How Do I Make Meaning From All Of This Chaos?

Perspectives on significance, religion, personal accountability and the interpretive anxiety of being human

What do you give significance to? What are the things, ideas, moments and memories that shape your view of the world? Who are the people that influence the way you live you life?

As I have continued my journey through the chaotic streets and bustling bazars of Istanbul I have begun asking a lot of these questions of myself. I have also had to reckon once again with the dynamic relationship between “doing” and “being”. I am driven by a deep sense of ambition, pushing myself to do more, create more and work harder. I walk along cobblestone streets, the sun’s heat hitting my skin as countless ideas bubble up in the space of my imagination. I think about making money and making art. I think about what I will do when I return home. How I will use this experience to take my life, my career, my creativity to the next level. I show up at the arts studio and I battle with the time it takes to soak in this inspiration and an overwhelming desire to turn all of these ideas into something tangible. I try and slow down, but ultimately I end up speeding up. The constant stimulation of this place challenging my ability to be present and at peace. There is constant movement here and I feel caught in the flow of it all.

I am working on an exhibition about weirdness. I am trying my best to synthesise the lessons and learnings of the past six months into something that I can articulate. I am meeting new people, and learning to see the world with new eyes, and the violence of articulation is challenging. There is so much to say and limited time to say it. There is so much “significance” and my ability to filter it is challenged by the constant onslaught of newness. There’s a magic to this though, a vibrancy of everyday novelty that’s intoxicating. I find solace in my belief that all of this newness is helping shape me into a better version of myself. I am coming to realise through this that the beliefs I have developed about myself and my place in the world are critical to my ability to manoeuvre all of this chaos and interpret meaning from these experiences, and I have therefore come to a the following hypothesis:

“An individual belief system or conscious framework for understanding the world is critical in overcoming the interpretive anxiety caused by the inevitable chaos of life itself”

Now I know you’re probably reading this going, WTF is this dude on about, he’s venturing deep into some existential, philosophical whirlpool that is way to complicated for a Monday. BUT, hear me out for a second. Let’s look at two individuals I have met over the past few days and see if I can make this point a little clearer…

I had lunch with a man who has run a print store for 25 years. He believed wholeheartedly that the coming of messiah will happen soon. He told me (through a translator) about an oceanographer who converted to Islam because he discovered previously undiscovered scientific truths in the Quran. He shared a meal with me and smoked his cigarettes while we drank coffee. He asked me about kangaroos, and told me that we were brothers because our ancestors both died on the shores of Gallipoli. He had a warm heart and a passion for his belief system. He wasn’t trying to “convert me”, but instead just wanted to share how he saw the world. There was a beautiful humanness to his excitement in hosting me. He told mew that for every guest you host they bless you and your house ten times over. His own unique understanding of karmic laws shaping the way he engages with and treats strangers. I may not believe all that he believes, but I could see the groundedness that those beliefs offered him. I could see the lightness that they brought to his life. He gained significance through his belief system. He had a structure through which he was able to live his life, that granted him a set of liberties and boundaries that he felt satisfied with.

I met another man, closer to my age, at a bar. He came and sat opposite me and introduced himself. He spoke broken english but we were able to communicate without the assistance of an app or third party. He was drunk. He smoked a lot of cigarettes and expressed the same sentiment of our shared history in war being a unifying force between our two countries. He said I was welcome here, and that he was glad to have met me. He was kind and interested in what I had to say, helping translate words from english to Turkish as if he was my teacher. He studies music and plays in a series of rock bands. He is not religious and was very critical of the society he exists within. He told me that he felt “unlucky” being from the Middle East. He feared racism abroad, and yet acknowledged his own privileges of financial and political power established from his family’s influence. He played guitar for me and showed me his modest flat on the edge of Kadikoy. We drank beers and chatted about the differences in our cultures. He got emotional, saddened by feelings of “not enoughness”, and an overwhelming lack of meaning in his life.

In him I began to see a familiar pain. A lack of significance. A lack of belief in something bigger than himself. A lack of a system of beliefs (religious or otherwise) that gave him a structure through which he could live his life. Without such a structure, I have come to notice that many people end up lost. Yes, there is a freedom from the boundaries of inherited belief systems, but without any alternative form of structure the individual ends up lost in the infiniteness of choices. Meaning struggles to be discovered when the expansiveness of all things does not have a funnel through which it can be viewed through.

