(Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Humanity)

Version 3.1

0. Introduction

All my adult life I’ve felt as if something was wrong, either with me, or with the world, or both. At different times for over two decades, I’ve felt some combination of depression, loneliness, frustration, anger, apathy, hopelessness and a general feeling that nothing matters and that my suffering, on top of being incurable, is also meaningless; that I’m suffering for no good reason.

This experience is not unique. People have felt this way for a long time. Today, despite being materially more comfortable and technologically more connected, more people than ever suffer from depression, loneliness and a sense that modern life feels shallow and empty.

Over the last century, this malaise of modernity has been described as a “Meaning Crisis”. The diagnosis being that humanity has lost its sense of meaning because reason and science have eroded the metaphysical foundations of religion, which once gave purpose and coherence to human life.

The solutions to the Meaning Crisis offered by philosophers have ranged from finding our way back to meaning, to creating our own meaning, to living authentically etc. Meanwhile, the general public has also discovered ways to deal with this crisis through distractions, mindless consumption, political ideology or even self-help. Despite these interventions and attempts at solving the problem, it still remains.

I believe this is because the Meaning Crisis is a misdiagnosis. In this essay, I argue that there is a more fundamental human need underneath meaning; that of Orientation.

All animals need to orient themselves, not just in the physical world but also in their social world. Humans also share the same need but our social world has become highly complex. The instinctive orientation mechanisms that we inherited from our animal past are not sufficient to fulfil this need in our complex human world.

We fulfilled this need by developing Narrative Orientation. We use narratives to simplify reality, organize experience and orient ourselves socially and psychologically. These narratives tell us who we are, what the world is, what matters, where we belong and what we should do with our lives. Historically, we have tended to believe our narratives to be true and this provided us with a sense of meaning. I call this process Meaningmaking.

In the modern world, science, free flow of information and access to competing worldviews have weakened our ability to believe in our inherited narratives. This does lead to a loss of meaning but the deeper problem underneath is that we’ve become disoriented. No new narratives have emerged that are coherent enough to help us orient ourselves or powerful enough to give us a sense of meaning.

I argue that if we try to solve the orientation problem first, instead of remaining stuck with the meaning problem, we can resolve the situation by learning to do Sensemaking. We can create new narratives while retaining the Meta-Awareness that they are narratives. This not only helps us orient ourselves but also helps us avoid the inherent flaw of Meaningmaking.

This essay is an attempt to develop the framework of Narrative Orientation and Sensemaking for understanding how humans make sense of the world, why our current solutions to the Meaning Crisis don’t work, and whether a more adaptive way of orienting ourselves is possible in an age where faith in absolute narratives has become increasingly difficult to sustain.

1. Orientation in Animals

1.1 The Physical World

Animals need to orient themselves in the physical world. The basic version of this is Spatial Orientation: knowing up from down, front from back and right from left. All animals have evolved to automatically do this type of orientation using their senses.

Animals also require a more complex form of orientation to the physical world which we can call Physical Orientation. This has to do with the animal being familiar with its environment. Familiarity means to have explored its surroundings and have acquired information like places to hide, where to find food, where to be careful of predators etc. If you place an animal in an unfamiliar environment, they become disoriented and show signs of anxiety and stress. Their cognitive capacity is directed towards immediate survival and even the most fundamental drives such as food or sex takes a back seat.

An example of this will be familiar to anyone who’s brought home a feral kitten for the first time. The kitten’s first reaction is to find the nearest safe place, usually under a bed or sofa, and hide there. It refuses to come out even for food. Slowly it’ll begin to get oriented with the new environment; first through smells and sounds and then through tentative exploration. Only when it has oriented itself completely with the new environment does it feel safe enough to behave ‘normally’.

1.2 The Social World

Along with the physical world, animals also have to navigate their social world which is made up of dominance hierarchies, territory defense, mating rituals, cooperation and competition with other members of the social group, to name a few. The exact complexity of the social world varies between species. Reptiles like snakes or alligators have a very simple social world while wolves or apes have a more complex social world.

We can call this Social Orientation. Being disoriented in the social world can be just as anxiety inducing as in the physical world. Just like the senses, animals have also evolved instinctive behaviors to orient themselves in, and navigate, their social world.

When zookeepers have to introduce a new member to an enclosure, they don’t just drop them in the midst of an established social group. They first help the new individual get oriented to the physical environment of the enclosure, perhaps by letting it in when the resident group has been taken out. They also help it get oriented to the social environment in multiple ways; like letting it smell the markings of the resident group and leave its own markings, letting it meet friendly or juvenile members of the social group, letting the group meet the new individual through a cage etc. This reduces stress in the animals and allows for better integration of the new member.

We humans also have these evolutionary tools for orientation in the physical and social world. But our social world has become incredibly complex and that makes our instinctive behaviors insufficient for orientation in it.

