Meaning Is Not Found, It Is Made

by Loring Mortensen

There is a quiet assumption woven into how most people talk about meaning. We say we are searching for it. Looking for it. Trying to find it. We speak as though meaning were an object hidden somewhere in the world, waiting to be discovered by anyone patient or lucky enough to come across it.

This framing is so familiar that it usually goes unexamined. But it shapes the question in a particular way — and the way a question is shaped determines what answers are possible.

Jorge Luis Borges’ tragic short story “The Library of Babel” is the narrative of just this kind of quest, and the meaning they search for is the impossible kind, the ultimate, divine kind of meaning. I share a similar yearning for that sort of meaning and I traveled 30-years to track it down. So I am both sympathetic and complicit in their thirst. The tomes I was searching to find for most of my life led me to Eidetica. But what I did not understand until recently was that the answer was not in the books at all. It was in the life I had been living — the books were not the destination. They were the instrument by which I learned to recognize what was already there. I came awfully close to suffering the same fate as the librarians.

“Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps this catalog of catalogs. Now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born.”

— Jorges Borges, “The Library of Babel”

In Borges' story, the librarians spend their lives searching for the one perfect book that will explain everything — convinced it must exist somewhere in the infinite stacks. They never consider that the meaning they seek might not be hiding in the books at all.

If meaning is something to be found, then the failure to feel it is a failure of search. You did not look hard enough, in the right places, with the right method. Try a new job, a new relationship, a new city, a new practice, a new belief system. Keep looking. Somewhere out there, the meaning is waiting.

Most people who have tried this approach for any length of time eventually arrive at the same disappointing conclusion: the search does not end. The places change, but the missing thing does not appear. And after enough cycles, the search itself begins to feel like the problem.

I think it is the problem. But not for the reason most people assume.

The reason the search does not end is that meaning is not something that exists prior to the search. It is not waiting somewhere to be found. It does not have a hiding place. It is not an object at all.

Meaning is something that gets made — through attention, through repetition, through the slow accumulation of care directed at something specific over time.

A relationship does not contain meaning that you discover by being in it. The meaning is generated, day by day, by the small attentions you give it. A piece of work does not have meaning waiting inside it for you to uncover. The meaning emerges from the hours you spend doing the work and the way you do those hours. A place does not have meaning that you absorb by visiting. The meaning forms through the years you spend there and the texture of your presence in it.

Meaning is the residue of sustained attention. It cannot exist without the attention, because the attention is what creates it.

This reframe sounds simple, but its implications are not.

If meaning is made rather than found, then the absence of meaning is not a failure of luck or location. It is a sign that nothing is being made. Sustained attention to something specific is missing from the conditions of life. The materials are there. The making is not.

This is uncomfortable because it shifts responsibility from the world to the person. There is no longer a place to go that will solve the problem. The Library of Babel is a fool’s errand. There is only the choice to begin making meaning where you are, in the conditions you actually have, with the attention you are willing to commit.

But it is also liberating, in a quiet way. If meaning is not hidden somewhere you have not yet reached, then you do not have to find it before you can begin. You can begin now. The making and the finding turn out to be the same thing.

The people who report living meaningful lives almost never describe a moment of discovery. They describe long stretches of work, attention, and care directed at something they decided was worth it — and the meaning appearing, gradually, as a consequence of that direction.

Meaning is not what you stumble onto. It is what gathers around the things you refuse to stop attending to.