"Man's Search for Meaning"....

Everyone is deeply engaged in living their lives - but like fishes swimming in the sea we can never see the water that surrounds us because we are totally immersed in it. In the same way, only some of us ever get to understand the true meaning of our lives, because we only see it in its parts and not its wholes, the meaning of things is rather patchy.

As a mental health nurse this is important to me because I work with people who have lost the meaning of their lives; the definition of being and staying well almost seems to be "knowing what your life means". 

However, my studies tell me that, for the majority of us, that meaning is a received meaning. By that I mean, it is not a meaning that we have had to discover for ourselves. Being "a mum", being "a postman", being "a president", are all titles with roles and actions attached to them, a bit like actors in a play, society has written the script for us in the history of our interactions. 

These words that we use to describe the people that we are, that are supposed to give our lives 'meaning' are actually only generic tokens for specific things. Thus, while I may "love my dog", by calling it "a dog", I relegate it to a class of things, that are infinite in number, that I have no connection to, that I could not love, at least not in the same way that I love this being that I know, and therefore, "my love" ceases to have the same meaning that it had for me before I used language to describe it.   

Language is said to "carve nature at the joints" in the same way that Dad carves up the Turkey at Christmas dinner. It goes for the easy bits first, and makes the incision to break the world up into natural categories of things to make things simple. For instance, it carves the "sexes" up into "girls" and "boys", and conveniently forgets about the problems of "transgendered" and "hermaphrodite" people.

Thus, it is easy to see how language has become the natural repository for ideology, the vehicle for the communication of ideas, for the benefit of some and detriment of others! What is left behind, and is often managed out of the picture by clever editing and production, is the ‘umwelt’ of the embedded and embodied emotions.

Ideology controls others through language. Ideology controls others by having them control their emotions. The more meaningless the emotions are, the less they have value from an ideological point of view, the less they are talked about or even recognised as existing. Like people who do not fit the ideology, they will eventually cease to exist.

But when you do not fit the ideology, and your meaningless emotions are all you have left; when your ideology has been destroyed; when another has destroyed everything that you are; then, you will have no capacity to decode the information of your senses; you will not be able to explain your reactions to events; you will not be able to externalise your emotions; and you will be mad. And you will be outside your own head wondering how you can get back in. And you will wonder if you have ceased to exist. And you will not exist.

Although you will still be deeply engaged in living your life. Some of you will realise that your lives still have meaning, beyond the received meaning, beyond the ideology, beyond the normative assumptions. You will develop a capacity to find meaning. The difference will be in whether others find that meaning with you; and share it with you; and live it with you. Without you. As it were.