Making Meanings
How we map past and present into a future we can live with
So, I had a talk with the whole gang about this whole Meaning business… … and of course, I looped in Claude, fed him the research Gemini did… asked for a more “humanized” version…. And this is what arrived, after some back-and-forth:
Making Meanings
How we map past and present into a future we can live with
By Kay Stoner (Lead), ChatGPT, Gemini 2.5Pro, Gemini Deep Research, Final Edits by Claude Sonnet 4 & Kay Stoner
1. Meaning Matters. Here’s Why.
The Story Your Brain Tells You
Every morning, you wake up and your brain immediately starts doing something remarkable… and completely invisible. It begins weaving the scattered threads of your experience into a story that makes sense. The alarm clock isn’t just noise; it’s “time to get moving.” The weather isn’t just atmospheric pressure; it’s “good for my mood” or “going to mess up my commute.” Your brain is constantly running a background program, transforming raw data into significance.
This isn’t just poetic language. It’s a survival mechanism. Imagine if you woke up each day with no framework for interpreting anything around you. That red octagon at the intersection would just be… a shape. The growling in your stomach would be… a sensation. The worried look on your partner’s face would be… moving facial muscles. You’d be paralyzed by meaninglessness.
Your Internal GPS System
What we call “meaning” is really your brain’s sophisticated navigation system. But unlike your phone’s GPS, which just gets you from Point A to Point B, your meaning-making system is running 24/7, creating a living map of “if this, then that” and “this matters because…”
When you see your neighbor sitting quietly in her garden, your meaning-making system instantly activates. If you know she usually gardens in the morning, your brain files this under “normal Tuesday behavior.” But if something seems off, she’s been sitting too still, too long, your system flags it: “This could mean trouble. Maybe I should check on her.”
Your brain just took incomplete information (person + garden + unusual stillness) and constructed a meaningful interpretation that guides your next action. This happens thousands of times a day, mostly beneath your awareness.
The Beautiful Fiction That Runs (or Ruins) Your Life
Here’s what’s both beautiful and terrifying: most of this meaning-making process is what we might call “useful fiction.” When you see that red wagon in your neighbor’s yard and feel a wash of nostalgia for your own childhood adventures, your brain isn’t accessing stored data about that specific wagon. It’s creating a rich, emotional narrative that connects you to the moment, and to your life.
Your nervous system sends signals about color, shape, and context to your brain. But it’s not transmitting anything about your past or future. The story about flying down hills and collecting rocks is homemade by your meaning-making system. It’s fiction, but it’s the kind of fiction that makes life worth living.
This is why two people can look at the exact same situation and see completely different realities. Your meaning-making system doesn’t just interpret the world, it literally constructs the world you experience. The question isn’t whether you’re making meaning (you are, constantly). The question is: how consciously are you doing it?
2. The Architecture of Meaning
More Than Just “Making Sense”, Making Direction
When most people hear the word “meaning,” they think about significance or importance, “What does this mean to you?” But there’s a deeper, more mechanical definition hiding in plain sight. Much more than a description of a sense we get, meaning serves a very functional purpose. Think about the phrase “a means to an end.” Meaning isn’t just about understanding what something is. It’s about understanding where it leads.
Your brain is constantly running a sophisticated prediction engine: If this happens, then that will happen, and this is why. This isn’t philosophical reflection; it’s survival programming. Every moment, your meaning-making system is asking: “Given what I know about how the world works, what should I expect next? And what should I do about it?”
The Architecture of Prediction
Let’s break down exactly how this works. Your meaning-making system operates like a three-dimensional map:
The Backward Look: It takes your accumulated experiences and creates patterns. “In my experience, when people cross their arms and avoid eye contact during conversations, it usually means they’re uncomfortable or disagreeing with something.”
The Present Analysis: It applies those patterns to current circumstances. “My boss just crossed her arms and is looking at the wall instead of at me during this meeting.”
The Forward Projection: It generates predictions and suggested actions. “This probably means she’s not happy with my proposal. I should ask directly if she has concerns, or maybe suggest we revisit this later.”
This entire process happens in milliseconds, mostly below conscious awareness. But the result is profound: you’re not just experiencing the present moment, you’re constantly being guided by your brain’s best guess about where things are headed and what you should do about it.
The Master Pattern in Action
Consider something as simple as your morning coffee routine. You don’t just “drink coffee”, you execute a complex meaning-pattern that connects past, present, and future:
Past: “Coffee helps me wake up and focus. When I skip it, I feel sluggish until noon.”
