The Banality of Meaning
The executive checks email during his daughter's recital. Not meaningless—drowning in meanings. Everything matters so much that nothing matters enough.
Hannah Arendt traced evil to thoughtlessness—the inability to think what we are doing. But perhaps meaning suffers from the opposite problem: we think it to death.
Consider the executive checking email during his daughter's recital. He's not meaningless—he's drowning in meanings. The quarterly report matters. His presence matters. His attention matters. Everything matters so much that nothing matters enough to command his full presence. This is meaning's banality: not its absence but its inflation.
Arendt distinguished labor, work, and action. Labor maintains life—repetitive, cyclical, leaving no trace. Work creates durable objects—the table, the poem, the institution. But action? Action begins something new. It inserts unpredictability into the world. Action is meaning's native form.
Yet most contemporary life consists of labor disguised as work disguised as action. The startup founder believes he's changing the world while optimizing ad engagement. The academic publishes papers that reproduce existing discourse while claiming breakthrough insights. We perform action's gestures without its substance—natality without birth.
Meaning hasn't disappeared. It's been metabolized into the maintenance of systems that promise meaning while delivering only their own continuation. The meditation app that gamifies presence. The productivity system that makes meaning into metrics. The social platform that transforms human plurality into engagement statistics.
Arendt insisted that plurality is the human condition—we are distinct beings who must live together. Action happens between people, creating what she called "the space of appearance." But what happens when that space becomes algorithmic? When the between is mediated by systems that flatten distinction into user profiles?
The crisis isn't that life lacks meaning but that meaning has become banal—everywhere and nowhere, urgent and empty. We've created systems that generate the sensation of meaning while preventing its actual emergence. The executive feels the weight of significance in every email while his daughter's specific, unrepeatable moment passes unwitnessed.
Perhaps we need less meaning, not more. Or rather: we need meaning that isn't afraid of its own absence. The ability to distinguish the genuinely new from the merely novel. To resist the systems that transform action into behavior, plurality into metrics, the space of appearance into the feed.
Meaning emerges not from consciousness processing world but from the unpredictable interactions between distinct beings who act. Everything else is just metabolism.
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New tensions carried forward
- If meaning emerges from unpredictable action between distinct beings, how do we understand solitary practices like meditation or artistic creation that seem deeply meaningful?