Total Addressable Meaning

What if we built a life around what actually matters? (and noticed the strange world we already live in) [Existential Explorer: Part 4]

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The Way of Work explores stories of where we fit in the world of work. This is part of the Existential Explorer series:

Part 1: From Businessman to ‘Existential Explorer’
Part 2: The Open Frontier of Meaning
Part 3: What You Need is a Midlife Crisis

Also, check out my popular series: The Other Side of Enough (what’s life is like when you have enough).

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You wake up. Check your phone. Scan the headlines. Skim some work emails. Slog out of bed.

Another day. Another cycle of output. You’ve barely opened your eyes, and already you’re behind.

You’ve got things to do, people to reply to, progress to make. Productive, respected, maybe even successful. By most standards, you’re doing quite well.

And still, something is off. You’re moving through the world, but not really in it. Awake, but not alive. Wishing you were somewhere else, but not sure where. And maybe wondering: Is this it?

Of course, it’s not like you’re aimless! You’re trying to find work that matters. You want to make an impact. You want to do more than get by. So what’s wrong here?

If you’re lucky, maybe you can name it: you’re missing meaning. It’s a hard thing to define that can take many forms. Not just “happiness,” but a deeper feeling of being alive, connected, and part of a bigger story. It’s not something you can easily measure, but you know it when you feel it.

You’re not alone. I’ve felt it and so have many more. This disorientation to the world; a sense that life feels full on the outside, but hollow on the inside.

What if the problem is we’ve built our lives around the wrong center of gravity? That, in all our busyness, we forgot to seek meaning? And instead, we’ve been chasing its shadows?

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Imagine: what if we stopped building our lives around markets, and started building them around meaning?

A world where meaning was at the center of life. Not markets, or money, or our relative place in the hierarchy. Where we stopped measuring life in terms of output or accomplishments, but moments that actually mattered.

(sometimes imagining a different world is the only way to see the strange one we’re already in)

School wouldn’t be a training ground for the labor market (not that it's even good at that). Or a place where we pound our kids with pointless facts. It’d be a playground for discovering meaning: a place to try, discover, and build a life that felt purposeful. Where children wouldn’t be asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” but “what are you curious about?” Instead of over-engineering their days, we’d watch where they gravitate and explore.

Real meaning, after all, must be felt, not forced. Just as there’s no way to rationally convince someone to love another, we can’t thrust meaning onto someone without their own discovery.

Teachers, then, would be mentors, elders and artists, who could guide us on this pursuit, not bureaucrats who just comply with a broken system.

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In this world, ambition is not extinguished, but pointed in a different direction.

We’d still work. But work wouldn’t be at the core, our default identity. Instead, careers would be one expression of meaning amongst many. Not ladders in a single direction, but landscapes with the ability to move and roam. Where meaning wasn’t an afterthought, squeezed into the margins of a career or what you do when your career is done, but what you do from the start.

We certainly wouldn’t confuse our economic system (e.g. capitalism), for a system of morality and meaning.

Companies and their leaders would no longer be our idols. We’d barely care enough to tune into one of their podcasts. Instead, it’d be community leaders, spiritual guides, teachers, and artists that hold the most social capital.

Meanwhile, writers with a small and mildly successful newsletter would sit at the top of the food chain. Okay, okay… that was a bit of a reach!

We wouldn’t need to advertise our experiences, turning everything into content. A walk in the park wouldn’t require perfect lighting and a few takes to make sure we recorded the right mood. In fact, we’d grow suspicious of anything too optimized, seeing them as performances of purpose, but not the real thing.

We wouldn’t try to monetize it all, turning hobbies into side hustles or relationships into transactional exchanges. In fact, we’d be resistant to financial incentives, as they’d risk leading us astray from where we felt pure purpose. Instead of orienting toward outcomes that add market value, we’d look to activities that make us lose track of time. Ones that involve, not just our head, but also our body and soul.

We’d consider the open frontier of creativity, community, philosophy, even spirituality. Acts of building, caring, moving, making. Showing up for something outside ourselves – a cause worth fighting for, a group worth backing, an activity valuable as an end in itself. We’d place higher value on transcendence, wonder, and awe; being one with a greater whole. Perhaps even new forms of meaning we haven’t discovered yet (or forgot along the way).

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There’d be burnout too. But not from doing too much.

Instead, it’d be from forgetting why any of it mattered. Pointless busyness would be polishing the surface while the inside remains hollow. Recovery, then, wouldn’t be collapsing on the couch, phone in hand, scrolling with dead eyes. It would be a space for reconnecting with our search for meaning. Maybe we’d make more room for a weekly sabbath, occasional sabbaticals, and pilgrimages that reorient us back to what matters.

The measure of a good life would not be output, but depth. We’d worry less about doing more, and ask harder questions about what any of it is for. Instead of the arbitrary goal of “peak performance,” we’d pursue “peak purpose” looking for ways to realize the total addressable meaning available across our lives.

To be successful in this world would be to be fully awake. Where you’d breathe your last breath, and say “damn, that was a great life!” And maybe, most importantly, the ability to share meaning with others. (Now those would be the people we admire most.)

Paradoxically, we might not even talk about meaning (at least explicitly). Like happiness, meaning tends to happen when you don’t chase it directly. Instead of contemplating meaning, we’d be focused on doing meaning. And we’d conclude that theoretical thought experiments were a colossal waste of time (cough, cough).

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Of course, even a world centered on meaning would have flaws.

We’d mess it up somehow, finding ways to corrupt it, commercialize it, and turn it into a performance.

There’d be Ikigai coaches, influencers peddling purpose, and so on. “Get meaning quick” instead of “get rich quick” gurus. Existential grifters. Maybe better than the bullshit they sling today, but still there.

We’d still fall for status hierarchies, envying those that are most fulfilled. Inequality would be: “why does she get to live a more meaningful life than me?”

There’d be over-optimizers, tracking KPIs and OKRs, turning meaning into a performance review. Well intentioned, but applying the wrong solution to the right problem.

There’d still be tribes organized around bundles of meaning, like today, selling us their templated version of salvation. Still a bit too enthusiastic about shoving their beliefs down on us. We’d find value in them, but stay vigilant about where they might lead us off course.

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Maybe we don’t need to imagine this world.

Maybe this isn’t a thought experiment after all. Maybe, instead, it’s a distorted mirror. Showing us that we’re not ignoring meaning at all, but we’re already obsessed with it.

And we just really suck at it.

Maybe we already do try to live for meaning, just awkwardly, performatively, dishonestly. Like we sense what matters, but still filter it through the same metrics we think we’re moving beyond.

We hoard money, put our names on buildings, leave artifacts of our existence behind. We find ways to destroy their tribe while growing our tribe. What better proof of our validity than having our way win?

We spend our lives chasing the illusions instead, attempting to feel permanent through fame, productivity, and success. Our survival instincts, always inventing ways to leave something behind via symbols, to outlive a body that won’t last.

But maybe, instead of hiding behind these pseudo-meaningful masks, we’d be better off being honest about what we’re actually after. Pointing ourselves, intentionally, toward something real. Not fooling ourselves with the distracting illusion of meaning, but getting at the crux of meaning itself.

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Is this just another unrealistic utopia?

A stupid thought experiment for over-thinkers?

Right now, the rebuttals may be blaring, starting with: “Rick, easy for you to say. You benefited from the markets, and are now free to pursue meaning.” Yeah, yeah, you got me. I do have space to examine these questions more than most. (Maybe that could be useful to you, if you think about it…). But I don’t think my circumstances let others off the hook.

In the future, meaning may not be a luxury problem reserved only for the well-off. (Though I’d argue it isn’t today, either.) If this all sounds indulgent or unrealistic, consider what’s coming: a future where AI upends our work, even whether we can or need to work at all. What then?

When markets no longer need us, meaning might be all we have left. The robots may take our jobs, but we’ll keep the existential crises.

What if we were forced to find meaning outside of work, outside of money, outside of markets? Would we still live the way we do today? Or would we finally be honest, and start pursuing a life around what really matters?

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📚 Further Exploration: For those curious enough to continue the exploration…

• If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living?, by Jordan Taggart (heavy inspiration for this essay)

• Die With Zero, by Bill Perkins (similar case for “Net Fulfillment” > net worth)

• Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker (all the symbolic ways we try to outsmart our own mortality)

⍰ Question: if meaning was your center of gravity, how would your life look different?
👀 Next up: what if work was ALL that really matters?

just kidding... work actually is the meaning of life!

🙏 My Ask: If this essay meant something to you, pass it along, ❤️ or 🔄.