“Disease of meaning”

21 Feb “Disease of meaning”

Hollywood film producer Adam Leipzig was stunned and amazed.

In his TED Talk the film executive and CEO of media company, Adam Leipzig, relates how shocked he was finding out how unhappy 80% of his friends and acquaintances were at their 25 year reunion at Yale university.

Having graduated from such an elite university they had gone on to be high flyers in the corporate and business world. They owned several houses, cars, travelled the world, led lives of luxury, had trophy wives and possessed everything much of the world’s population strives for. Yet they were unhappy.

They even told him how they felt they had wasted half of their lives. They had worked hard followed the rules acquired everything which society had told them would make them happy and yet their lives felt empty and purposeless. They wondered what the point of their lives was. The happiness they did get was fleeting and not the “happily ever after” they had been promised since childhood if they just followed societies rules played their role and worked hard.

The emptiness they felt needed to be filled with a sense of purpose and meaning. In an earlier post we saw how most of us get pushed back to the “concrete self” level of consciousness once we finish our studies and go out in the world. Many of us sooner or later come to the point when we experience the “Disease of Meaning” and we start to need purpose and meaning in our lives. We respond to that need either by developing vertically or unfortunately through an anaesthetic or distraction which only brings temporary relief often at a high cost.

If your wondering about the 20% of Adam Leipzig’s friends who were happy, they were the ones who had studied subjects that they genuinely enjoyed and not because they saw it as a stepping stone to a future career. As Joseph Campbell’s would say, they were “following their bliss”.

In the next post we will first look at the wrong way to deal with the “Disease of Meaning”. Sadly you will probably recognise lots of examples in people you know.

Then we will look at examples of people whose lives have been lifted by their desire for purpose and how they grew vertically to ever higher levels of consciousness, wisdom and maturity.