Tag Archives: Meaning

Chasing After The Wind

     The meaning of life is something that has been a mystery for each one of us at
some point in our lives. This mainly subliminal quest for meaning looks different to
everyone, but mine was the most common.

     To many people the meaning of life is defined as “success”, whether this is financial, social, family, legacy or any number of things. We all are striving for this meaning, and where we find it is in a chase of what we or society has defined as success. This definition of success seems to hold true to itself, but it does not lend any insight into the meaning of life for those that pursue it.

     For myself, this “success” for many years meant money. Money gives you freedom of purchase, freedom of housing, and freedom of doing basically anything you want. It is this sense of freedom that comes with a price tag, but if freedom has to be bought then in actuality it is not freedom at all. Thankfully, when it came to the pitfalls of the pursuit of money I was lucky enough to be an outsider looking in, having dipped in the toes but not fully submerged into the chase for an ocean of cash. This is not to say I wasn’t on the exact same level when it came to understanding any sort of meaning for life. Money ruled, and I was oblivious to its power over me. Though I had attempted for years to find meaning in money, what I ended being left with was a deeper sense of emptiness.

     I can’t help but observe this feeling of emptiness being transcendental since the depravity of man. Even the people who are deemed successful understand this plight. We can all relate in some way or another to Solomon in Ecclesiastes 2.17 when he says, “all of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind”, and this is a man who seemingly had everything. Unfortunately, what he had described, “as having everything” was just an unhealthy elevation of life without God.

     The commonality in all of us wants to be deemed successful through the wind of chasing money. This is true to be my experience with elevating the value of money over my life, which I found to end up being ultimately meaningless.

Get to da meaning!!

      In North American society we hold the rich and famous above everyone as a model for success and goals in our lives. Do these rich and famous people really know the meaning of life, or are they searching from one personal success and blunder to the next?
      It only takes one Google search to discover a vast amount of confusion concerning the meaning of life. Many hold the more negative point of view, which is that life is a struggle, so live for the moment. Kanye West has said, “the point of life is getting shit done and being happy”. You will quickly see most all the quotes you find are vague roundabout ways to describe our inability to truly define the meaning of life. This should be concerning to everyone.
      It is no surprise then, that North American society sees the meaning of life as an internal meaning. That is to say that the only meaning you can gain is the meaning you make for yourself. This is to assume that meaning gained, hasn’t already been given to us since the beginning. This assumption is seemingly the prevailing thought.
      The quote in the featured image from Arnold Schwarzenegger seems accurate. Though you should probably ask yourself, achieve and conquer to what end? What is the meaning in that? Sure, it may be a process to go about life, but it still does not solve the problem of meaning whatsoever. It is scary to assume that people we deem successful know more about the meaning of life than us. However, the matter of fact is that we are still searching for the same thing everyone else is.
      We are born with a natural hunger to be like someone, something, or fit into a certain mold, because we think that meaning is found in what we do. However, for me, it seems logical to look at who made the mold in the first place, as I think the meaning is found in the why before the what was created.

Click here to view Arnold speak on the meaning of life in ten hours.