Last Updated on April 8, 2025

Living a meaningful life

Feeling like life is meaningless is one of the core features of depression.

So the opposite of being depressed is when we feel our lives are deeply meaningful.

The real question is this:

Why do we feel like life lacks meaning in the first place?

I believe it’s because of the illusion of disconnection.

Everything is already connected

If you…

  • go on enough meditation retreats,
  • or do enough Core Transformation,
  • or take a big enough dose of psychedelic mushrooms,

…you might experience a profound Oneness with everything.

This is what some people call an “altered state” experience.

But I’d argue it isn’t an altered experience.

If anything our normal waking consciousness is what’s altered!

People who have experiences of Oneness say it feels like seeing reality clearly.

And that actually makes a lot of sense.

Every time you inhale, you breathe in oxygen.

Where does that oxygen come from?

From rainforests in Brazil and plankton in the ocean.

And such oxygen-producing organisms are only possible because the sun continues to shine.

And luckily the sun is exactly the right distance away from planet Earth to allow for life.

If any of those things were to suddenly stop working, we’d all die within minutes.

So we are already always connected to everything in the entire Universe.

What an incredible miracle!

When we forget our interconnectedness, that’s when we feel alienated.

That’s when life feels meaningless.

Restoring connection through the body

When we feel like life is meaningless, we are stressed.

And when we are in a stress state, our eyes literally change.

They focus more on foveal vision, what’s right in front of us.

And they delete peripheral vision, what’s off to the sides.

So one simple hack we can use to restore the rest-and-digest parasympathetic response is this:

Simply pay deliberate attention to peripheral vision for a few minutes.

Interestingly, it can also go the opposite direction.

Focusing on an extremely narrow phone screen for a long time gets us in foveal vision.

And getting into foveal vision then can fire off the fight-or-flight response!

This is just one example of how we lose connection.

When we are in more wide-open awareness, we are more connected with everything that is happening around us.

If we do that long enough, we enter into more of a state of Oneness.

We can do this in other senses too.

Instead of listening to one sound, listen to all the sounds in your environment all at once.

Instead of feeling just one sensation in your body, feel your entire body all at once.

You can even combine them all into one experience of all the senses simultaneously.

This wide-open-awareness approach to meditation often works better for people with ADHD than focusing your attention.

So if you struggle with attention, you might try this awareness approach instead.

It can lead to profound experiences of Peace and Oneness.

Telling meaningful stories

But meaning is more than just a physiological hack.

It’s also about the stories we tell about ourselves and the world.

If you keep telling yourself “life is meaningless,” then you are hypnotizing yourself to believe it.

It can be helpful to first loosen up such unhelpful narratives with questions like…

  • Do you have to believe that?
  • Is that the only possible story?
  • Is there no other possible way to think about this?
  • What are you afraid might happen if you had a different story?
  • If everyone had the story you have, would it make the world a better place?

Then once the old story is loosened up a bit, we can brainstorm new narratives.

What would you want someone you love to believe about their life?

What narrative is still accurate but much more empowering and enlivening?

What story makes life feel deeply meaningful when you believe it?

We are always already connected to everything.

And we are always already authoring stories about our lives.

So when will you decide to be the authority, and write your own story?

Take care,

 

 

 

~Duff
(they/them)

P.S. In my weekly coaching group The Joy of Doing, we explore a new story called The Progress Paradigm. The first month is only $7 with coupon code 40.

Hope to see you there, my friend.