Tomorrow morning you wake up and you’re stranded on an unknown island, alone. Nobody else, just you. Yes, it’s all very unexpected. Yet you manage to remain calm, cool, and collected. Nice work.
In that situation, how do you define what’s meaningful?
To put myself in your shoes, I would guess that your process would entail sitting there and thinking to yourself, “what the heck is going on and what should I do?” You’d probably conclude that the most meaningful thing is to stay alive while you’re on the island. The second most meaningful thing is getting off the island.
All in all, your process of defining what’s meaningful wouldn’t be that complicated since you only have your perspective to consider.
It’s More Complex With Other People
Now let’s run a slightly different scenario. Tomorrow morning you wake up and you’re stranded on an unknown island, but this time it’s with one other person. A dynamic duo.
In that situation, how does having a companion with their own definition of meaning impact what’s meaningful to you?
Adding this person changes things. It makes defining meaning more complicated because you have to communicate with them. There are two reasons why you have to communicate:
You need to know the perspective of this stranger to inform your own. After all, what if this stranger has an insight that could help you know what’s meaningful? For example, maybe you don’t know what an island is or perhaps you don’t understand that the human body can’t sustain itself off of salt water. You don’t know what you don’t know, but this person might.
You care about what your companion is going to do based on their definition of meaning. For example, what if this person believes something that is detrimental to your belief? If your companion’s definition of meaning is “kill everyone else on the island as fast as possible,” you’d have a real problem on your hands. On the other hand, if their definition of meaning is similar to yours, which is likely the case since they’re a human too, you can probably work together.
Solving these two complications isn’t all that difficult since it’s just you and your new best friend. We’ll assume you both speak the same language, so all you gotta do is talk it out. “What’d you believe is meaningful?”... “I can barely believe that this is happening and I just want to live and get the heck off this island!” …“Samesies.”
Yay! You did it. You learned their perspective to ensure your definition of meaning is as up to date as possible and you confirmed that you do not have competing beliefs. As long as you stay in communication and update each other on perspective changes, you can ensure that your definition of meaning is cutting edge.
An Island Like Earth
Now let’s run one last scenario. Tomorrow morning you wake up and you’re stranded on an unknown island with a group of other people. 8 billion other people. Yes, it’s a large island floating in a very large ocean.
How do you define meaning when your previous strategy of talk with the person won’t work? There are about one hundred million times too many companions to have meaningful relationships with based on conversation alone! You need some other tool to communicate with these people.
To see how this problem is solved, it helps to see that the same fundamentals are at play with 8 billion people as they were with 2 people: 1) you still need to know the perspective of these other people to inform your definition of meaning and 2) you care about their definition to know if they’re going to help or hurt you.
The answer for doing these two things within a group of 8 billion is still communication, but the exact type of communication isn’t a conversation.
We use our incentive systems: economies, governments, religions, media companies, academic centers, and non-profits to communicate with each other and determine meaning. For example, if the price of a water bottle is 2 American dollars, we’ve communicated through a supply and demand marketplace that a water bottle is 2 dollars meaningful. For example again, if the punishment for killing another human is execution, then we’ve communicated through the judicial process that the cost of taking a human life is another life. For one last example, if the reward for behaving in accordance with the bible is everlasting life in heaven, then we’ve communicated through the act of spiritual interpretation that following god’s rules is worth immortality.
The point with these very high-level examples is that our economies, governments, and religions are complex communication networks that enable 8 billion people to share their perspectives and define meaning. While complex on the surface, these incentive systems are just facilitating a conversation among very large groups of people.
Whether you’re deciding what to purchase, who to vote for, or what to worship, you’re sharing your perspective in a group effort to define and pursue something meaningful.
By creating and using these systems, we’ve done a good job figuring out how to communicate so far, and I believe there’s a necessary and significant upgrade on the horizon that will enable us to define and pursue meaning with more clarity than ever before.
Stranded on this island we call Earth floating through an ocean we call space, our incentive systems place us in a conversation around an 8-billion person dinner table to find a meaningful path forward.
Next Up
The next handful of posts are going to look at each of the major incentive systems we currently use. The next post will focus on the economy, exploring some economic history, present, and future, with the goal of clarifying how humanity’s current economies define and pursue meaning.
Thank you for reading.
-Michael
Loved this one. The exchange of value super thought provoking. What came to mind was - of course water is worth much more to us than 2 American dollars (e.g. if you are dying of thirst and you have 100 American dollars, you will pay that), but there are competing forces to keep trade off and value in balance (supply and demand, faith, etc.)