Design Your Life to Find Meaning?

We all want meaning. But what if our approach to life design keeps us from it? The 2022 film Living, starring Bill Nighy, is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). It beautifully captures a man’s search for meaning in the face of mortality. The film is set in 1950s London where a humorless and lonely bureaucrat’s life, Mr. William, life takes a tragic turn when he is diagnosed with a terminal illness and short time to live. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, Mr. Williams embarks on a search for meaning. He’s guided by a young colleague until a simple yet profound realization allows him to leave behind a legacy. We can learn a lot from Mr. Williams and how to design life to find meaning.

This is the world we live in. Part of the film’s resonance is that so many viewers can relate to the sort of existential quest that we view in Mr. Williams. And the stakes could not be higher, who wants to simply live? We do not want to merely live, but to live well. 

Overview

Living (2022) nicely isolates the problem of the modern milieu and searches for meaning but it does not offer a solution to the problem. In the film, Mr. Williams finds meaning by building a playground in his part of the city. Not everyone can build a playground. So what are we supposed to do? In this post I want to highlight one solution. I’ll show that this popular solution is lacking. Then, we’ll see one way forward.

We Are Mr. Williams

Mr. Williams’ problem of meaning is not unique to him. Studies show that only 20% of young people (ages 12-26) have a clear sense of purpose, leaving the majority uncertain about their direction in life.¹  What affects Mr. Williams affects many of us, especially young people. 

One Wrong Solution

In response to this widespread uncertainty of such a fundamental human question, many turn to the “life design movement,” which offers practical steps for achieving one’s personal goals. More importantly, it promises a path to design your life to find meaning. This awesome movement, from which I have benefitted much, guides adherents on getting precisely what subjects want from their life and then detailing particular steps to achieve it. For example, the excellent book called Design Your Life takes this approach. Other books within this space assume a goal for life already and simply focus on the means to get there (for example, the 4-Hour Workweek assumes that more free time is what the goal is so designs ways to achieve this). 

There is a fatal flaw in this movement that does not help us in our quest to find meaning. While they help us decide what we want more clearly and devise effective plans to achieve what we want, they never ask whether the goals that we set out are good ones or not. The tragedy is not just failing to reach our goals–it’s succeeding in goals that were never worth pursuing in the first place. Effective means to meaningless things is ineffective. 

Even if we achieve our goals, we are left with a deeper question: Were they worth pursuing in the first place? Rather, we seek to have meaning in worthwhile pursuits. Mr. Williams seems to have found that in the film. Yet, no explanation as to why it is worthy of his life nor does it offer any sort of clear way where we can find it too. Using this to design your life to find meaning may lead to meaninglessness.

Hints Toward a Solution

Perhaps a hint towards a way forward that the film implies is that a meaningful life can be found in the mundane, places that we have passed over. For Mr. Williams, this is in constructing a community playground. How are we to find our playgrounds? How are we to know whether or not what occurs to us is truly worth our time? If we are to move beyond the trap of designing a merely efficient life, we need a richer vision of human flourishing. Aristotle offers one: true meaning is found not just in living, but in thriving–a life shaped by wisdom and virtue. But how do we begin this quest? How do we begin to see what is worth doing and pursuing for a good life? For Aristotle and many other agent thinkers, the answer lies in an important character trait: wisdom. To know and seek a life worth living, we must become wise. 

What About You?

Have you ever set a goal, only to later wonder why you pursued it in the first place? Arriving at meaning begins with asking deeper questions–not just how to achieve our goals, but why they matter in the first place. Do you see in yourself a tendency to not think of where you’re going and to what end your actions lead? The start to a meaningful life is to begin to ask what is worthy of your pursuits and what goals and ends are worthwhile. This could be as simple as a task of ridding your life of distractions and menial tasks to open up for more engaging and significant goals. Endlessly scrolling social media, being glued to our inbox, and obsessing over our next purchase are time wasters that take us away from significant pursuits. Eliminating distractions is only the first step. The real work begins when we start asking: what pursuits are truly worthy of my time?  

For Meaning, We Need Wisdom

We need more insight than this simple cleaning method. A life is far too important and complicated to simply apply a few rules to clean out the clutter. We need positive guidance and to gain this guidance and use it properly, we need something Aristotle calls “wisdom.” We all know people who are wise and we hopefully go to them when important life decisions come our way. However, understanding what wisdom is and how we can get more of it is less clear to us. 

If wisdom is the key to a meaningful life, then the next question is: How do we grow in it? In my next post, I’ll explore Aristotle’s vision of wisdom and why it may be the missing ingredient in modern life design.