I found myself journaling as the caffeine was injecting stimulation into my brain this morning and my pen stumbled into contemplating the current meaning in my life. I don’t know about you, but if I don’t journal — I will most likely go days, weeks — *gasp* years — not being entirely sure of — what it is that I am doing — or more importantly, why? That is due — I think — to an ever-increasing sense of meaninglessness in our modern age.
Morning pages from The Artist’s Way — write three pages longhand or for twenty minutes — is something that I often neglect at my own peril (it is such a valuable practice for someone with little intuition that I should be lashed for skipping a day). I have been pretty decent at jotting down some thoughts on a semi-daily basis for a while, but the practice of sitting down and writing three pages longhand will more often than not yield a rich nugget that was desperately trying to get my attention.
The discipline of the pages is required to produce awareness.
Without The Pages, days accumulate without an understanding of why, and without a why, meaninglessness enters its ugly little head, and in 2025 — there are tons of distractions ready to suck meaning from your life.
I recently had a conversation with my boss where we were discussing work, and he said something that resonated with me. In a world where dissatisfaction runs rampant he told me, “work will save you.”
Enter Deep Work by Cal Newport.
The core message of this book is to eliminate shallow activities in your life and replace them with deep work practices where you are deeply engaged for periods of time.
He buttresses this position by stating that there are neurological, psychological, and philisophical arguments for a deep work preference.
Neurologically, placing your attention on a meaningful piece of work not only absorbs you in a meaningful way, but eliminates all of the unpleasant thoughts that would surely be entering your mind if you weren’t engaged.
Psychologically, it is when we are working that we are most happy, due to the built in structure, goal, and feedback system in place. Leisure time is actually the hardest time to produce satisfaction because of its lack of structure. This seems almost painfully true to me, as on my days off I seem to attempt to extract as much joy as I can from doing nothing, except doing nothing isn’t all that great.
Philisophically, it is the effort with which you engage in your work — regardless of what it is — that will produce meaning.
If adding meaning is the name of the game, then reducing the things that don’t bring this is also a part of it, and the usual suspects are social media and your phone.
Newport suggests making your phone as uninteresting as possible and taking a month off of social media. If by the end of the month you don’t feel as though its absence was impactful on your life, then abandon it altogether.
Overall, the method is simple, but not easy. In my attempts to employ a deep work philosophy, I have continually been distracted by reaching for my phone, even though I eliminated social media apps from them a while back. So here is a random suggestion that I don’t see that I think should make a comeback:
Join a support group.
My guess is that a large number of people who are addicted to their phones and social media apps — or even dating apps — is due to a lack of actual, genuine connections in their personal lives, because the major irony of social media — to me — is that connecting with people through digital media/apps actually relieves us of the burden of having to connect with them in person, and the reason it’s burdensome is that it takes effort and energy — effort and energy that we would rather keep to ourselves. Except giving our energy to others and building real world connections is what we desperately need.
So in a quest for meaning, here is a mini-blueprint that I will be using moving forward:
- What is my current why? Why?
- What are three things that I could start doing that would add more meaning to my life? (Deep activities).
- What are three things that I am currently doing that are working against meaning? (Shallow activities).
- Build real connections with real people.
