“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

In the summer of 2020, we were all cooped up in our houses with a lot of questions on our minds. COVID-19 was in full force, and this change of lifestyle left me with an inordinate amount of time to lean into a project I had been wanting to undertake for years.

When I was about thirteen, I started to fall in love with philosophy. I have had a pretty consistent obsession with exploring what gives life meaning ever since then. I started asking everyone, and I mean everyone, what they thought about the “big meaning question.” I wish I had more of a vision back then of what was to come. As the years went on I decided to start recording the answers of everyone I asked, and yet, thousands of anecdotes over the years were only passed orally and I cannot go back and visit them in a substantial way. This all changed as quarantine took over.

Though I have perils with the current state of the internet and how it is used, I found a new sense of gratefulness towards it and how it allows for connection during worldwide isolation. I began using the dating platform, Tinder, to collect responses to the question “what gives your life meaning?” An excel sheet formed and gained a few thousand entries as I matched with person after person and began dialogues about meaning. I have full conversations recorded for answers that are outliers or put in a way unique from other answers. Though I have no background in formal research or data analysis, I looked at the data and constructed different versions of graphs based on it to find trends. The results have been eye opening for me and even though this is definitely quasi-research (and statisticians are rolling over in their graves), I have been able to construct a foundation for what I believe most people find to be meaningful.

The first two categories that formed I used to call “Big M” Meaning and “little m” meaning but I now I have come to call them objective meaning and subjective meaning. The realm of objective meaning is answers that pertain to a deeper purpose like God. On the other hand, almost all other answers fall into subjective meaning which are answers that pertain more to one’s ethics and how they go about living their life. Undoubtedly, the two types of meaning are linked. Many times, one’s conception of objective meaning leads them into how they believe they should conceptualize subjective meaning in their lives. If one does not have a strong sense of objective meaning they may elevate subjective meaning to take on the primary role of meaning in their life. Yet, on occasion, the lack of objective meaning can lead to thoughts of despair around meaninglessness and can be a lot to reckon with as I have seen time and time again as I ask people about it.

Leading into subjective meaning is interesting as this is where the real meat of life is. Subjective meaning, from my data, seems to branch off into three different general realms. Though I should note that it does this only in this version of my graph for I have conceptualized the data in a few different ways— yet this current configuration seems to make the most sense to me at the moment. The three branches are of individual experience, connection, and contribution. These branches cannot actually be separated from each other but all play into one another. From the realm of individual experience, answers like passions, curiosity, pleasure, and identity building come into play. From the realm of connection, answers like family, friends, and pets are most common. From the realm of contribution, answers like reciprocity, legacy, creation, and altruism are the one’s that come to light.

In such a short article, I can’t even begin to unpack the amount I learned and what was elucidated during this project. Though, I do hope to continue asking people my infamous question and add to my data, as well as write more about the topic. This is something that I believe helps give my life meaning in an ironic and totally sincere way. I believe delving into this topic is something everyone should do, though maybe not to the extent I have, because it will illuminate and direct one’s intentionality in way I could not have guessed until I began doing it for myself.