Meaning is a Fever Dream

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The guy working on the floor behind me is running some kind of power chisel at a volume that is actually making my right eardrum rattle like a speaker with a torn membrane playing dubstep at 11.

He showed up this morning, totally unexpected, to repair an unbelievably poorly done vinyl job, where they laid the faux floorboards over a nail that was never removed or ground down, so it broke through the pseudo-wood leaving shards that felt less than pleasant to step on when I was cooking or doing dishes.

I requested the repair weeks ago.

I’d blame him for distracting me, but I was already killing it at distracting myself before he came in.

Because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

I don’t understand grief. I don’t get how it works when it does, or why it doesn’t when it should.

It’s like this iceberg of hidden pain that breaks off in chunks and floats to the surface at random intervals. So you have a few good days, you start feeling happy, you build some momentum, maybe you say some really forward-looking motivational shit out loud because you think you’re finally getting the hang of this thing, and then the next thing you know you’re laid out on your bed sobbing after dinner like you just had the world taken out from under you by some unseen tsunami.

(That tool has been off for five minutes now and my ear is still ringing. Jeeze.)

Anyway, it’s really hard to operate in an environment where the conditions are constantly changing. You want to know when it’s going to rain before you head to work for the day, because maybe you wear different shoes, grab that rain jacket or your umbrella, plan to give yourself a little extra time. But when you’re living through extended grief, it’s like you need to expect it go from 115 degrees to snowing to summer thunderstorms AT ANY TIME. Good luck dressing for that.

I realized years ago that the adage about male depression — the one that says men are there because of loss of agency and thus need meaning and purpose to get out of it more than they need love — is true. Well, I thought I did. It worked for me in the past. “Just do work that feels like it matters and you’ll start to feel better.”

But the problem I have now is that I don’t know what matters anymore. I am waking up to the fact that my pursuit of meaning was always contextualized within relationship. If I have nobody to come home to, nobody to share that meaning with, nobody to join me in meaning-making, it stops feeling like meaning at all. It gives way, eventually, to the feeling that “nothing matters,” because nothing you do can alter the timeline you’re living in. What’s done is done.

I felt safe to build before in large part because I had someone to build with — because for me, accomplishment was always a path to acceptance and belonging. “You have to perform to earn acceptance and safety” is one of the deepest pieces of code in my brain. “Look at what I did! Don’t I deserve love?!”

When I wake up in the morning, the questions immediately start bouncing off my head like someone’s pegging me with ping-pong balls:

“What am I for? What difference does anything I do make? What is the point of anything I attempt?”

I have had every one of the deepest roots of my identity severed over the past five years. I’m tired of repeating that fact, but I haven’t fully reconciled with it, either. Like an untethered astronaut spinning through space, I have no means by which to re-orient myself or return to the ship.

Which way is up?

And what is the ship in this metaphor, anyway?

I’m not completely sure. Telos, maybe? I struggle with teleological views because while yes, some things are ordered to ends, I do not see a plan in the universe or in my life. I see generalized systems of quasi-order slouching toward entropy while endlessly assaulted by random chaos. It’s a confusing mix of structure and…not structure. But I do realize that even if my telos, my ultimate purpose or aim, is subjective, it’s at least a potential map to a destination.

It’s not me just drifting endlessly until I’m sucked into some black hole a billion years from now, already mummified within my suit.

Or, more plainly, it’s not me just barely living until however long it takes for my heart to give out.

It bothers me that I don’t know how to sort this out. It’s one thing to see it as an intellectual abstraction. It’s another to live a forced directional change when everything feels so overwhelmingly pointless. Even if you know that the pointless feeling itself is likely a deception of a fatigued and overwhelmed nervous system more than any reliable indicator of reality, that feeling remains, and it’s powerfully suppressive. Again, the difference between known and felt is not insignificant here.

I also want to know how to reconcile the mismatch between meaning for the sake of belonging and meaning for its own sake.

Why can’t I find motivation to pursue the latter?

Why don’t I care about doing “worthwhile things” if I have nobody to share them with?

How do I get to a place where it feels worth it to get out of bed every day and try again because maybe there’s some good to be drawn from all of this?

How do I orient myself to a higher purpose and feel like that matters when nobody is going to pat me on the head or give me a hug for it and that’s the thing I always really wanted?

I can’t seem to depersonalize the pursuit of meaning.

I can’t seem to debride the attachment wound.

