The meaning of life depends on you

Personal meaning is basically an internal feeling about how much you think or feel that your life matters to the world. Similar to self-respect and self-esteem. Not to be confused with personal significance, which is basically an internal feeling about how much other people think or feel like your life matters to them. They are both based on internal thoughts and feelings, but meaning is more inside out, and significance is more outside in. 

I believe building a sense of meaning is most important, as it is based on your identity, and if you get it right it usually helps build significance, naturally. However, if you don’t have a strong sense of identity or meaning, and you try to build significance, it can result in an eventual identity crisis and might tempt people to use you and manipulate you. 

If people feel that you are significant to them, but they do not sense that you have a strong sense of identity or meaning, they might influence you to pursue what they believe is meaningful. This might be partly why people claim to find meaning. Of course, this is a big part of being a parent, to help children grow up to be responsible, respectful, reasonable, and resourceful adults, with a strong identity and sense of meaning, hopefully including the family.

We have four core ways to build meaning in life; faith, strengths, relationships, and goals. Faith is having evidence for what we hope for. Evidence for faith is mainly the perception of important values or beliefs. We can have faith in God, ourselves, other people, or systems and organizations. I offer the idea that the more you build your relationship with God and strengthen your faith in Him, the more He will help you clarify your identity and build meaning in other areas. 

Faith in God can come from understanding He is a just and loving God. Having faith in ourselves can come from clarifying our identity and core values, and building important skills, especially relationship skills like communication. Having faith in other people can come from understanding they not only share your core values, but they also have some similar beliefs about how to pursue those values. Having faith in a system or an organization can come from understanding that it is build on values and beliefs that you respect, and it is managed by people with integrity. Faith in God is the most durable sense of meaning because earthly relationships and our strengths can change, but God does not change. 

Strengths can be rooted in important interests and knowledge, skills, or our core personality traits. I offer the idea that passion, purpose, and calling are higher levels of meaning. Passion is based on our important interests and knowledge. Purpose is based on our skills and core personality traits. A calling is combining passion and purpose, the highest level of meaning. While people might feel like they can’t pursue their passion or purpose, focusing on building meaning and skills is still a good life. 

Relationships are probably the most common place most people get a feeling of meaning, especially if they are parents. I believe humans naturally have a strong desire to love and be loved, and to feel like they belong to a group of people. Building meaningful relationships depends a lot on our emotional intelligence and communication skills. However, some people feel that building meaningful relationships depends more on doing things together. 

Goals are probably the least valued of the ways to build meaning, but arguably the most important. Properly setting goals includes some planning and assessing opportunities, challenges, with important milestones and choices. This will naturally get you thinking of what knowledge, skills, and relationships are more important to you. 

Of course you don’t want to pursue relationships just to reach a goal. But there is nothing wrong with genuinely pursuing relationships that align with a goal, as they might even be thankful you did. It may very well turn into a win/win situation and a lifelong friendship depending on the goal. 

Truth is a consistent representation of reality. It is our most valuable resource, because it allows us to make good use of our time. As of the time of this article, every month tens of thousands of people search online for the phrase, “what is truth.” 

Get truth. Live better.™ 

There are three basic ways to understand truth, or three basic truthviews, spiritualism, naturalism, and relativism. 

Spiritualism: Truth can be known through the spirit, science, and our senses. The origin of life is through a spiritual means. Over 70% of the world’s population falls into the spiritualism truthview, just considering the big four major religions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. By the way, when science is done well, it basically reveals natural laws of our physical world. 

Naturalism: Truth can be known through science and our senses. The origin of life is evolution. All that exists is material, and people are basically just biological beings. This truthview includes Atheism and Agnosticism. 

Relativism: Truth cannot be known. There is not such thing as truth, because reality is socially constructed. 

Truth is often difficult to prove, if not impossible. Consider how it takes faith to believe in God, and to not believe in God. Because we have not found a universal absolute way to prove God is real, or to prove there is no God. So we are left with comparing evidence for truth. 

We compare evidence based on our values, beliefs, feelings, and perception of facts. Just because we all perceive reality through our values, beliefs, and feelings, does not mean reality does not exist. Feelings are basically a reflection of our values, based in our heart. While emotions are basically survival instincts, based in our brain with our beliefs.

Just because two people disagree on the facts of the same experience, does not mean there is no truth. In fact, the idea that everyone has personal truth is like claiming something is an opinion fact. It just doesn’t make sense, at the basic level of thinking.

One of the most important pieces of evidence to start with is the question, How did the universe begin? Science says there is strong evidence showing that the universe is still expanding. Which means if we go back in time there was a point where the universe had a beginning. There are two basic explanations, and they can’t both be right. The universe either came into existence from nothing (which is a huge leap of faith), or God created the universe.