There appears to be a kind of interpretive anxiety that is generated when one lacks a system of belief. The complexities of life itself become overwhelming and difficult to process without some kind of “box” to categorise them. The cultural shift away from organised religion is a positive thing in my opinion, but, the need for meaning and belief doesn’t dissipate. Human beings need a framework through which they can decipher the mystery of their own experience. Consciousness demands awareness and awareness requires some level of interpretation. Lacking a process or organised system for conducting this interpretation one becomes susceptible to chaos.

I come back to myself. Sitting here alone in a cafe, drinking another iced americano, while a brown noise playlist on Spotify echos in my ears attempting to combat my attention deficits. I am overwhelmed by the stimulation of all things. My memories of the past, my dreams of the future, and my absolutely unbelievable existence that I am experiencing in the now. I do not follow any religious doctrine, and am in the most part resistant to any form of organised religion because of the clear connections I see between these forces and manipulative power hierarchies, global conflict and the historical abuse of individual autonomy. And yet, I believe in something. I believe in what I understand as the “universe”. I believe in energy and the flow of good and bad karma. I choose to believe that the more optimism and good deeds that I put out into the world, the more optimism and good deeds I shall receive in return. I choose to believe that everything that occurs in my life is happening for a reason and that my perception of good and bad is just that, “a perception”. In this sense, I have built a structure through which I view the world. I have a base understanding of reality and my place in it, so as to avoid the inevitable debilitating, existential chaos of infinity. I still get overwhelmed and frustrated, and sad and all the other totally natural sensations that come with being human, but I have a system of transferring that stimulus into a form of interpreted meaning. It may not be objectively “right” but it is my truth, and as long as I am willing to interrogate and challenge that truth as it accumulates and as I grow as an individual, it is empowering and productive in my ability to face the complexities of the world.

The truth, as I see it, is that religion is losing its grip as the defining set of belief systems that shape our human experience. For centuries religion controlled the world, and it still does to a certain degree, but the tides are changing. The younger generation is becoming more curious, more experimental and more exposed to alternative view points and this is inevitably generating an interpretive anxiety amongst this same generation. The value of religion is that it provides a structure through which one can interpret the world. It provides a set of guiding principles and boundaries through which one can operate. Taking this away provides the ultimate sense of personal freedom, but it does come at a cost. Meaning is important. Community is important. A system of beliefs is important for any individual to live a productive and fulfilling life, and without an understanding of “God” and a clear structure to live by, the individual becomes accountable for creating their own understanding of the world. The issue is the education system and the other rites of passage required to empower young people to develop this belief system have not been updated to serve this changing world view.

We do not have the tools and community focussed resources nor spaces to adequately equip these emerging generations with the confidence and capacity to make their own meaning. This is where things like extremism come into the picture. People get lost and attach to ideologies that give them that sense of structure. People become obsessed with identity structures and modes of categorisation, the system of social capital becoming all the more important in symbolising one’s sense of significance and meaning in the world. Cancel culture, influencers, media consumption, political polarisation, fear mongering - all of these things are expanding out of an evolving need for meaning and our inability to equip ourselves with the tools to think critically about how we come to understand the world and then act in accordance with these emerging beliefs. We are in some respects creating our own “Gods”, but without the conscious thought and clarity of personal responsibility required for these “Gods” to truly serve us and our communities.

A shift is needed. It is happening in some circles and being challenged in others, but the necessity for open conversation, personal accountability and individual empowerment in the face of these interpretive anxieties is essential. We need to be able to decipher what is significant in our lives for ourselves. We cannot rely on the social norms, tech companies or media personalities to do this job for us. As we venture away from religion we must look towards our own consciousness, our own individual agency and ability to create a belief system that shapes how we see the world. In turn we must also be willing to interrogate these ideas over time, embracing curiosity and acknowledging that the goal is not to be “right”, but to learn and grow over time, as individuals and social communities.

Would be keen to know your thoughts on this, if you have any. Send me a message <3

Stay Weird,

Zed

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