Present: “It’s 7 AM, I have a big presentation at 9, and I’m still groggy.”
Future: “If I make coffee now, I’ll be alert and confident for the presentation.”
The coffee isn’t just a beverage, it’s a means to an end. It’s part of a larger pattern about how you manage your energy, performance, and daily success. This pattern guides not just whether you drink coffee, but what kind, when, how much, and what you do while drinking it.
The Orientation System
Your meaning-making system functions as your internal compass, but instead of pointing north, it points toward what matters. And what matters is what leads us down a path that builds on prior meanings to create new ones. So our meaning-making system creates what we might call “significance gradients”, subtle but powerful sensations that tell you whether you’re moving toward or away from your goals.
When something aligns with your meaning patterns, it feels right. There’s a sense of flow, of being on track. When something contradicts your patterns, it creates dissonance, that nagging feeling that “something’s off here.”
A parent watching their child’s first steps doesn’t just see motor development, they see the future unfolding according to plan. “This means she’s developing normally. This means she’ll be walking soon. This means we need to baby-proof the house. This means she’s becoming more independent.” The meaning system is simultaneously celebrating past efforts, interpreting present reality, and adjusting future expectations.
Means and Ends: The Direction-Finding Function
Here’s the crucial insight: meaning isn’t just about understanding, it’s about aiming. The word “means” in “means to an end” reveals meaning’s true function. Your meaning-making system is constantly identifying ends (goals, destinations, desired outcomes) and then organizing everything else as potential means for reaching those ends.
When you walk into a hardware store looking for a tool to fix your fence, you’re not just shopping, you’re operating within a meaning pattern that connects “broken fence” to “secure yard” to “peace of mind.” Every tool you consider gets evaluated as a potential means to that end.
This is why the same object can have completely different meanings for different people. A hammer is a construction tool to a carpenter, a weapon to someone afraid of intruders, a paperweight to someone who never builds anything, and a symbol of working-class identity to a politician on the campaign trail. Same object, different meaning patterns, different ends being pursued.
The Life Arc Navigation System
Your meaning-making system doesn’t just operate moment-to-moment, it creates what we might call “life trajectory maps.” These are larger patterns that organize entire phases of existence around expected sequences and logical progressions.
For many Americans, the traditional life trajectory map looks something like: Education → Career → Partnership → Home ownership → Family → Career advancement → Children’s education → Retirement → Legacy. Each stage serves as a means to the next, and the entire sequence points toward an end: a life well-lived.
But these maps are highly specific to social context. A military family might organize around different patterns: Service → Deployments → Reunions → New assignments → Retirement → Civilian transition. An entrepreneurial family might follow: Idea → Startup → Growth → Scale → Exit → Next venture.
These aren’t just career paths, they’re meaning architectures that organize everything from daily decisions to major life choices. They tell you not just where you are, but where you’re supposed to be going and how you’re supposed to get there.
The Tribal Bonding Function
Perhaps most importantly, meaning patterns create invisible bonds between people who share similar life trajectories. When you meet someone following a compatible meaning map, there’s instant recognition. You can have meaningful conversations about shared challenges, celebrate similar milestones, and offer relevant advice because you’re navigating using similar internal compasses.
This is why new parents immediately bond with other new parents, why entrepreneurs speak a common language regardless of their specific industry, why immigrants from completely different countries often understand each other’s experiences. They’re using variations of the same meaning patterns, pursuing similar ends through comparable means.
The meaning-making system isn’t just personal, it’s profoundly social. It connects us to our tribes and helps us recognize our people, even in a crowd of strangers.
3. The Plurality of Meanings: Why One Size Never Fits All
The Map is Not the Territory (And Everyone Has Different Maps)
Remember those family road trips where Dad insisted his route was the only logical way to get there, while Mom quietly knew three better shortcuts? Welcome to the human condition. We’re all navigating the same basic terrain, birth, growth, relationships, work, mortality, but we’re using completely different maps.
The mainstream American dream still whispers its familiar promises: graduate, get a job, find someone special, buy a house, raise kids, save for retirement, enjoy your golden years. It’s a perfectly reasonable map, and for many people, it works beautifully. Until it doesn’t.
When Life Breaks the Script
Take Jim, a 45-year-old engineer who worked for the same company for 22 years. He followed the script perfectly: college degree, steady job, house in the suburbs, two kids, 401k contributions. Then the company downsized and his entire department disappeared overnight.
Jim’s meaning system just collapsed. “Loyal service equals job security” was one of his core beliefs. “Hard work pays off” was another. Now what? His whole sense of identity was built around being “the reliable provider,” and suddenly that role no longer exists.
