Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. Let's talk about the meaning of life. I want to start off by saying it's my birthday. Right now as I'm shooting it, this vlog this morning, it is my 52nd birthday. I'm finally playing with a full deck of cards. I love playing cards so actually I love that and I am excited about this number, 52. And this morning as people have been texting me "happy birthday," I've been texting back, "Thank you. Let me go celebrate by shooting a vlog on the meaning of life. No pressure!" (With a smiley face)
Yeah. And that's kind of funny, I guess. No teleprompter, no script. Let me just talk about the meaning of life, unscripted, for who knows how long to how many thousands of people. Sounds like something fun to do on your birthday. Yeah. Actually I'm excited about this. The reason I want to talk about this is that I, for the past couple of months, have been in an existential hole thinking about this. I mean really feeling urgency and intensity around needing to think about this. And I think that got brought on by this birthday, by the awareness that odds are I have more years behind me than ahead of me. And I've noticed over the last few years that my ambition is kind of slowing down a bit. And given that for me, the purpose of life feels like it's positive impact and I've noticed that I seem to have the capacity to have positive impact at scale and really actually help a lot of people.
The slowing down of ambition feels morally fraught for me. And so I've found myself over the last couple of months deeply thinking, but does it matter?
20,000 years from now, I mean we have zero record or sort of evidence of the impact of anyone from 20,000 years ago, and 20,000 years is a blip in geologic time. I mean, if you zoom out to deep time, a million years, a billion years, none of this matters, none of it. So I really found myself needing to think deeply about that. Am I kidding myself that any of this matters? And what about the size of space and how insignificant we are compared to the size of everything? And we're just these little blips of dust in the corner over here doing our little thing and thinking it matters so much. Maybe it doesn't matter at all. And then from another perspective, it feels like it matters a lot. So I was trying to get a foothold into the meaning and purpose of it all. Does it actually mean anything?
And it was feeling really important. So I went through a long process. I talked with a lot of people. I invited people out to dinner and said, "Tell me what you think about the meaning of life." Some of them I gave a heads up and some of them I didn't. Yeah. And so what I came to first is after talking with enough people, I realized, okay, there actually can't be a universal meaning of life. There can't. And to put that into some context or a framework that makes sense, why can't there? Well, because meaning is not that kind of thing. Meaning isn't something that can be concretely known like gravity or mass or height. It's not a physical property. Meaning is a cognitive relationship. It only makes sense in the context of this has meaning to me. It's something that conscious beings create, right? And it is therefore relative.
Meaning is, for example, if you went to Georgia O'Keefe and you asked her the meaning of life and she said, "Well, of course it's to create. It's to paint. It's to not squander your art. It's to create." And then you went to Mother Teresa and asked her the meaning of life and she said, "Well, it's to serve. It's to succor the destitute and shelter the homeless and give ear to the oppressed and it's to serve. That's the meaning of life." And you went to Amelia Earhart and you asked her the meaning of life and she said, "It's to explore. It's to discover uncharted territories and to do what hasn't been done before." You would be silly to say, "No, no, no, you're wrong. The meaning of life is actually blah, blah, blah." Right? That would be ridiculous. The meaning of life has to be unique to each person and something that we decide for ourselves.
So okay, having decided that, I went down the rabbit hole of what if it really doesn't mean anything, sort of that nihilistic rabbit hole. And I read a great paper thanks to my friend Yanis Hadziminas in Greece, a philosopher. And I read this great paper he recommended called "Our Cosmic Insignificance." And it was all about this question of, if we're just a little speck of dust in one corner of the cosmos, how can we matter at all? And he said, "This is confusing size and value, right? Value holds no matter the size of the container you put the thing in. If you've got a diamond, it holds its value whether you put it on the beach along with a lot of other sand, a lot of sand or in a tiny little box or in a bigger box. It doesn't matter. Something that's valuable stays valuable irrespective of the size of the things around it.
And I thought, "Oh, interesting." And then he said, "Now significance varies in terms of relative terms, right? Like one accomplishment would be less significant if you put it next to a much larger accomplishment, right? So significance is relative." And he said, "But look at us here, conscious, intelligent, sentient beings and look at the universe--gobs and gobs and gobs of gas and space and mostly vacuums of nothingness with occasional rocks and helium and hydrogen." Basically, if you're looking for value, we're about the best we can find so far. Now maybe there's other intelligent life out there that's a debate for hopefully a different vlog. Maybe that'll be my 60th birthday, but clearly there's something pretty magical happening here. And so that actually, reading that paper had me walk away looking around at what we've got here on earth with our consciousness and our intelligence and our trees and our oceans and rivers and streams.
And I just started to think, "This is so special. This is so unique and precious and its value holds." So okay, so what's the meaning of my life then to me? What am I making of this? Does it matter if I slow down my efforts here in helping people? Well, I'm not really looking to be let off the hook on that. I just really want to know sort of what's my compass for--I don't know--maybe not the rest of my life, the next chapter of my life. So I got on the phone with my life coach, Monica Leggett, and had a good talk. I said, "I don't know, Monica, here's what I've come to so far." And I told her everything I just told you. And I said, "So my life purpose is positive impact and can I just talk through, because I'm an extrovert.
I need to talk these things through some of the candidate options that I've been thinking of for the meaning of life." And she said, "Absolutely, go ahead." She got her pen and paper ready. She's keeping notes. And I said, "Well, first of all, I could imagine that maybe the meaning of life is love, right? Human connection. In the way of when two people or more connect with each other and create positive emotion and their eyes sparkle and they lean in and there's mutual care and we know scientifically that their heart rates sync up and that their brainwaves sync up and there's all this incredible science about how they benefit each other biologically, positively, just by sharing those moments together. There's nothing like it, right? And maybe just creating more of those moments is the meaning of life. So love, connection." And she's taking notes and she said, "Yep, that's a good candidate." She said, "What else you got?" I said, "Well, it also occurs to me ... " You've heard my story, right?
The universe said, "Write a book called Bright Line Eating." I hear things in my God voice, my still small voice deep inside. I can't explain it. If I am quiet, I'm facing a decision I will hear inside my being, stay, go, not yet. Don't say that. I often hear that one. Don't say that.
So maybe the meaning of life is to attune myself to the creative intelligence of the universe, my highest self, whatever you want to call it, God, and to live according to that guidance, right? She said, "Okay, so spirituality. Great." She wrote that down. She said, "Any others?" I said, "Yeah. Well, this other one keeps occurring to me. This I've been thinking about for a few years, right? If you think of deep time and deep space and how this is all just turning to ash eventually, it feels to me like, 'Yeah, but right now I'm conscious that I think, therefore I am, right? I have consciousness, therefore I am. (Descartes)' Moments of conscious aliveness are so precious and it feels to me like the gift is just that to savor it, to just be here for the magic of conscious aliveness. So what would I call that? Gratitude, savoring, awe, presence." She said, "Okay, great. Any others?"
I said, "Yeah, it seems to me like growing and learning and developing, like being on a path of growth feels like the meaning of life." And it's interesting, I was talking with a dear friend many years ago who'd had a spiritual experience and she in that moment claimed to know the meaning of life. And with bated breath, I said, "What is it? " And she said, "Growth, growing. That's what we're here to do is just to keep growing." And it resonated in that moment. I thought, "Yeah." And I love that. I've framed my whole life really around experience and growing from it, experience, grow from it, experience, grow from it.
And then I noticed all of these are necessary for me, for me to achieve my purpose. Like my purpose in life of positive impact, my positive impact isn't showing up every day to feed the poor. My positive impact is what I'm doing right now and it only works if I'm engaging with life in alignment with all of these things I've just been talking about. If I'm full of bullshit and not in integrity with the types of principles that I talk about or not growing and learning from my experiences, not listening to the still small voice deep inside, not savoring with gratitude, the present moment and pulling from its mysteries, whatever I can, not connecting with other people and loving and being loved and engaging in that. If I'm not doing those things, I don't have positive impact. People look to me because of how I'm living, not because of any specific concrete acts of service that I'm doing on a daily basis.
In essence, sort of living that way is my service. It's my impact, right? That's why the impact is there. And so then I realized, "Wait a second, Monica, wait a second." I had this light bulb moment. It was literally jumping out of the bath ... Not literally, it was figuratively jumping out of the bathtub and screaming, "Eureka!" I said, "Monica, these are the values. These are the values. Remember six months ago when I did that work to figure out my values, because I was kind of freaking out about this stuff a few months ago as well. I was taking a trip, my kids were home. I was facing the reality that two of my three kids would be off in college within a few short months and yet I was taking a trip for work and I had an existential crisis and I was like, I need to figure out what my values are because is it right for me to take this trip or do I need to be staying home?" And I went on this journey to figure out my values.
I did this course by my friend, Gregg Lederman. Genius, genius, genius. And it helped me to narrow my values down to five and I just listed them for you. My values that I delineated are love and connection, spirituality, personal growth, wellness, and gratitude. Those are my values. And so I said, "Monica, maybe that's it. The meaning of life for me is to live my purpose in alignment with my values." And it was this full circle moment where I realized it's just like in science when they uncover something on a brain scan and then they find other papers that uncovered it with blood tests and other papers that uncovered it with EEG and other papers that uncovered it through formulas. And if all of the signs point to one thing, they're like, "Okay, that's pretty robust. It's not proof, but it's indicative. It's something." A bunch of arrows pointed in the same direction.
And it was that experience for me. I said, "Oh, okay. Maybe this is the meaning of life for me. " And then a couple weeks later, someone said something that put it into a little different perspective. It was, "What am I optimizing for right now?" And I realized, okay, this might change, right? The meaning of life for me might change and evolve in accordance with the personal growth and the spirituality, right? My values might shift, I'm going to change, my values might change, my life purpose might change. It's possible, right? And so I need to keep growing, keep doing my work.
So that's what I'm thinking on my birthday about the meaning of life. I'm 52. It's been a wild ride, grateful for that full deck of cards. I love playing cards. 52 feels like a good age. Yeah, finally playing with a full deck of cards. That's good. That's good. Status update. I'm not dying my hair. I'm still plucking the grays. I don't play pickleball yet. I don't knit yet. I don't garden yet. Still working. Like I said, two of my three kids are off to college. One is still going to be home going into sophomore year of high school. Happily married, just celebrated 27 years of marriage. Love you, David. Yeah, that's the status update over here. Thinking pretty deeply about things just to make sure I'm not going off cold cocked on the wrong path, right? It matters. It matters. This life is precious. We have value. You have value.
What does this have to do with Bright Line Eating? Well, when you put the food down, you get to think about things. There's space that opens up for other pursuits and maybe you too will be thinking about like, "Toward what end does it matter? What am I doing?" Every now and then it's good to step back and take the 60,000-foot view. So that's the Weekly Vlog and I will see you next week.
