The Weight of Meaning: Why We Chase Significance

Meaning used to be quiet. It used to show up like weather, like a song you didn’t expect to feel, like a late-night talk with someone who wasn’t performing. Now meaning is loud. Now it has a marketing department. Modern life has trained us to treat significance like a receipt—proof of purchase, proof you mattered today, proof you did something worth counting. Careers become identities, relationships are scoreboards, social media becomes a daily audition to a plea for validation. Even rest has to be justified. We don’t just want to live, we want the world to confirm we lived, and that’s bullshit.

Be careful, because we can chase meaning everywhere and elsewhere, beyond ourselves, like it’s hidden in the next promotion, the next milestone, the next post that lands.

The external world has become a vending machine for purpose.

All you have to do is insert effort, insert opinion, insert outrage, receive significance. Politics didn’t used to feel like this. Sure, it mattered, it always mattered, but it didn’t occupy the whole mental atmosphere like a permanent storm system. Now it’s everything. Every headline arrives with moral urgency, every conversation risks becoming a tribunal, every person reduced to their positions.

Significance has swollen, not because life got deeper, but because the noise got constant, and we’ve been conditioned to believe that meaning must be attached to whatever is loudest.

I watched this shift from the inside. I worked in tech both as a vocation and an avocation. The rise of the web, the early optimism, Web 2.0 back when that phrase still felt futuristic instead of archaeological. There was a time when the internet felt like possibility, connection, and a democratized voice. Then the platforms hardened, the algorithms sharpened, attention became currency, and meaning became outsourced. We started living as if significance could be granted by metrics—likes, shares, engagement—a life translated into data. Screw that, man. That’s when the matrix is buying and selling a little piece of you each time.

I followed the old American impulse myself: go west, young man. So I went west, to Arizona, wide sky and heat and reinvention as geography. I climbed corporate ladders in tech fields, did what you’re supposed to do, build a career, become legible to the system. There’s dignity in striving, but there’s also a slow erosion that comes from constantly converting yourself into something measurable by someone else on a jobs platform.

And then, as I got older, something changed. Not suddenly, not dramatically, just steadily. Like a phoenix out of the ashes (Arizona symbolism unavoidable) I became more of me. I found my voice in writing after years of dabbling in other arts like they were hobbies instead of signals. Writing wasn’t about success, it was about me recognizing me. It was about hearing myself think, I think.

Now I’m returning to the Midwest, back to the rivers, trees, and lakes…back to nature as a backdrop instead of a screen. And somehow, something about that feels like meaning returning to its proper scale. Because meaning isn’t supposed to be loud. It isn’t supposed to be performed. It isn’t supposed to be voted on, posted, optimized, or proven.

Sometimes meaning is insignificant as hell, and that’s fantastic. Sometimes meaning is a slow moving river water moving through a carved stone landscape in the woods. Sometimes it’s a quiet morning and a hot cup of coffee. Sometimes it’s the voice you stop ignoring.

The weight of meaning is only unbearable when we keep trying to carry it like a public display trophy. But when meaning comes from within, it’s not a burden because it’s more like home.