Meaning Less: On Choosing Self-Acceptance and Losing Respect for Others’ Respect

“There’s something wrong with the way that we think, and as long as that’s there, everything we do will be a mess.” Alan Watts

Hi, my name’s Adam and I have a thinking problem. See, I think too much and mostly wrongly. I think myself out of being happy, useful and connected by thinking my self out of being at all. I think my way out of being by obsessing about seeming, driven by the idea that I will seem my way into finding the meaning of my life.

I think about how people think about me. I guess (wrongly) what people think about and guess (wrongly) whose thoughts will matter. I attempt (mostly subconsciously and also wrongly) to align my desires, beliefs, and goals themselves with my guess of what the people I guess might be important expect from me.

This is an unhappy, unfree, and unfulfilling way of living that begins and can end with how I choose to think. This essay is the result of my attempt to think better. Attempting to share this journey has helped me clarify what I hope to achieve, highlighted what has been helpful along the way, and made me better appreciate the progress I have made. I hope that it helps someone else who thinks as wrongly as I do begin a journey that proves as enriching as my own.

Here’s my guess: we are fraught with an inherited and socially-reinforced fear of being disliked that we can choose to recognize as irrational and limiting. I believe choosing to think in this way allows us to lose undue respect for others’ respect and frees us to pursue self-acceptance instead of fruitlessly flailing after each other’s.

I guess that self-acceptance is itself more of a journey than a destination. This journey is enabled and empowered by the recognition that the fear of being disliked and associated desire for other people’s acceptance are bits of evolutionary baggage which influence me into an inauthentic way of living. I believe that I can choose to leave this baggage behind by understanding and improving the way that I think.

Dismissing these irrational fears allows for disenchantment with the perceived security of clinging to conforming desires and beliefs and frees me of the invented insecurities of individuality. Pursuing self-knowledge forces me to recognize the situations in which my mind reverts into a conditioned search for social recognition, to confront and challenge the polluting pressure to align my thoughts with what I guess are accepted ones. Pursuing self-love allows me to better recognize, understand and appreciate my authentic desires and beliefs. Combined, self-knowledge and love free me from an insecure and isolated pursuit of meaning via seeming in order to pursue a meaningful existence of authentically being.

I’ve been trying to change the way I think for five years. I am good at guessing what people want and good at delivering it. Worse yet, I’m great at fooling myself into accepting my seeming for actual being. Five years ago I was shaken awake, made finally aware of the consequences of my inauthentic life of seeming once the actions my ego was happy to justify came to be known by and deeply hurt someone I loved. This awakening left me at an utter loss as to who I truly was, what wants and beliefs were core to my being. Five years ago I began the journey to know and accept my self.

The connection I feel with the experiences and people that make up my life has changed with my thinking and made my life richer in laughably countless ways. It has also hurt. It has led me to confront the pain that my selfish way of seeming has caused people I care about, pain that my ego was happy to ignore. I’ve gained a deeper understanding of my faults and inabilities, shortcomings my ego was happy to dismiss. I’ve developed a growth-focused mindset which acknowledges my unlimited potential to think, feel, and be better, a development that’s proven critical for compassionately appreciating (or at least accepting) the flawed and incomplete self that I find in this pursuit of self-knowledge.

These pains are part of a journey that has made me immeasurably happier. I am less burdened by an unfulfillable desire to live in accordance with my guess of what other people want from me. I am less burdened by my own expectations of achieving meaning from a ridiculous hero’s journey for my ego. I get more joy out of the moments that make up my life and see more to be grateful for. My vision obscured with less bias of how I wish things to be, I am able to see more clearly opportunities to improve how things are. I am better able to contribute my unique capabilities to considering and creating inclusive progress.

This journey has made my relationships deeper and stronger. There can be no substance to a relationship without vulnerability, no fundamental connection without laying bare my self without pretense. Vulnerability is wholly at odds with the fears derived from self-awareness. With increasing self-acceptance I am increasingly comfortable opening my self to the people I share my life with, and have found them increasingly comfortable reciprocating that vulnerability.

My friendships have deepened upon a knowledge and acceptance of my self in all of my authentic weirdness. My closest loved ones are those that have been most damaged by my attempts to seem. My people and I have come to know and love each other more deeply by joining on my journey to accept my work-in-progress self.

My life is subjectively and objectively better because I have improved the way I think. This journey is not one of feelgoodery woowooism but of genuine self and shared betterment. It is not singularly about meditating or traveling or cold showers or psychedelics or being in love. It is about finding and using whatever methods convince you that the way you think is a choice you make. It is about choosing to create a life full of meaning by developing a mind that obsesses over meaning less.

Listen, the way we think is not an accident. The mind’s ability to consider itself is a trait selected for in the evolution of our social species. Thinking about thinking permits me to reflect on personal consciousness as well as intuit the contents of the thinking minds around me.