2. Narrative Orientation

We solve this problem by doing Narrative Orientation. I define it simply as a kind of orientation that is done by using narratives. While Physical Orientation is done using the senses and animals do Social Orientation using instinctive behaviors, humans need narratives, on top of, and sometimes in place of, instinctive behaviors, to do Social Orientation in our highly complex social world.

A narrative is simply a structured account of events. It connects events in a causal chain and arranges them in time. It presents the complexity of reality in a simplified version which is cognitively easier to grasp and has more emotional valence than pure information.

Fictional stories are the most obvious examples of narratives. Non-fictional stories, journalistic reporting, political ideology, religious myths etc. are all types of narratives. In all narratives, complexity is simplified to achieve the goal of the narrative, which can vary from entertainment, or catharsis, to inspiring a movement, or providing meaning.

We also have ongoing narratives in our head about our own life, our relationships, and our place in the world. These narratives are not consciously generated and often we’re not even aware of what we actually believe. None the less, everyone does have narratives like these on which they base their choices and decisions in the world.

Individuals have narratives about the groups they belong to, but groups also have shared narratives about the group identity. Both these narratives affect and shape each other but the collective narratives have a much more significant impact on individuals than the individual narratives have on the group. The exception to this are certain individuals like artists, writers, philosophers, who can impact the collective narratives much more significantly.

Before we can explore Narrative Orientation further, we need to discuss how humans deal with, and add to, the complexity of the world.

3. Filtering & Compression

The human social world is the most complex out of all animals. We have multiple hierarchies that we inhabit simultaneously. We have developed systems to manage our large societies, many of them in an emergent fashion so we don’t even fully understand how they work. And as we’ll see later, our narratives and concepts also add to the complexity of our world.

But the physical world is also already quite complex. Humans and animals alike, already do perceptual filtering and compression to simplify the world. We’re constantly bombarded with sensory input but our perception filters out most of it and we only pay attention to the signals that matter to us. We perceive the world not as it is but as it relates to us.

For example, visual perception is not simply our eyes working like a camera. When we see an object, we see it as how it relates to our body, our needs and our goals. When we see a pen, we don’t see a cylindrical object but a writing instrument. When we see people, we don’t really pay attention to all their features in detail. That’s why children and adults who have never learned to draw, draw in an iconic manner when asked to draw someone from memory. Instead of eyes we draw circles and a triangle for a nose. In fact, many art teachers feel that learning to draw is really learning to see.

We are not just filtering the signals coming in but we’re also compressing them into icons, symbols and concepts so as to make it easier to understand the world. We experience a simplified version of reality. Evolutionarily, this was necessary to reduce cognitive load as well as to accelerate response, like on seeing a predator. Even apes have been found to mistake ropes or twisty sticks for snakes in certain conditions.

3.1 Conceptual Compression

This process is continued in the human world with the help of our language. One form of linguistic compression we do is Conceptual Compression. It begins with abstraction. If we only give a name to every individual thing we can see, language remains limited. The power of language is unleashed when we abstract out a general concept that applies to every individual member of that group but also something that we can hold in our head as a general concept.

For example, the word “tree” doesn’t just apply to this tree or that tree; it doesn’t just apply to some old tree from our memory or some mythical tree of life; it applies to every tree ever possible. The concept of a tree becomes a mental object that we can hold and manipulate in our mind.

We can create concepts that are made up of more fundamental concepts. Like a logic tree is a concept made up of the concepts of tree and logic, which itself is a complicated concept. We can stack these layers endlessly. We’ve created a complex conceptual world that interacts with the human world. Just because concepts are mental constructs, that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Concepts like money, god, justice etc. are so powerful that they can impact our lives in significant ways. Ironically, while Conceptual Compression helps us simplify the world, in the long run it also adds to the complexity. Especially when we start considering our concepts to be the reality.

3.2 Narrative Compression

Narratives also do both filtering and compression. Filtering simply means that when we create a narrative, we discard all irrelevant information. Sometimes we deliberately ignore information that might be relevant from an objective standpoint but it doesn’t help us make our case. We select what information to include based on what goals we want to achieve.

Then we do Narrative Compression. It works by simplifying complicated reality into easy to understand versions. It turns boring and complicated reality into emotionally motivational versions which are psychologically more powerful. Individuals are caricatured or turned into stereotypes. Greyness of events is lost and black and white versions are constructed. Archetypes are like a compressed shorthand version of individuals. If you attach an archetype to an individual, we instantly understand what kind of person they are.

Conceptual Compression allowed us to unleash more of our intelligence and made our language more complex. Narrative Compression allowed us to work with strangers in large numbers and increased our sociability. The human story can be understood as this runaway feedback loop. We are constantly trying to create concepts and narratives to understand our world, but the act of compression in both these ways, eventually adds to the complexity of our world. