Stop trying to be so meaningful with pointless stuff.
This is a fascinating “ask” I got a few days ago. I’m not sure what it’s referring to in specific, tbh. So I’ll go general here.
I think the point of art, a lot of the time, is to attempt to infuse meaning into a world that doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s why there are so many books written on the structure of movies and the idea of what a hero’s journey should entail. Why we have classes based around dissecting archetypes, studying paintings and their artists, learning what chord progressions stir up what kind of emotions.
More than that, though, it becomes obvious that humans spend a lot of time attempting to infer meaning from the world around them. Not just art, but everything. Not just people who call themselves artists, but everyone. I don’t know enough about science-y things to really know why that is, just that it is.
I probably had OCD as a kid. I had a lot of issues with patterns and counting and numbers and very little control over any of it. It’s faded gradually over the years, but some variance on an obsession with patterns has always been a part of my life. When I was in school, I’d try to recognize cycles, predict future events based on obscure similarities that lined up, often steering things in that direction without even always realizing it. Because I wanted things to make sense. I wanted some way to understand and relate to the world and figure out cause and effect for all the shit that happened so that I could believe things could be different. I didn’t want to understand that everything in life was subject to five million different factors and a lot of them were just left up to chance. That takes away control, it takes away the ability to understand.
A lot of religion lends itself to the idea that there’s a higher power in control of everything, and that if you just understand that everything that happens is part of some Divine Plan, you’ll find the peace to accept it. Everything has meaning because it is part of that Divine Plan.
When you don’t believe in religion, that kind of gives way to the train of thought that everything is meaningless. We’re here, for whatever reason, to live and die and be buried and that’s all it is. That strips away our control. But to quote a great line from Angel, “if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.” Similarly, if everything is completely meaningless, then the only meaning that exists is that which we create.
And we do. Constantly. No matter what you believe, we all spend our lives searching for meaning in the world, finding things that are meaningful to us, infusing meaning where we can. To deny that would be to deny being human.
You don’t have to find meaning in the things I find meaning in. I don’t find meaning in a lot of things most people do. We’re all wired differently like that. But to tell people not to find meaning in something is just silly. And kind of sad.
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