Those best capable of projecting the contents of other minds are best able to act in ways which gain the approval of those minds. In the era in which our minds evolved, being outcast from the tribe meant death. Physical and social survival were one and the same, and self-awareness would have been selected for on the basis of evolutionary fitness conferred by the ability to manipulate.

I suspect that the evolved ability for self-awareness was critical to our cultural evolution toward more complex societies, that the functioning of dynamic social, political and economic networks relied upon and thus reinforced the concept of self vis-à-vis others. I guess that the evolutionary selection for fitness-enhancing self-awareness combined with social reinforcement of self-conceptualization to entrench an internalized concept that I’ll call Identity.

Identity is the over-developed and under-questioned outgrowth of an inherited and socially-enforced self-awareness. It is my mind’s illusion of a permanent self that exists separate of the impermanent world of experiences. Identity is a mechanism for biological and cultural preservation through cohesion, hijacking and entrenching innate fears of being unaccepted to influence my adoption of accepted desires and beliefs over unvalidated, authentic ones.

I suggest that, with physical and social survival no longer tightly bound, we now give undue deference to the demands of an overdeveloped self-awareness that has gained control over our freedom to be. I am suggesting that we question and challenge the control granted to an Identity we imagine ourselves to be, that we recognize the evolutionary grounds supporting this thinking to no longer be applicable and allow ourselves to regain control of our awareness.

I guess this illusion of Identity is the source of my obsessive desire for finding meaning for my life, the root cause of my lifelong pursuit of purpose. The permanent, immaterial I refuses to accept that it too is a function of the material world which my eyes interpret, refuses to believe that it too is an effect of chemical and physical causes. No, Identity assures my rational mind, there must be a greater reason for our existence. The search for meaning arises from an acceptance of identity’s irrational demands.

It seems that over the course of our history, our species has sought meaning in many places and from many sources. We seem today to have begun to lose faith in meaning granted to us by unseen omnipotencies without losing any faith in the base reality of our lives having extrinsic meaning. A life of pursuing one’s internally-derived goals, empowered by self-defined desires and fueled by intrinsic beliefs, is also one exposed to the perceived insecurities of unvalidated individuality. It seems that in our fall from grace we fell just shy of realizing intrinsic meaning independent of an illusory Identity. In our retreat from a pursuit of the gods’ acceptance, we fell prey to the perceived security of each other’s acceptance.

And so, the self-awareness which arose from evolutionary pressure for social acceptance further developed into an Identity that seeks meaning via social recognition. My sense of meaning becomes inextricably tethered to my guess of how others believe me to be progressing towards goals which I’ve guessed they believe worthy of pursuing, with their beliefs mostly reflecting their guesses of social acceptability and so on. With my thinking under Identity’s control, external validation of my progress toward recognized goals becomes the primary criterion by which I judge the meaningfulness of my life.

This is, first and foremost, a very irresponsible way to care for something as important to well-being as a sense of self-worth. In this state, my sense of purpose is tied to my perceived attainment of goals, and these goals reflect my interpretation of social cues and norms. My attainment of these goals will forever be tenuous, a function of (a) my perception of what my goals should be, and (b) my idea of my perceived progress toward them. If I look to twenty external influences fifty times a day for confirmation that my actions (based on my guesses) are conforming to their expectations (based on their guesses), what are the odds that all signs will point to the progress that I need to feel “on track”? How secure can this feeling ever be when built upon such an unclear and fluid foundation? Seeking meaning from external validation makes the loss of feeling meaningful all but certain.

So fixated on recognition, I live in a trance. My life is transformed from a series of moments of which I am a part into a story, a fantasy culminating in me achieving my life’s meaning. This fantasy separates me from the reality of existence. My raw experiences are biased by this story, with my mind favorably weighting the events I guess to be seen as safe means toward accepted ends. With every moment considered a potentially critical step toward or misstep from achieving meaning, I self-impose an overwhelming pressure on my decision making. This expectation-weighting of moments leaves me paralyzed in doubt when my guess of what is acceptable collides with my intrinsic desires and instinctual beliefs.

Consumed by this story, my perception of how things are is skewed by the biasing lens of how my Identity wants things to be. I cannot fully know my unique capabilities, neither humbly accepting my strengths nor clearly understanding my shortcomings, and falter in my development by failing to apply the former toward advancement of the latter. I cannot see with any clarity the benefits and costs of the norms and institutions we placidly accept and fail to see opportunities to contribute my unique capabilities toward the progression from how things are to how they could be.

The Identity-driven conception of life as a story enforces an identification with the events of my life that discourages productive risk taking. Cultural and technological evolution are the product of innovators correctly assessing risks. Identification with one’s actions as acts in the play of one’s life influences a perspective in which failure in an action and failure of oneself are inseparable. In this conception, I am neither chef nor scientist, creating and experimenting and learning from successes and failures. I am a dish, a single experiment, and its failure is my failure.

This identification skews the risk-taking calculus, with the potential for outsized gains from unvalidated actions weighed against the perceived risk to self-worth from possible failure. This deprives us of both the potential gains from the action, should it succeed, and the growth of knowledge that results from failure in experimentation. Accepting a cultural preference for conventional failure over unconventional success retards the pace of individual and collective development and so serves to sustain the status quo rather than propel inclusive progress.