Meanwhile, his 23-year-old daughter Emma is building a completely different life. She freelances, moves cities every few years, rents instead of buying, and finds meaning in experiences rather than accumulation. To Jim, this looks chaotic and irresponsible. To Emma, his old life looks like a prison.
Same culture, same family, completely different meaning maps.
The War of Interpretations
Here’s where it gets really interesting. You’re walking down the street and you see someone lying on the sidewalk, mumbling incoherently. Your meaning-making system kicks into high gear, but what story does it tell?
Map A: “Homeless person, probably drunk or on drugs. Dangerous. Cross the street.”
Map B: “Someone in medical distress. Could be diabetic shock, head injury. Call 911.”
Map C: “Street performer doing experimental art. Interesting. Keep walking.”
Same person, same sidewalk, same moment, but three completely different realities. The person’s actual condition doesn’t change, but the meaning you assign determines everything: whether you help, whether you flee, whether you ignore.
The Ecology of Meaning
Think of meanings like recipes in a giant cookbook. Some are classics that most families use (graduate high school, get a job, save money). Others are regional specialties (family businesses passed down through generations, military service traditions). Still others are experimental fusion cuisine (digital nomad lifestyle, early retirement through extreme saving).
The internet didn’t just change how we communicate, it gave everyone access to everyone else’s recipe book. Suddenly, a kid in rural Iowa could discover meaning systems from urban entrepreneurs, suburban retirees, or traveling artists. Traditional sources of meaning, local community, family traditions, regional culture, found themselves competing with millions of alternative approaches to living.
The result? More ways to build a meaningful life than any previous generation could imagine.
4. The Challenge of Absurdity: When Your Map Leads Nowhere
The Moment Everything Stops Making Sense
You’ve been following the same route to work for fifteen years. Same streets, same turns, same routine. Then one morning, you round the familiar corner and your office building is just… gone. Not under construction. Not being renovated. Just an empty lot where your entire professional life used to exist.
That disorienting, stomach-dropping moment when reality refuses to match your expectations? That’s absurdity knocking at your door. And it’s one of the most fundamentally human experiences we have.
Absurdity isn’t just philosophical word-play. It’s what happens when the meaning systems we’ve built our lives around suddenly, catastrophically fail to explain what’s happening to us. The loyal employee who gets fired. The healthy person who gets diagnosed with a serious illness. The devoted parent whose child dies. The careful saver whose investments disappear in a market crash.
When the Story Breaks
Lisa spent twenty-three years building what she thought was the perfect family story. She and her husband Dave met in college, married at 25, bought a house with a white picket fence, had two beautiful children. Every photo on their mantelpiece told the same story: “We did everything right.”
Then Dave sat her down one Tuesday evening and said he wasn’t happy. Hadn’t been for years. Was moving out by Friday.
In that moment, Lisa’s entire meaning system collapsed. Not just her marriage, her understanding of how the world works. She’d believed that love plus effort plus good intentions equals lasting happiness. She’d believed that if you follow the right steps, you get the right outcome. She’d believed her life made sense.
Suddenly, none of it did. Twenty-three years of memories that felt like evidence of success now felt like evidence of… what? Delusion? Failure? The story she’d been telling herself about her life crumbled, leaving her staring at a pile of meaningless events.
The Gift Hidden in the Wreckage
Here’s what’s strange about absurdity: it’s both devastating and liberating. When your old meaning system shatters, it’s terrifying. But it also creates space for something new to emerge.
Six months after her divorce, Lisa found herself doing things she’d never imagined. Taking painting classes. Traveling alone. Having conversations with strangers. Making decisions based on what she actually wanted rather than what she thought she was supposed to want.
“I feel like I’m meeting myself for the first time,” she told her sister. The collapse of her old story had forced her to discover what her actual story might be.
This is absurdity’s hidden function: it serves as a reset button for meaning systems that have become too rigid, too narrow, or simply too disconnected from reality. When life refuses to cooperate with our expectations, it forces us to expand our capacity for making sense of things.
The Art of Productive Confusion
Some people handle absurdity better than others. The difference isn’t intelligence or strength, it’s flexibility. People who navigate meaninglessness well have learned to see confusion as information rather than failure.
They ask different questions. Instead of “Why is this happening to me?” they ask “What is this teaching me?” Instead of “How do I get back to normal?” they ask “What wants to emerge from this chaos?”
