What is Meaning?
This post was originally posted at my short-lived website, Faith Working. I am not sure I currently agree with everything herein, but thought I’d repost here anyways — I’ll post new stuff as it comes up.
Recent research suggests that only a little over 10% of people feel engaged at their work. Another study has shown that “meaningfulness” is more important to people than their salary or their work environment. For many people, there is a deep disconnect between their jobs and what they consider to be “meaningful” work. And I think this is undoubtedly the case for Christians as well.
It begs the question, though: just what is meaning?
Despite the high value we place on meaning, this ends up being a surprisingly hard question to answer. Some people might describe it as a kind of feeling — of what? Depth? Appropriateness? Well-suitedness? Awe?1 Each of these descriptions involve an encounter between my inner understanding of the world and an outside reality. Meaning emerges, it seems, in that encounter with the outside, whether as a confirmation of my understanding or as a discovery that the outside far exceeds our understanding. To believe something is meaningful is to believe that it has significance in the outside world.
This somewhat philosophical way of understanding meaning resonates with the way “meaningful experience” is presented in Scripture, particularly in the Psalms. For example, consider Psalm 121:
I lift up my eyes up to the hills,
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the LORD,
Who made heaven and earth.
The profoundly meaningful encounter with the otherness of God’s creation, draws us out of ourselves and urges a response. Likewise with love of neighbour, love of enemy, the recognition of God’s primacy and the lordship of Jesus: these central tenets of our faith again and again emphasize the locus of meaning as ultimately residing in God and, in a secondary but related way, in the other who is our neighbour.
Burger-flipping and “the outside”
This brings us back — in a roundabout way — to the question of finding meaning at work. If meaningfulness has to do at least in part with — to use a shorthand — the “discovery of an outside,” then the problem with a lot of jobs is that they are entirely encased within the boundaries of their own concerns and ends. When you work at McDonalds, for example (or Dairy Queen, which is where my first job was), you have a specific set of responsibilities. Wash dishes, mop floors, clean bathrooms, wipe tables, make burgers, deep-fry fries (and chicken strips), etc. These responsibilities are linked to a set of objectives: finish the order within a certain amount of time to (1) keep bosses happy and (2) avoid angry customers. The bounds of the circle within which you act are more or less solid. From time to time, you may still encounter some internal difference. I remember this guy I worked with — nicknamed “Skippy” — could make a burger so fast! But the terms of what is considered valuable and important were entirely contained within the culture of the restaurant.
Every once and a while, though, you have true brushes with the outside. A conversation with a coworker that goes beyond small talk or work planning. An inebriated person wanders into the restaurant and orders something way off the menu. Someone loses their temper at something other than a failure to perform. In each of these instances, the outside breaches the bounds of the inside, resulting in an experience of meaning.2 Similarly, we talked recently about encountering excellence at work. This is a rare example of an encounter with something larger than what we already know, expanding our imaginations, and giving us the feeling of “meaningfulness.”
One of the ways that we as Christians can live out our faith at work is by helping our coworkers and our organizations become more meaningful places to be. We can draw attention to these “brushes with the outside” and do what we can to facilitate them when they do happen. As a recent study suggests, there are also several changes that can be implemented at the organizational level that can help to increase opportunities for encountering meaning. For Christian business owners and managers with the ability to make organizational change, putting these recommendations into practice represents a concrete way of loving their employees. Nevertheless, the majority of us don’t have that capacity or agency for creating top-down change. We therefore need to think more broadly about what might be possible.
Our shared search for meaning
It’s interesting that there is this common sense across human experience that life should be more than what’s inside our heads and more than just the day-to-day grind. Meaningfulness is something that we all seek, even if we go about it in many different ways. What I believe the Christian has to offer — in the broken way in which we cannot help but undertake everything — is:
- An affirmation of the human desire for meaning
- A direction regarding where true meaning can be found
The desire to have our work mean something may be something everyone else feels, but it is definitely not something everyone would feel free to express. As Christians, we believe that God desires us in Christ to “have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). Not only is it okay to desire this, we affirm that this desire is ultimately because, as Augustine writes of God, “You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You.” There is no need to reject or suppress this desire for meaningful work or life.
Yet, as I note above and as Augustine indicates, “meaning” isn’t just what you make of it. As Christians, we have the opportunity not only to accompany our coworkers in the search and discovery of “an outside”; we also have the opportunity to point others towards the source of meaning.
We’re just scratching the surface here — and many, many others have worked through the challenges and opportunities involved. In the next few posts, I’d like to draw on the work of some of these thinkers to explore the different ways that we can find meaning in our work.
- These descriptions make “meaningfulness” overlap with two old aesthetic terms: the beautiful and the sublime. In both cases, the aesthetic experience involves the discovery of a correspondence between myself and the world outside my self. With beauty, it is the discovery that the world outside my self is somehow nonetheless akin to my existing understanding of the world; with the sublime, it is the discovery that the world outside my self in fact exceeds my understanding. Both experiences are pleasing, however, because they bring my understanding of the world into relation with the outside world, inviting me to imagine that outside world, encompassing that enlarged thought within my mind, and wrestling with the sensation of difference. (Even the experience of beauty requires an encounter with difference because it is founded upon the unexpected discovery that something outside of me [i.e., different] resonates with something inside of me). ↩︎
- Certain kinds of work perhaps have a greater amenability to such breaches than others. Work that involves close interaction with people in heightened situations of physical, emotional, or spiritual intensity: nurses, lawyers, counsellors, chaplains: there may perhaps be some greater chance of “encountering meaning” here. Yet one only needs to talk briefly with a member of these professions to understand that the same kinds of “internal” meaninglessness is experienced there as one might find in any other work. This is likely unavoidable. ↩︎