Finally, the illusion of Identity numbs in me a realization of connection with the people and places that fill the moments of my life. In unfortunately few moments of my life, I have felt the reality of an idea that Identity prevents me from knowing in normal waking consciousness. Encased in alpine clouds, wrapped in the embrace of a condition and pretense-less love, in the throes of a meditative or psychotropic exploration of my mind, I have felt a connection that is destroyed by the idea of self-and-other that Identity enforces.

The pursuit of meaning for my separate, permanent Identity imposes a sense of division on an indivisible reality. I and you and everyone and everything else that had and can ever be are connected by infinite biological, chemical and physical cycles. And yet I allow my Identity’s obsession over meaning to convince me that I am alone in a solo journey toward purpose, permitting supporting characters to come and go while preventing a genuine connection to grow upon our togetherness in coexistence.

The moments in which I have lost sight of my self and its search for meaning have been the most vivid and powerful of my life. These moments have convinced me that pursuing the connection that emerges when the veil of Identity drops, the feeling of being inescapably a part of all that I experience, the true realization that there is nothing of me that is separate from everything, is the greatest sense of meaning that I can achieve. I guess fostering self-acceptance to be the best route towards breaking down the self-and-other sense of duality that keeps me from living with this sense of unity.

There is an old idea, kept alive in eastern philosophies and long-buried within Western religions, which maintains that within each of us there exists a greater something shared by all of us, something hidden from our realization by the ego’s idea of self. This “highest common factor” (see Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy”) connecting humanity has, in its various formulations, been called God, the soul, Brahman, the Ultimate Ground of Being, etc.

I guess what connects us is our awareness. Awareness allows us to understand and, armed with knowledge, seek to create a better world. Self-awareness and the irrational fears it inspires prevent us from actually creating one. The biasing, blinding, and numbing effects of Identity preclude me from realizing that we are all on humanity’s inherited flight from the same fears, each searching for meaning in a meaningless world and grasping at what we guess to be accepted means toward the realization of this mirage.

I guess that the breakdown of Identity precipitates the emergence of humanity. I guess that humanity’s future depends on increasing our knowledge of and ability to coexist in harmony within the chemical and physical bounds of reality. Hamstrung by Identity, I fear that we will falter in our pursuit of knowledge of these bounds and discovery of means to better exist within them. Disabled from realizing our connection in coexistence, I fear we will never achieve genuine empathy and continue to fail to achieve the progress for all required to achieve lasting progress for any. Lacking a sense of our shared humanity, I fear we will share instead the failure of our species to save ourselves from ourselves.

The thing is, we have a choice. I suggest that we choose to turn awareness upon self-awareness and choose to lose respect for each other’s respect. I suggest that we recognize that seeking acceptance for our desires and beliefs is an unfree way of living that sustains how things are at the cost of progressing towards how things could be. I suggest we create meaning by seeking greater self-knowledge and love, that we choose to pursue self-acceptance over others’ acceptance.

I am advocating realizing purpose in the pursuit of authentically being. I believe that by choosing to dismiss irrational fears we can detach from the isolating hold of Identity and better realize the inescapable connectedness of existence. I guess that truly experiencing a fundamental oneness with everything and everyone that make up my reality, of losing the separation imposed by the self-and-other mode of thinking, is the greatest meaning that I can create with my life.

I don’t know if this realization is achievable. I know that in its pursuit I have realized a deep sense of empathy with an ever more inclusive community and felt more freedom to contribute my authentic self toward the creation of communal progress.

Ultimately, inclusive progress is my purpose for exploring self-awareness. I believe collective betterment is impossible without individual development. Outside change begins with inside change, particularly the breakdown of the imagined duality of outside and inside worlds that prevents realizing the intimate connectedness of being. I cannot imagine how we achieve equitable upward movement without widespread inward movement.

Sharing this idea is part of my journey inward. It has forced me to better understand my motivations and highlighted where I remain conditioned into seeking recognition. It has forced me to define and refine my concept of what is true about this pursuit and helped guide me forward. It has forced me to seek to better understand why evolution might have saddled me with an awareness capable of constraining my freedom and encouraged compassion for my starting place on this journey. It has sent me in search of concrete steps to assist in my journey to challenge and overcome the limitations of self-awareness. It has encouraged an exploration of the limitations self-awareness imposes on the growth of knowledge and the ways in which Identity is weaponized by forces desiring stagnation.

I have begun to change the way I think, and sharing has inspired me onward. Sharing helps me to more genuinely be. I share to continue my journey towards existing in the moment and with the whole environment, to become less confined by the of the confining illusion of an isolated Identity. Only by authentically being can I see clearly, connect deeply and contribute effectively to creating the harmonious existence which I know we can achieve and believe we deserve.

And so I’ll continue onward in my journey inward. I suggest you do the same.