You’re not insecure. You’ve been looking for belonging in a place that can never give it to you.

Your failed meditation practice and your quiet sense of meaninglessness share a single cause. No one has named it for you yet.

If I'm not insecure, then what's the actual problem?

You're not insecure. You've been looking for belonging in a place that can never give it to you.

Did you pick your career because you wanted the title to do the talking?

Do you replay conversations afterward, worried you didn't sound impressive enough?

I spent over a decade building my identity on other people's applause.

Most high achievers do. And it works. Until it doesn't.

Why does my life feel meaningless?

You can run on other people's approval for decades. Then one morning, you wake up, and the color has drained out of everything else.

Your life feels meaningless because you are stuck in a particular way of knowing.

The way you know your experience right now can be formulated in four different ways.

Our culture biases us strongly toward a single form of knowing.

And as it turns out, it's the form of knowing that is least conducive to meaning.

If you've been struggling to find your purpose, if you once felt meaning toward your profession but now feel as if you're just going through the motions, don't ignore that.

That's a helpful pointer informing you about something important.

What are the different forms of knowing, and how do they relate to meaning?

Western Culture lives in propositional knowing (fact-based statements). For example:

Paris is the capital of France
Water freezes at 0°C, etc.
It's cloudy today

Our culture unwittingly overemphasizes this form of knowing so much that it pigeon-holes us into meaninglessness, since there is almost no meaning at this level of knowing.

And, it does so at the expense of assisting us in accessing the deeper forms of knowing where meaning lives like:

perspectival (knowing from): what it's like to be the underdog in a fight
And participatory (knowing by being): knowing what its like to be married by being married

Think the know-it-all stuck in their heads. Propositional knowing is NOT where meaning is discovered.

This form of knowing is why western civilization is experiencing a meaning crisis.

Meaning is revealed through our participation.

Meaning is realized in how you are participating with reality itself.

Who are you being at work? In your community? What is your relationship to a cause larger than yourself, and how are you participating in it?

What is the meaning crisis?

The meaning crisis stems from our scientific worldview, which explains how things work and what they're made of, but never tells you how to belong.

You have an accurate picture of the universe and no place in it. The meaning crisis is the inability to bridge intellectual coherence and existential relevance.

For most of human history, humanity lived in a worldview where how you know the world and what the world is reinforced each other.

Aristotle's cosmos is the prototype: the world was organized by purpose, and your place in it made intuitive sense (see chart above).

You didn't ask whether your life had meaning because it was already meaningful.

We're not just a little sad.

Suicide rates rose 30% in two decades, and the increase can't be explained by economics alone.

The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory framed loneliness as a public health crisis with mortality risk equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Loneliness is epidemic among high performers.

The more status you gain, the less time you have, the fewer deep relationships you cultivate.

And deep relationships are the single strongest predictor of a flourishing life (not wealth, fame, or achievement).

Nothing else comes close, according to the Harvard Grant Study.

Where can I find meaning?

You need to belong, to matter, to grow.

But you've been trying to get your belonging needs met through promotions, to consume your way into transformation.

The promotion comes. For two weeks, you feel it.

Then the hollow feeling returns, and you start eyeing the next one.

I spent a decade pursuing a molecular biology career, pulling regular 12-hour days, sacrificing relationships, missing family, telling myself the next publication would finally make me enough.

I managed to complete my main project just 24 hours before a competitor working on the same thing (it was brutal).

At the lab celebration, a colleague asked if I was happy it was finished. I stared blankly at him, and my response surprised me: “No.”

I was as shocked as they were.

I was trying to fulfill my need to belong through accomplishment, and by seeking it in the wrong way, my accomplishments were never enough.

For high achievers, this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy:

The need to belong is unmet
You increase the having-mode strategy (that doesn't work)
The unmet need feels more acute, and the cycle continues.

So how do you actually get it back?

The way to access more meaning in your life is again about how you are participating with reality.

The gateway to deeper levels of participation with reality has all to do with entering flow state.

What is flow state?

I'm sure you've experienced times in life where you were so engaged with something you were doing that time disappeared.

Times when the mind-made sense of “me” disappears altogether.

The separation between the observer and the observed disappears.

In these moments, the observer is revealed as the observed.

It might be times in which you were playing your favorite sport, or your favorite hobby.

When we enter flow, the duality between subject and object dissolve altogether.

The writer and the written dissolve, leaving only the writing itself.

There's no longer the tennis player and the game, but the playing itself.

Flow State as a Gateway to Meaning

Flow demands a challenge calibrated to your skill level: too easy and you're bored; too hard and you're anxious (see chart above).

If the challenge exceeds our skill level, we experience anxiety and become self-conscious—strengthening our mind-made sense of self.

Our mind-made sense of self is what I call the separate self.

The separate self isn't a noun. It's a verb: always reaching for something “missing”, always pushing away what's already here.

The separate self is experienced as the mental narration we have in our minds.

When the separate self is running the show, the overthinking, the mental replaying, the constant commentary: you're locked into the shallowest form of knowing (see image below).

By its nature, we will only be able to access propositional levels of knowing (fact-based observations and descriptions about our experience):

“There are many flowers in the field.”
“They are yellow, red, and purple.”
“The sun is shining”, etc.

But we can reach a threshold where flow becomes our doorway into deeper levels of meaning.

Above this threshold we stop looking at the flowers in the field through the perspective of the separate self, but instead begin to access the collapse between the separate self and the objects it perceives.

In this collapse of separation, we gain access to a profound and intimate sense of oneness with our experience.

The flowers are no longer “out there” apart from ourselves, they are ourselves.

The sense of distance and time collapses.

Until we are simply left with the Now, revealing itself in the form of what is.

Pure. Intimate. Timeless. Profound

These moments are eternity itself breaking into time.

And in that, we find deep meaning revealing itself effortlessly.

Flow therefore becomes the pathway through which we silence the mind-made narrator (the separate self) and its obsessive thought patterns.

It reliably induces the types of knowing that reveal meaning and give richness to our life experience.

In these higher forms of knowing, we are direct and intimately coupled with reality itself, without the separate self running the mental commentary, separating us from our direct experience.

What meditation actually does

Meditation does for the narrator what flow does for the task: it trains the same capacity from the inside out

Meditation isn't for relaxing. It's for transcending the part of you that thinks life is meaningless.

Meditation isn't to help you calm down.

It's not a stress relief tool or productivity hack.

And if you've used it for those things and found some benefit but had a hard time making it stick, it's because no one told you what it's actually for.

The point of meditation is to directly experience a mode of being that does not pigeon hole you into meaninglessness.

Meditation is a way to access a kind of knowing your entire identity has been built to suppress.

Meditation brings you out of your mind and into direct contact with your experience

Flow directly couples you to something outside like playing jazz, climbing a rock face, your opponents movement, etc.

Meditation returns knowing to its source: first by placing it on a subtle object like your breath, before drawing it back.

Practiced long enough, it becomes a skill in sustaining non-judgmental contact with reality directly.

Meditation trains the exact capacity flow depends on: the ability to let the separate self go quiet without needing an external task to force it into silence.

How meditation and flow relate to each other

When you meditate you increase your capacity to quiet the separate self, which makes it easier to access flow in other domains of life.

Flow dissolves the separate self as a side effect.

You're attention is too engaged with reality to narrate it, and that's where meaning lives.

Your assignment this week, if you choose to accept it: block off one window of time for an activity that absorbs you so completely that the separate self isn't present.

If your separate self has been running the show for years, meditation isn't optional. It's the only practice that deliberately trains the capacity flow depends on, from the inside out. The Essential Meditations Kit →