Meaning

The single most influential book in my life was the Steve Jobs biography. It came out when I moved from China to New Zealand. I derived much of my values from it, it so eloquently described a system of values that offered a beautiful alternative to everything I did not like about China, and for me it was the pinnacle of ‘The American Dream’.

What stuck with me deeply was this notion that meaning is of critical importance to your life, and furthermore that a ‘good life’ should deeply intertwine what is meaningful with work, since we spend most of our life working.

Over the years I’ve tried in various ways to live my life in accordance with this philosophy. I adopted various values I found appealing from others, and declared it meaningful, and tried my best to live my life in service of it. Some of these were: the idea of rebelling against what I think is not right, the idea of working on or at a startup, the idea of advancing technological progress.

None of these stuck, and each time I ‘find a new meaning’ and pursue it, I’m ever so slightly less convinced or foolhardy, and it becomes a little bit easier to abandon it and look for the next. It must be similar to hopeless romantics going through relationship after relationship only to break up again, and needing to go into the next one fully believing ’this is the one’. I can see that some part of the formula isn’t quite working, but I’m not sure what, and the idea of giving up having work being meaningful seems deeply wrong.

On graduating from high school, I didn’t know where I wanted to go, and didn’t see why I should go to university - perhaps wanting to mirror Steve Jobs’ life and reasoning, I was about to drop out, take a gap year, and travel around the world in search of meaning. My parents started pushing back: of course I shouldn’t, how would I fund myself? what did they go through all the pain of immigration for? how could I possibly find meaning in a year of dilly dallying around? I started to get calls from aunties in China who I hadn’t spoken to in 5 years, just to tell me it was a terrible idea to not finish school. I never fully gave in or agreed, but I also never acted on dropping out, and so time decided for me and I finished uni.

I went to Kyoto recently, and ended up spending as much time as I could meditating in the zen rock gardens. It was surprising how many ‘insights’ into my own life came up in every day of meditation, and leaving the city was a deeply saddening event. I realised that I had a lot of things that I need to figure out, and I was nowhere near exhausting them.

So I’m going to do a very scary thing, but something I effectively have wanted to do since I was 20 - I’m going to take time off and search for meaning.