Understanding stories, values, goals … and the meaning of life

What is the meaning of life? It’s a big question. And it’s one we might never answer.

But there’s another question that can be answered. One that subjectively carries just as much weight to the individual who utters it: “What is the meaning of MY life?”

It’s a big moment when you decide to tackle a big question such as defining the meaning of your life.

And that is the goal your Story of My Life Journal supports you in realising.

What is meaning?

To understand how your Story of My Life Journal helps you answer the question – “what is the meaning of my life?” – let’s begin with the question itself.

What is meaning?

Let’s take a quick crash-course in behavioural psychology (Operant Conditioning, as opposed to Classical): it starts with values, which create goals, which drive behaviours, which result in emotions.

Underpinning it all – the start of the whole cycle – are the stories that you’ve constructed to define your sense of identity.

Think of your values as the implicit representations of your unconscious stories – they drive the behaviours that act out the enduring beliefs you tell about yourself, the world, and your place within it.

Those beliefs have been established by stories, mostly developed subconsciously when you were an infant or a child, or during events of emotional significance.

Dr Gabor Maté, in his book Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder, describes this process using the analogy of someone who loses their temper at being cut off in traffic. In that moment, they are not so much reacting to being cut off, as they are playing out a story – the enduring belief that has established a value around the action that drives the behaviour – which was established subconsciously in response to some event LONG ago.

Your values, as the name suggests, drive and motivate you towards that which you value. They also, in turn, tell you what you don’t value (or value less).

That value hierarchy then establishes goals, as you target that which you value ahead of that which you don’t, and you behave in ways you believe will lead to the obtainment of your goal.

That entire system needs some sort of feedback mechanism to give you an idea of whether your behaviours are working.

Enter: emotions.

You feel positive emotion when moving towards a goal, and negative when either not progressing, or losing ground.

The ghost in the machine

So, I hear you asking, “What does that have to do with meaning?”

That’s where you and your stories come in.

This entire process happens whether you’re on board with it or not. Your mind and body don’t need you to consciously tell them what to value.

They don’t even need you to be aware this process exists – they’ll develop stories for you all by themselves.

They’ll create values for you all by themselves. They’ll even set goals, motivate behaviours, and produce emotions for you.

But the one thing they can’t do is create meaning – because they are simply a process. They’re effects of consciousness, they’re not consciousness itself. They are processes of you – they’re not you.

The process and the system have no awareness of that which created them, let alone an awareness of what that creator might find meaningful.

The computer program might reflect the programmer in the ways in which it’s been designed to behave, but the program itself has no awareness of the programmer’s existence, nor does it have any idea how to honour its creator’s purpose in life.

The Apple has no awareness of the Jobs. The Windows has no understanding of the Gates.

Life on autopilot

This is why, without consciously deciding to take control of the narrative of your life, you can still operate in the world, and most of the time you can do so quite effectively.

You can find a job, find a partner, marry, have kids, wake up and look after those kids, go to work and earn money to pay for everything you and your family needs (or wants), come home and look after those kids, spend a bit of time with your partner, go to sleep, then wake up and do it all again.

You can do all of that just fine.

But, at some point, you’re going to become aware that you never remember hitting ‘autopilot’ and have no idea how you got to where you are, but you know something isn’t right.

That’s because, for a period of time, your family and culture provide so much scaffolding for your mind and body – for your life – that their stories get you to a certain point without you needing to think much about them.

You legally have to go to school until a certain age, and you’re told it’s good to graduate and go to university, or get a trade, or enter the workforce without either. It’s expected you’ll use your acquired skills to get a job.

There’s an expectation you’ll seek a partner and, eventually, a stable, long-term one – you’re told holding down a job will help with that. Then, once you’ve proved capable of sustaining a relationship, you’re expected to marry and settle down. Then you’re expected to have kids.

But, then, the music stops.

From about mid-30s until the time of retirement – maybe 65 or so – the scaffolding runs out. The unwritten laws of your culture no longer have clear values and expectations to help your years disappear into a vacuum.

The clear-cut goals and next steps they once provided are replaced by simple guidelines: you got a degree, you should use it; you got a job, you should keep it (and upgrade); you got married, you should stay married; you have kids, you should raise them ‘right’.

And it’s about this time that the autopilot switches off, and you find yourself with your hands on the steering wheel of a machine you’ve never driven before, with your life a third of the way, if not more, done.

You – the ‘you’ at the centre of it all – begin to wake up.

Waking up

You might not realise you’re waking up – becoming more self-aware and self-conscious – and you might not be able to say exactly what’s wrong, but you sure as hell know something isn’t right. You can feel it in the pit of your stomach.

A few things can happen at this moment: some people have a mid-life crisis and attempt to use ‘things’ to distract themselves from the realisation; some turn to substance use/abuse to numb the realisation; some get weighed down by the enormity of the realisation, succumbing to anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges – or worse.

And some seek answers to what they’re feeling and why they’re feeling it. They dare to dive deep within themselves.

They search, without knowing what they’re searching for. Even without knowing they’re searching.

They’re the ones who eventually come to a realisation: there is no meaning and purpose in the stories and values of the autopilot.

The autopilot got you to where you are, not through meaning and purpose, but by imitating meaning and purpose through a seemingly endless flow of cultural values, expectations, and goals.

They weren’t yours. They never belonged to you. You never created them, you just inherited them from your culture.
And, because of that, you didn’t really have the chance to consciously decide whether they fit and align with who you are.

How could you? You likely adopted most of them when you were a child, or formed them subconsciously during emotional events, with no awareness of any of this.

And they kept you so busy that you never had to ask what you were up to in life, or the deeper question of what was driving what you were up to.

Or deeper still: “What is the meaning of my life?”

That doesn’t mean your life to that point of realisation was meaningless – you undoubtedly loved and would continue to love parts of it.

But it does mean that, once aware, you can consciously begin to take control of the stories that control your life.

The wheel is yours, captain

Your Story of My Life Journal is designed to support you in identifying those stories driving your life, and to then rewrite the narrative – to create the story you CHOOSE to tell.

It’s designed to help you better discover and understand who you are, consider where you want to go, and work out and plan how to get there.

What came before was someone else’s story.

What could come next is the story of your life.

If you’re ready, you can either find out more about how your Story of My Life Journal works and supports you at our How It Works page, or head to the Shop to get started.