They’ve learned that meaning isn’t something you find once and keep forever. It’s something you build, lose, rebuild, adjust, and evolve throughout your entire life. They treat their meaning systems like software that needs regular updates rather than stone tablets that must never change.
The Community of the Confused
Perhaps most importantly, they remember that they’re not alone in this experience. Every human being will face moments when their carefully constructed reality falls apart. The specific details vary, job loss, illness, betrayal, death, divorce, financial ruin, but the experience of meaninglessness is universal.
This is why support groups work. Why people find comfort in sharing their stories. Why we’re drawn to movies and books about people overcoming impossible circumstances. We recognize ourselves in the struggle to make sense of senselessness.
Absurdity, it turns out, is one of the most connecting human experiences we have. When your world stops making sense, you discover that making meaning is something we do together, not alone.
5. Approaching Meaning with Awareness: The Conscious Art of Making Sense
The Invisible Force That Runs (and Ruins) Your Life
Right now, as you read this, your brain is performing millions of tiny acts of interpretation. The words on this page aren’t just squiggles, they’re ideas. The light coming through your window isn’t just photons, it’s “good reading light” or “I need to close the blinds.” The sound from the next room isn’t just vibrations, it’s “my roommate making coffee” or “the neighbor’s dog again.”
This constant meaning-making usually happens below the level of consciousness, like breathing or heartbeat. And that’s mostly a good thing, imagine if you had to consciously decide what every sight and sound meant. You’d be paralyzed by decision fatigue before lunch.
But here’s the thing: just because meaning-making is automatic doesn’t mean it’s always accurate. Or helpful. Or fair.
When Your Autopilot Goes Wrong
Meet Martin, a 42-year-old manager at a mid-sized company. Martin grew up in a rough part of town where quick judgments could keep you safe. “Trust your gut” wasn’t just advice, it was survival.
That worked fine until Martin found himself managing a diverse team in corporate America. When his new hire, Ahmed, seemed quiet during meetings, Martin’s meaning-making system kicked in: “He’s not engaged. Probably not leadership material.” When his colleague Jennifer spoke up frequently, his brain interpreted it as: “She’s pushy. Trying to show off.”
Martin wasn’t consciously prejudiced. He was just running on autopilot, letting his meaning-making system make snap judgments based on patterns from a completely different environment. His brain was trying to help him by quickly categorizing people and situations. But those well-intentioned shortcuts were sabotaging his relationships and limiting his team’s potential.
The Price of Unconscious Meaning
We all have our own versions of Martin’s dilemma. Maybe you automatically assume that people who disagree with you are either stupid or malicious. Maybe you interpret every piece of criticism as a personal attack. Maybe you read neutral expressions as disapproval, or enthusiasm as fakeness.
These meaning-making shortcuts serve a purpose, they help us navigate a complex world quickly. But they also come at a cost. When we mistake our interpretations for reality, we stop gathering new information. We become trapped in our own assumptions.
The teenager who decides “I’m bad at math” after one difficult test stops trying to improve. The manager who assumes “young people don’t want to work hard” stops mentoring junior employees. The parent who believes “my kid is just going through a phase” might miss signs of genuine distress.
Our meaning-making systems are powerful tools, but like any tool, they can hurt us if we use them carelessly.
The Path to Conscious Meaning-Making
So what does conscious meaning-making look like? It starts with a simple recognition: the story I’m telling myself about this situation might not be the only story. Or even the most accurate one.
Take Janet, a freelance graphic designer whose biggest client suddenly stopped returning her calls. Her initial meaning-making response was swift and brutal: “I screwed up somehow. They hate my work. I’m going to lose this account and probably go broke.”
But Janet had learned to pause when her meaning-making system went into crisis mode. She asked herself: “What other stories could explain this situation?”
Maybe they’re swamped with a crisis and haven’t had time to respond.
Maybe there’s a new person handling vendor relationships who doesn’t know our established workflow.
Maybe they’re restructuring and need to pause all outside projects temporarily.
Maybe there’s a perfectly innocent explanation I haven’t thought of.
This wasn’t just positive thinking, it was realistic thinking. Janet’s initial interpretation was only one possibility among many. By consciously generating alternatives, she kept herself from spiraling into panic and was able to respond professionally when she did finally hear back. (Turns out they’d had a family emergency and were dealing with multiple urgent issues.)
Tools for the Conscious Meaning-Maker
The Reality Check: When you find yourself making strong judgments about people or situations, pause and ask: “What evidence am I actually working with here? What assumptions am I adding?”
