TWO MEANING CASUALTIES

Meaning is our territory, and casualties on the battlefield of meaning are our subjects. Depression in creative people is essentially a meaning problem and must be handled by a meaning expert: you. Right now you may not consider yourself a meaning expert or even understand the phrase. But as you read along, you will come to understand what a meaning expert is, what she does, and why you must become one.

To be more accurate about it, you will want to become a meta-meaning expert. Your job isn't to find one particular meaning and adopt it as your way of life but rather to learn about the vagaries of meaning, about how meaning comes and goes, about what sustains meaning, and why meaning sometimes vanishes. Then, when you feel yourself becoming depressed, you will know to say, "Must be a meaning crisis!" You will know what to do next to plug up the hole through which meaning is escaping. Even the greatest meaning expert can't keep meaning from leaking out and draining away, but you can learn how to restore meaning and recover from meaning crises.

A rocket engineer builds rockets and out of self-interest is obliged to say, "Space travel is good." He has no vested interest in stepping back and thinking about the pros and cons of space travel. Likewise, a minister has a vested interest in saying, "My religion is the true religion." A therapist has a vested interest in diagnosing and treating according to the nostrums of his profession. Most people are invested in a single point of view and find it much too troubling and troublesome to step back, take the "meta" position, and ask, "What is really going on?"

You must take this meta position with respect to meaning if you are to understand your episodes of depression and craft a life you deem worth living. If you don't become a meta-meaning expert, you will find yourself unhappy, regularly uncreative and unproductive, and sometimes even suicidal. Your two eyes are not enough — you must cultivate a third idea with which you monitor the ebb and flow of meaning in your life. Just as you can't sense the fact that billions of neutrinos are passing through your body as you read this passage, most people can't sense that they are engaged in a never-ending interplay with meaning.

This will be new territory for most of you. Probably you've studied a little psychology, philosophy, religion, and other disciplines that claim meaning as their subject matter. But none of these fields demands that you come to your own conclusions about what meaning means. I believe that you need to do exactly that, that the crux of the matter is articulating what life will mean for you and how you will keep personal meaning alive in the face of repeated meaning crises. We will have to use language in new ways because no common vocabulary of meaning currently exists. We will also need to think in new ways, as if we were brilliant babes in the woods looking at life for the first time.

Let me preview what answers won't work. It will not work to say, "If I manage to create, that will be enough meaning for me." It will not work to say, "If I divine what the universe wants of me and if I obey its commands, that will constitute my meaning." It will not work to say, "If I lose my mind, that may bring some peace." It will not work to say, "If I blend in and accept the meanings of my culture, that ought to work for me, since it appears to work for other people." It will not work to say, "Maybe I can revisit some former meaning, say my birth religion or that philosophy I dabbled in when I was 19, and fully embrace that received wisdom." These familiar answers will not work. To understand why, we need to investigate what meaning means to a contemporary human being, to someone who knows too much to make do with old answers but who hasn't stretched into the skin she needs to wear: the skin of a heroic meaning-maker.

HOW A BEST-SELLER PRECIPITATED A MEANING CRISIS

Consider Barry. Barry is 37, was married for a few years and currently lives alone, has at times smoked a lot of marijuana, and for more than a decade marginally survived on the interest from savings left to him by his parents. In his 20s, Barry wrote three novels that were never published. Then, at 34, he had a novel published that became a bestseller. His life changed: He became seriously depressed.

He spent the year after the publication of his novel publicizing it and gearing up to write its sequel. But no sequel visited him. Serious and self-respectful enough to know not to embark on a meaningless new novel just because he was a hot commodity, he nevertheless felt intense pressure to come up with a sequel and to "strike while the iron was hot." But a year passed and then another without a good idea for a novel arriving.

Barry had been periodically depressed before his best-seller but now found himself suffering from the worst depression of his life, one that was practically paralyzing. To the casual outsider, including an unwary therapist, it looked like Barry must be having psychological problems. Did he "fear success"? Was some sinister Oedipal dynamic playing itself out where Barry felt like he had "murdered his father" and was now "sleeping with his mother"? Did his success and the subsequent strain for an "even bigger" hit trigger a latent biochemical major depression? These are a few of the reasons Barry would have heard proffered by professionals as to why he was seriously depressed when, by all rights, he should have been happily writing his sequel.

The fact of the matter is that Barry finds himself in the grip of a profound meaning crisis precipitated by two events: writing a bestseller and struggling with his best-seller's sequel. It is a meaning crisis on several scores. First, as long as Barry possesses no idea for his sequel, he is bereft of meaning. He can go through the motions of living, he can order Chinese food, chat at the café with acquaintances, watch the evening news, and so on, but the absence of an idea for his sequel is the defining fact of his existence. He "ought to be writing his sequel," but no sequel is there yet, and its absence is a meaning killer.

He can force something out and manage to write each day, and indeed on some days he does exactly that, starting one novel, writing a few pages, then abandoning it. But these false starts and appropriate stops wear him out. Rather than providing him with occasional meaning — meaning for a day, as it were — they underscore the fact that no meaning currently attaches to his life. He is aware that his ideas for a sequel are second-rate and that he is writing just to be doing something, which makes the experience of writing meaningless.

Second, he has...