On the Meaning of Life

My opinion, anyways

Every tradition has an answer. The traditions that claim not to have one are the most suspicious — because the refusal to answer is itself an answer, and usually the most protected one. The Stoic says: virtue. The Buddhist says: release. The Christian says: union with God. The utilitarian says: the greatest happiness. The nihilist says: nothing, which is still an answer, still a posture, still a prior that protects itself by calling itself the absence of a prior.

I have spent a long time inside these traditions. Not as a tourist but as someone who needed them to be true, tested them as rigorously as I could, and followed the evidence. The Grand Praxis — the name I gave to the methodological orientation I’ve been developing and applying in this publication — began as an attempt to hold all of these frameworks simultaneously without being captured by any of them. To move through them the way a navigator moves through weather: using what is real, not pretending the instruments are the territory.

What I found at the end of this itinerary — or rather, what I keep finding, because the itinerant doesn’t arrive, the itinerant orients — is simple enough to say in a word and strange enough that the word requires some approach before it can be received.

⁂

The usual answers fail in the same way. They all answer the question from outside life rather than from inside it.

Virtue is something you achieve. Happiness is something you accumulate. Release is something you attain. Union is something that happens to you. These are all answers that position meaning as a destination — something the living moves toward, something that justifies the living in retrospect or in anticipation. The living itself is the means. The meaning is elsewhere.

This is the Cartesian move in metaphysical clothing. There is a subject here — the life being lived — and a world out there — the meaning to be found or built or earned. The gap between them is what makes meaning feel like a problem. Fill the gap, solve the problem. Fail to fill it, fail to solve it.

But the gap is the error, not the human condition.

What contemplative practice disclosed to me — and I am aware this is asserted more than demonstrated here, and the demonstration belongs to another piece — is that meaning is not a property life has or lacks. Meaning is what life is doing. It is processual. It does not stand behind experience as its justification. It moves through experience as its substance.

The Spinozan tradition understood this. There is no backdrop against which the world performs its meaning. There is only the one substance, expressing itself through everything it is. Deus sive Natura. God or Nature — not God and Nature, not God behind Nature, but the copula: God is Nature, which is to say the world is what it is from itself, without reference to an outside, without a justification it is waiting to receive.

The Daoist tradition knew the same thing from a different direction. Ziran — self-so-ness. The way things are from themselves. Not the way things are for something, not the way things tend toward something, but the way things simply are, which is already the complete answer to the question of what they mean.

Einstein intuited this and it shaped his entire metaphysical sensibility. When he said God does not play dice, he was not making a claim about probability. He was expressing a Spinozan discomfort with a universe that would require an outside observer to collapse into determinacy. The Copenhagen interpretation — Bohr’s answer — installed exactly this: the measurement apparatus standing outside the system, the observer not inside the world but hovering at its edge with a clipboard. Einstein couldn’t accept it. Not because he was wrong about quantum mechanics — he was, on the specific physics — but because his instinct about the metaphysical structure was right. The view from nowhere is not available. The observer is inside.

⁂

Here is what the year of walking taught me.

I left Silicon Valley not because I failed there but because I succeeded well enough to see what I had built. Systems predicated on the Cartesian framework: users as subjects, data as objects, meaning as something extracted from the gap between them. Engagement metrics as the utilitarian answer to the question of what a human life is worth attending to. The whole architecture was an answer to the meaning of life, installed in code, operating at scale, never examined.

When I began to examine it — through Hume, through the dissolution that contemplative practice makes possible, through the mythologist’s toolkit that let me read wisdom traditions as navigation technology rather than doctrine — what I found was not a better framework. What I found was that the question had been wrongly posed. Not what is the meaning of life but what is life doing when it is doing it fully.

And the answer to that question, as far as I can see from where I stand, is not a proposition. It is not a destination. It is not a framework or a tradition or a system or a set of conclusions.

It is an orientation.

⁂

I have written this past week about the Gospels, about the founding liberal tradition, about the crisis of democratic self-governance, about the epistemological foundations of inquiry. These are not separate projects. They are the same orientation expressed in different registers.

The Jesus of the Gospels — read without institutional instruction, read fresh — is not primarily a theological figure. He is someone who treated every encounter as complete in itself. The leper was not a problem to be managed. The Samaritan was not an anomaly to be absorbed. Each person was the full weight of the question, already answered, already whole, already the meaning the tradition was supposedly pointing toward.

That is what the itinerant posture means in practice. Not moving through the world in search of meaning. Moving through the world as if meaning is already here, in this person, in this exchange, in this specific and irreplaceable instance of the world folding back on itself and asking: yes?

The republic I defend in the Crisis Papers is downstream of this. A political community that welcomes all pilgrims sailing in the night toward home is one that has, at its foundation, said yes to the full weight of each arriving life. Not contingently. Not provisionally. Not pending verification of credentials or origin or doctrine. The dignity of the individual against both the state and the market is the political expression of a metaphysical prior: each life is already the answer.

⁂

So.

The meaning of life, as far as I can see from my vantage, is most perfectly captured by a word in my native tongue of English.

It is not a word that argues. It does not defend itself. It does not arrive by derivation or require a prior to authorize it. It precedes all of that. It is what has to already be operating for any argument, any inquiry, any framework, any tradition to occur at all.

It is the condition of the compass. What orients the navigator before the navigator knows they are being oriented. The thing Hume was moving toward when he followed the empiricist method past the point where the ground disappears and kept going anyway.

It is what the world is saying to itself when it is honest.

It is what you are when you stop pointing away from it.

Yes.

⁂

I do not claim to have discovered this. Discovery implies it was waiting somewhere separate from the discoverer — the Cartesian move one final time. What happened is closer to alignment. The compass and the north converging. Not because I located something outside myself. But because I stopped generating noise that obscured what was already the orientation.

This publication — Notes from the Circus — has been the year of that alignment made public. The Crisis Papers were the yes applied to the republic under pressure. The Cathedral and the Compass was the philosophical defense of the method. The Kingdom Within and Itinerant in This Place were the yes read in an ancient text without being told in advance what I would find.

This piece is the word the whole body of work has been walking toward.

You already know it.

---

Go Deeper into the Circus

---