How Betrayal Can Destroy Meaning

[This post is the nineteenth 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!]

Think of a feeling like happiness. Can’t happiness be wiped out in a moment? Of course it can. Something bad happens—and your happiness vanishes. The same is true for meaning. If you aren’t alert to this reality, you may feel supremely disconcerted that “the meaning of life” disappeared just like that. Where did meaning go? Well, it went away, just as happiness can and does.

If you hold the view that meaning is out there and must be sought after, or that some certain something, like love, or some certain set of somethings, like love, work, meditation, family, and a spiritual practice, are potential answers to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”, you stand ready to be disappointed at every turn. Those are the wrong views, following upon the wrong question, which is why most people have—and sometimes have trouble recovering from—the following sorts of experiences.

You listen to a talk given by a well-known rabbi, Indian mystic, or New Age spiritual leader. His voice is comforting, his delivery is seamless, his demeanor seems grounded and centered, and you experience your time there as meaningful. The event provokes a certain feeling. Then, as you are leaving, you overhear two women talking about the speaker’s predatory nature: that he is a well-known pedophile and rapist. There goes your feeling of meaning, just like that, in an instant.

How will you interpret this loss of meaning and how will this unfortunate event make you feel? You’re likely to feel duped, conned, and seduced by a practiced conman who has honed his persona. You will blame him—but you’re likely to blame yourself, too, for falling for it. Certain other unfortunate thoughts and feelings are likely to pounce on you in the aftermath of that betrayal as well. You’re likely to feel once again that life really has no meaning, that life is just fluff, nonsense, lies, and death. And you’re likely to feel once again that if “life does have meaning,” you have once again looked in the wrong place for it.

If, by contrast you are living your life purposes, then if by chance listening to that celebrity huckster did provoke a certain feeling in you, that feeling of meaning, which then vanished when you learned the truth about him, you would know that all that had happened was that you felt something, that certain feeling of meaning, which you would have by now come to understand is no big deal. Hearing about his depravity would produce no pain and no sense of betrayal. You would nod, maybe even smile, and say to yourself, “Yup, we are built to feel meaning at the hands of folks like that—glad I know better! Glad to know that nature has provided us with lots of seductive feelings that I’m now able to hold as lightly as soap bubbles!”

If you hold meaning to be something out there, something that other people know about, something that resides outside of yourself, and something that must be searched for and, if you are lucky, maybe found, then every event of this sort will disturb you, demoralize you and maybe even seriously harm you. This person had the answer—oh, foolish you, no, he didn’t. Betrayed again! And lost again, back in the tangled wilderness of pining for meaning.

Understanding the truth about meaning, that meaning is merely a feeling that comes and goes, one that nature often provides us with for less than stellar reasons, inoculates you against blows of this sort. Betrayals may still hurt—but they won’t rock you to the core.

Consider a second scenario. Maybe you picture the universe as having purpose, for you, for the species, and for everything, that these purposes have a positive valence—that the universe is for love and not hate, for justice and not injustice, and so on—and that this worldview helps keep you essentially optimistic. At the same time, you know that “life is not fair.” You have a way “beyond words” of melding these two contradictory views, such that the bad things that happen—the earthquakes that kill 20,000 people, the way that your promotion was given to your boss’s nephew—do not invalidate, destroy, or even wobble your view of a “good universe.” You “possess meaning” that works for you and you would likely score well on any “meaning in life” questionnaire.

This sounds like a success story. But what regularly happens if you are holding views like these is that your system can’t withstand significant personal loss. As functional and resilient as your world view scheme appears, it can suddenly break down almost completely into the deepest sort of despair. You fall in love, the love of your life walks out on you, and something essential crumbles. Your way of avoiding admitting that life has no meaning or purpose of the sort you ascribed to it worked well in an everyday way, but it made you susceptible to that whole edifice collapsing. Serious collapses and crashes can occur if you don’t understand and admit that this thing you are pinning your hopes on—a loving universe run with beneficent purpose—is a shaky bit of wishful thinking.

When a person understands that the feeling of meaning comes and goes, that its presence does not, by its mere presence, signify anything spectacular, and that its absence is nothing tragic, then they have put life on a solid footing. They will not stand mortified when a hero turns out to have feet of clay, they will not feel their world crumble when a charming lover leaves town, they can say in those and all similar instances, “Back to the project of my life, back to doing the next right thing, back to deciding what’s important and plucking motivation from that well of motivations that nature has provided.”

Painful events will still prove painful. This updated and upgraded understanding of life, with its focus away from meaning and toward instrumentality, will not provide a cure or full immunity. But it is bound to make a real difference. Imagine investing in that guru to the extent of following him to Nepal and joining his dogmatic, unsafe community, versus smiling to yourself as you listen to him for the first time and whispering to yourself, “He sounds good, he’s even giving me a tingling feeling, but as soon as this lecture is over, back to my life purposes!”

That first way might cost you a decade or a lifetime. That second way costs you nothing more than an hour or two of your time, or at most an evening.

***