I've been doing a lot of reading on the research on meaning in preparation for a shift in research focus. There are a lot of different models to explain the effects found in the literature, some of which are very different from others. However, we could say that, at the simplest level, they are describing processes by which people make themselves feel better. That is to say that the experience of a lack of meaning is aversive, and each model is trying to describe how it is that people relieve themselves of this aversive experience. This statement is obviously agnostic towards what it actually is to experience a lack of meaning and what meaning is in itself. To answer that question we have a different but related literature full of different models. That's not really what this post is about though. I've gotten to a place where I think I have a tentative conclusion that partially answers the question of meaninglessness. To experience meaning, you must believe in and focus on a high level, abstract system. Some of you are thinking at this point "Duh!" If that were the end of it, this research would be unprofitable. It turns out though, that things start getting interesting when you look at examples of what constitutes a system. It looks like a system is any ideal, so long as it is high level and abstract. The most obvious sort of this system is a religious system. Another example of a system is a political ideology or the set of values that motivates a culture or nation. Another system is, believe it or not, the self. In this case, it is a focus on the ideal self and affirming the integrity of one's self. When meaning is lost, people mentally focus on identifying with one of these ideal systems and this serves a palliative function of restoring a sense of meaning and removing the aversive experience of a loss of meaning. This is not an exhaustive list of what has been explored in the research.
What we can do with this information is consider those times when we feel a loss of meaning, and recognize that to restore it we can choose a system to affirm or identify with. There is one additional issue that we have to address that I haven't seen explored fully enough in the literature yet, and that is the issue of what to do when one experiences doubt in the truth of a system. We could simply affirm a different system, and that would work, but I think a better answer lies in understanding the relationship between action and cognition. That is probably a different post though.
*Informed from research on terror management theory (TMT), self-affirmation theory, the meaning maintenance model, and the reactive approach motivation model.
What we can do with this information is consider those times when we feel a loss of meaning, and recognize that to restore it we can choose a system to affirm or identify with. There is one additional issue that we have to address that I haven't seen explored fully enough in the literature yet, and that is the issue of what to do when one experiences doubt in the truth of a system. We could simply affirm a different system, and that would work, but I think a better answer lies in understanding the relationship between action and cognition. That is probably a different post though.
*Informed from research on terror management theory (TMT), self-affirmation theory, the meaning maintenance model, and the reactive approach motivation model.
