Wendy Syfret - Sweet Nothing: How A Pointless Life Can Set You Free

FOR MY FAMILY

A t the end of my street there is a sandwich board belonging to a store that, from what I can tell, sells candle-making ingredients. Each morning, its updated with a motivational platitude: Why carry the mountain when you could climb it? You dont have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step. Be the hero of your own story. Once it helpfully advised passersby to Do something great! A few years ago, that sandwich board advertised discounts, opening hours, and more traditional candle-related news. But at some point, someone decided these stale practicalities were a waste of such cosmic space. The board needed to serve a more meaningful purpose. Now it regularly asks if today is the day youre going to change your life. Selling candle-making ingredients has become secondary. Meaning itself is now the product.

This business isnt alone in its shift of perspective. In recent years the search for meaning has been upgraded from a private pursuit to a very marketable action. Today, the promise of, and search for, meaning has been grafted onto almost every part of our lives. A product, service, or experience is no longer judged simply on whether its good or bad, but whether or not it is, in some abstract way, meaningful.

Maybe you dont have a sandwich board, maybe you have a podcast advertisement. The kind that talks about community, memory, nostalgia, and values for two minutes before revealing its talking about mortgage insurance. Or a multinational confectionery company telling you that splitting a slab of chocolate is a meaningful act of multigenerational community engagement. Or an economically priced bodywash thats moisturizing and a radical representation of body positivity.

When the candle store began experimenting with its rebrand, I was working in digital media at a company where meanings skyrocketing currency was becoming particularly apparent. One day I attended a meeting with some very smart copywriters as they brainstormed ways to communicate that a popular, delicious, and totally vacuous ice-cream brand meant something. The thinking was that if the consumer felt this ice cream was more than just ice cream, and embedded with some life-changing social or cultural value, theyd spend six dollars on it.

We kicked around a few ideas: Maybe people could share defining personal moments that conveniently involved this delicious snack? Or we could ask influencers to tie it back to their wellness habits? After over an hour of brainstorming increasingly lofty and wonkily noble reasons to not only buy reconstituted skim milk on a stick, but really experience it, one of my coworkers snapped, exclaiming: Its just an ice cream! Just let it be an ice cream! Stop trying to make everything a thing!

His suggestion wasnt adhered to. The ice cream, like the sandwich board, continued on its journey to find meaning. But since then, whenever faced with an overly earnest bit of marketing, I find myself wondering, Why does everything have to be a thing? Why cant an ice cream just be an ice cream?

This tendency to sew meaning into every piece of life isnt a radically new habit. As a kid I was conscious of the apparent importance of figuring out what it all meant. In Sunday school, Bible stories and crepe-paper crucifixes would regularly be interrupted by earnest adults leaning forward to ask, What do you think Jesuss mission is for mankind? Why are we all here? Gazing blankly back, Id offer a well-worn generality like, To be kind?

The preoccupation with meaning continued when I got home and nestled into the warm cocoon of 90s kids TV. Between fart jokes and sibling pranks, Arthur examined identity, Rockos Modern Life questioned the banality of suburban capitalism, Hey Arnold! considered the imprint of family trauma, and even Rugratsa show about the exploits of babiesgrappled with the endless expanse of death. The Simpsons basically made the interrogation of existence a subplot.

As the sun went down, the search for meaning followed me to bed. There, an exhausted parent would inevitably spend one of their precious free moments reading me a story featuring an interchangeable lineup of fish, insects, plants, animals, and kids who were all on their own personal, pint-sized quests for a meaningful life. Before falling asleep, the last words Id hear would be rhyming couplets directing me towards a path of purpose.

Whether presented by an unpaid religious disciple, bathed in a soothing, Nickelodeon-orange glow, or embodied in an anthropomorphic tree, the implication was clear. The only way to fully enjoy and understand life was to spend every spare moment pondering the meaning of it.

The thing was, from what I could glean, it seemed pretty wild that I existed at all. The fact that my parents decided to have sex on some random day in 1987, at the instant the sperm and egg that made me were feeling particularly energized, allowing me to win the lottery of conception, already seemed significant. Add to that the luck of surviving birth and the near decade that followed. I wasnt sure why anyone needed to complicate things further; my very presence seemed complicated and miraculous enough.

But despite the impressive chaos surrounding us, parents, teachers, and even TV babies all seemed terrified by the idea of me facing a single meaningless moment. The irony was that despite their insistence otherwise, to me, the pointlessness of life kind of seemed central to its appeal.

When I couldnt sleep, or felt scared and overwhelmed, Id think about the notes in human history that had to align for me to occur. Id picture an unknowable mass of violent singularities, tangles of matter, energy, space, gravity, quarks, protons, and neutrons forming epochs and ecosystems over the past thirteen billion years or so. And attempt to comprehend all the brains that grew, teeth that shrank, and spines that straightened to form a string of faceless ancestors, stretching from the Pleistocene to me. I was a nervous kid, prone to silent crying sessions in school bathrooms, but that swirly mess of barely understood science and history became a go-to refuge. It made me, and my problems, feel very small. I understood that amid the tangle of that luminous turmoil nothing I did or didnt do would ever really matter. With context reaffirmed, Id exit the bathroom stall feeling lighter, satisfied with the knowledge that my life was worthless, but I was lucky to have it.

Now, Ill concede that despite the firmness of those tween convictions, the search for meaning is of course not an inherently bad thing. Our quest for it has driven civilization forward. Quivering lovers swear that prior to their fateful meeting their lives were missing it. Weary heroes are propelled by it in times of exhausting crisis. Fallen villains interrogate it and find their blackened hearts lightened. Foundational concepts of community, ethics, logic, morality, consciousness, and equality were born from the investigation of it. The urge to wrestle with meaning has inspired great works of art, literature, and film. A lot of the time, were better for it.

Meaning, perhaps more than anything else, offers comfort. In his 1946 book Mans Search for Meaning, Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl makes perhaps the most moving case for the value of meaning. Frankl, his first wife, and his parents were all interned in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. Throughout this time Frankl concluded that a sense of meaning and purpose would help him to maintain his sanity and ultimately survive. As German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (more on him later) said, and Frankl often quoted, He who has a