In some eyes, that probably looks like selfishness. It’s not a choice, though. It’s just how it works with the way certain brains is wired — like mine, at least for now.

Cartoonist, author, and social commentator Scott Adams died of cancer today. In his final statement, he said something that really grabbed me, in light of all this:

For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages don’t always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable way. I’m grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family.

Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I donated myself to “the world,” literally speaking the words out loud in my otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add the most to people’s lives, one way or another.

I found myself asking the question, “Do I want that? Can I be the guy who derives happiness from contributing something to the world, even if my dream of doing that within the context of a family is probably gone?”

And I don’t know the answer, because from here, I can’t access the feeling of wanting much of anything.

As luck would have it, another Substack I follow had a post today that outlined the emptiness of this experience, if for different reasons:

you know that feeling when you wake up and go through your entire morning without actually feeling present in any of it, like you’re watching someone else brush their teeth and make coffee and respond to texts, and the person doing these things is technically you but you can’t seem to locate yourself inside the performance? a softer rupture, where life continues as usual while your own sense of yourself becomes faint and oddly distant. you know your name and your job and where you live and what you’re supposed to be doing today, but the internal coherence that usually holds you together has evaporated, and you’re left floating in this strange liminal space where you can’t quite access what you actually think or feel or want.

i’ve had more of these days than i’d like to admit. days where i open my laptop and stare at my screen wondering what i’m supposed to care about, days where someone asks me what i want for dinner and i genuinely cannot access my own preferences, days where i’m scrolling through my own camera roll looking at photos of myself doing things i apparently enjoyed and feeling no connection to the person in those images. it’s not depression exactly, though it shares some of depression’s flatness. it’s more like a temporary amnesia of the self, where all the small certainties that usually anchor you to your own personality have dissolved and left you untethered.

what makes these days so unsettling is how they expose the degree to which our sense of self is actually quite fragile and constructed, held together by habits and routines and social roles that we mostly don’t think about until they stop working. you realize how much of “you” is actually just a collection of patterns you’ve fallen into, preferences you’ve inherited, opinions you’ve adopted from people you respect, reflexes you’ve developed to navigate social situations. when those patterns get disrupted or stop feeling authentic, you’re left with this uncomfortable question: if i’m not the sum of my habits and preferences and social performances, then what am i?

It is such an unsettling feeling just not to care. To answer the question of what you’re going to eat only by choosing one of a limited number of inexpensive, reasonably palatable options. To choose how you’re going to spend your free time by selecting whichever activity feels like it has the most probable chance of distracting you from your malaise. To be reduced to a series of logically pragmatic transactional choices at a minimum threshold necessary to sustain yourself.

But some part of my brain keeps tapping on the window to my consciousness. The voice is muffled because the glass is pretty thick. But it sounds like it’s screaming that meaning matters even when nothing else seems to. Maybe especially then.

I don’t know if it’s being sincere or if it’s performing because it knows I’m writing this down and it makes me look deeper, more authentic somehow.

But the thing is, you have to care. You have to want. You have to desire. You can know something is important but if it feels unimportant, it’s easy to neglect it. We all do it in some areas of our lives. Health. Relationships. Self-work. It’s not just laziness, there’s real neurophysiology to it. When people take damage to their amygdala, or have to have it removed because of a tumor, they lose certain normal brain functions. One of them is fear. They just can’t really be afraid anymore because the part of the brain that controls that is gone. But the other thing they can’t do is make even the most basic decisions if there’s no logically superior choice. Because they don’t steer their reason with desire. If you can’t want anything, then directional choices become exponentially harder.

So where does that leave us, oh patient reader of these rambling thoughts?

I don’t know.

I hoped I’d have come up with the answer by this point in the post, but so far it has managed to elude me, except for this: I am taking steps, however futile they feel, to work on projects that are meaning-adjacent. Perhaps desire will follow action. Perhaps it won’t, and I’ll have to triangulate again.

But when you’re lost in the dark, you can either stay still indefinitely, hoping for someone to turn on the light, or you can stumble your way forward, hoping you don’t bust your shins.

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P.S. - I know my posts have been more raw and stream-of-consciousness lately, and not as polished or directional. I’ve decided to cut myself some slack so I keep writing while I try to wrestle this meaning monster to the ground and try to stabilize in my new life. One of the reasons I share all of this stuff, actually, is because I hope it will be meaningful and familiar to some of you. It does feel good to share meaningful things, even if you’re worried that maybe that’s still tied to your need for approval…I’m going to shut up now.

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