Escape the emptiness: the timeless quest for meaning
The foundations of The Net Project – field research, what we’re building, what we’re hoping to accomplish for a more meaningful world.
Meaning and purpose.
Meaning and purpose are critical for mental health, physical health, and general life outcomes. Depression, addiction, suicide, strokes, heart attacks, and premature death are just some of the negative outcomes that someone lacking a strong sense of meaning and purpose is more likely to face. 1 Unfortunately, for something so critical to our health, only ~25% of Americans believe they have a clear sense of purpose and what makes their lives meaningful, and nearly 40% of Americans feel neutral or say they do not.2 This was in 2008. And there are many indicators of general societal increases in isolation, pessimism, and even hopelessness – indicators that signal that “nihilism” (the word philosophers use for a belief that life is meaningless) has only continued to increase.
Despite the important role meaning and purpose play in our life outcomes, there is a tendency to struggle with approaching these topics, or to avoid them entirely. This isn't too surprising. The topics can be intimidating to approach. After all, where do we go, if we start thinking about these “existential” (the world philosophers use for deep themes related to existence) questions and find no satisfactory answers? Not having a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives can leave us feeling empty inside. Conventional advice often minimizes our yearning. It tells us that we’re overthinking when we worry about these things, that we should aim to escape feelings of emptiness with conformity instead, even if that conformity, in all its contradiction and confusion, can never fulfill our deeper human need for meaning.
Spring 2019: I was living in Hong Kong, completing a second research project on meaning. Up to that point, I had moments in my own life where I had felt grabbed by existential anxieties, but this was not one of them. Instead, I was now driven by a curiosity to learn about how other people, from backgrounds different than mine, experienced these topics in their own lives. I started with a simple question, “did everyone have these thoughts,” or were my research questions an indulgence of personal curiosity, an over-intellectualization?
Up until then, people often shared how they personally resonated with my work but suspected everyone else was unconcerned about these questions. Maybe even that there was something wrong with them for entertaining these concerns. These suspicions contradicted my understanding of these questions as universal to the human experience, yet their recurrence forced me to take them seriously and question my own perspective. Addressing this, I decided to take an unconventional approach to my research. Rather than focusing solely on reading and writing, I added a layer by bringing my ideas to public spaces to better understand people's personal experiences with meaning and their reactions to my ideas.
In the weeks that ensued, I traveled through Japan, South Korea, China, and Malaysia, mostly staying in hostels and couchsurfing. I interviewed both locals and travelers from across the world hailing from six continents, with varied nationalities, hometowns, religions, and overall life experiences. To say that experiences were both impactful and personally meaningful, feels like an understatement. There were memorable moments, stories, and thrilling travel experiences, but that’s for another time. Instead, I want to focus on some of the key insights that have inspired me–and others–to build The Net Project.
Insight #1: Pretty much everyone thinks about the meaning of life. No really. They might not use those exact combinations of words, but everyone thinks about the topics captured by meaning. It might be useful to understand exactly what things we mean by a “meaning of life.” A Meaning of Life (MOL) is many things: something that gives a sense of purpose, brings a feeling of understanding to our existence in the universe, and inspires resiliency in the face of adversity. They are central things we use to organize our identity, values, motivations, time and efforts, and the act of living itself.
Insight #2: People struggle thinking through these topics. After all, these concerns are scary – how do you navigate your life if you determine all of it is meaningless? It doesn’t help that the topics are effectively taboo in most communities. We shy away from talking publicly about such things, fearing that it can come with labels of being overly serious, depressing, neurotic, and even blasphemous. Still we can’t help but think about these things at least at some point in our lives. These taboos can make us feel alienated and alone, like dysfunctional people who can’t seem to function like everyone else. And yet, to struggle with these questions can actually be the most human experience.
Insight #3: The little bit of thinking we did about these questions only scratched the surface, yet had dramatic consequences. Questions like what was meaningful, what values and goals were worth striving for and why, and many more, have downstream effects on our decisions big and small. Everything from our friends, romantic partners and family, and work, to what we ate, and what we did in our free time: so much of it was the result of the conscious and subconscious beliefs of meaning we had. What we decided to study, the person we wanted to marry, and where we decided to live–all our wants were informed based on values and goals that we thought were meaningful.
But again thinking about these things is hard. In an effort to more comfortably escape the emptiness, people often took on the most popular meaning approaches around them. Almost all groups of people were dissatisfied with how they were approaching MOL questions. Often, people expressed that life was meaningless and the things they were spending time on felt ultimately pointless. Even people who did their best to distract themselves from these questions, felt something was missing or lamented at one point or another find themselves struggling for meaning once more.
It all sounds pretty bleak right? This doesn’t have to be the case. Throughout my interviews, there was a surprising theme that began to emerge. People were thanking me. The interview’s intentions weren’t to help people find meaning or to even help them think about these topics. Unexpectedly, that seemed to be happening. People appreciated that I was helping them think through these topics with a well thought-out and safe structure. There were some who even invited me to their homes, asking me to talk to friends and family, or even joined me on my travels to help me with translations.
It was evident in my conversations that people felt pain and anxiety by attempting to haphazardly escape the suffering, often in ways that hurt themselves and hurt others. This hurt sometimes would take years to heal, if it ever happened. I certainly hope my interviews were positively life changing, but more realistically, my brief encounters were nowhere near what people needed. Life presents us with consistent challenges that make us question our values, assumptions, goals, and overall sense of meaning. One conversation isn’t enough to give someone the tools they need to approach these “existential” topics throughout their lives. However, if we can give people better tools to think about these questions and frameworks for meaning, we can create alternative outcomes, where people feel empowered and supported to live up to the potential of all they could be, and contribute to a world that feels meaningful and fulfilling.
At the broadest level, The Net Project’s mission is to help people explore and create healthier approaches to life’s biggest existential questions. We want to give people the wisdom, interconnectedness, and awe that are empowering to one’s sense of meaning. If people can meaningfully meet these questions with strength, courage, and wisdom, then we can more assuredly meet the challenges that will inevitably emerge and prompt these questions. This is the beginning of our ambitions at The Net Project. In the coming months, our 501(c)(3) nonprofit will be releasing the first broadly available experience aimed at this goal. It’s something we have been working on and iterating for quite some time, and we can’t wait to share it with you.
You can stay updated below. Want to contribute to our mission of creating a more meaningful world? Reach out at future@netproject.org.
Dictionary
Nihilism: the word philosophers use for a belief that life is meaningless
Existential: the word philosophers use for things related to existence
Meaning of Life (MOL): can include many things, something that gives a sense of purpose, brings a feeling of understanding to our existence in the universe, and inspires resiliency in the face of adversity. They are central things we use to organize our identity, values, motivations, time and efforts, and the act of living itself.
Updated Jan 01, 2025 to improve clarity and refine explanations. The original meaning has not been changed.