and Ethical Action
Read Part Sixteen: Two Golden Meaning Opportunities: Pleasure and Contentment
Read Part Seventeen: Love, Relationships, Creativity and Career
Read Part Eighteen: Marrying Meaning Opportunities: How Creativity and Activism Go Together Beautifully
Read Part Nineteen: How Betrayal Can Destroy Meaning
Read Part Twenty: Intelligence and Mania
Read Part Twenty One: Meaning and Mania
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