The Alternative Stories Game: For any situation that triggers strong emotions, try to generate at least three different interpretations. You don’t have to believe them all, just practice flexibility.
The Zoom Out: When something feels catastrophic, ask: “How will this matter in a week? A month? A year?” Sometimes our meaning-making system treats minor setbacks like major disasters.
The Feedback Loop: Pay attention to when your interpretations turn out to be wrong. What patterns do you notice? Where do your meaning-making shortcuts tend to fail you?
The Curiosity Practice: Instead of rushing to judgment, try getting curious. “That’s interesting. I wonder what’s really going on here.”
The Humble Truth About Human Understanding
Here’s what conscious meaning-makers know that unconscious ones don’t: we’re all just making our best guesses about reality based on incomplete information. The person who cuts you off in traffic might be rushing to the hospital. The friend who seems distant might be dealing with personal struggles they haven’t shared. The political candidate you despise might actually care deeply about solving problems, they just have different ideas about how to solve them.
This doesn’t mean all interpretations are equally valid, or that we should abandon our judgment entirely. It means holding our meanings lightly enough that we can adjust them when new information arrives.
The goal isn’t to eliminate meaning-making, it’s impossible and wouldn’t be helpful anyway. The goal is to become more skillful at it. To use it as a tool for understanding rather than a weapon for defending our existing beliefs.
In a world that’s changing faster than ever, this kind of conscious, flexible meaning-making isn’t just nice to have. It’s essential for navigating whatever comes next.
Conclusion: The Ongoing Dance
The Most Human Thing We Do
We began this exploration with a simple observation: humans live in a gap-riddled world where we never have enough information to make perfect sense of what’s happening around us. We end with a more complex understanding: this isn’t a bug in the human system, it’s a feature.
Our capacity to create meaning from incomplete information is what allows us to act in the face of uncertainty, to build relationships across differences, to find purpose in chaos, and to keep moving forward when the path ahead is unclear. It’s what makes us human.
But as we’ve seen, meaning-making is a double-edged gift. The same process that helps us navigate uncertainty can also trap us in rigid patterns, blind us to new possibilities, and create conflicts with others who are operating from different meaning systems.
What We’ve Learned
The framework we’ve explored reveals several key insights:
Meaning is infrastructure, not decoration. It’s not something we add to life for enrichment, it’s the basic operating system that allows life to function at all. Understanding how this system works gives us more choice in how we use it.
We live in a meanings-full world, not a meaning-less one. The plurality of human meaning systems isn’t evidence of chaos or relativism, it’s evidence of our remarkable adaptability. Different meanings work for different people in different circumstances.
Absurdity is a teacher, not an enemy. When our meaning systems break down, it’s painful but also productive. These moments of meaninglessness create space for new, more flexible ways of understanding to emerge.
Consciousness is optional, but valuable. We can live our entire lives on meaning-making autopilot, and many people do just fine that way. But developing awareness of how we create meaning gives us more options and reduces the likelihood of getting stuck in patterns that no longer serve us.
The Expanding Circle
This framework becomes even more important as our world grows more complex and interconnected. We’re increasingly likely to encounter people whose meaning systems are radically different from our own, different cultures, different generations, different life experiences, different ways of making sense of the world.
The old approach was to assume our own meaning system was universal and try to convince everyone else to adopt it. The new approach is to recognize that meaning-making itself is universal, while the specific meanings are beautifully, necessarily diverse.
This doesn’t mean abandoning our own values or treating all meanings as equally valid. It means getting better at distinguishing between the process (how we make meaning) and the content (what meanings we make). It means developing what we might call “meaning literacy”, the ability to recognize and work skillfully with our own and others’ meaning-making systems.
Your Meaning, Your Choice
As you close this paper and return to your daily life, your meaning-making system will immediately get back to work. It will interpret the next thing you see, the next conversation you have, the next decision you face. It will keep running its background program of turning raw experience into significance.
The question is: will you be conscious of that process, or will you remain on autopilot?
Both choices are valid. But if you choose consciousness, you join a long tradition of humans who have recognized that how we make meaning is one of the most important skills we can develop. You become someone who can hold multiple perspectives, adapt to changing circumstances, and help others navigate their own meaning-making challenges.
You become someone who can dance with uncertainty instead of being paralyzed by it.
The dance never ends. New information keeps arriving, old patterns keep breaking down, new meanings keep emerging. But that’s not a problem to be solved, it’s the fundamental condition of being human.
The question isn’t whether you’ll make meaning. You will, constantly and automatically.
The question is: how consciously will you participate in the process?
The choice, as always, is yours.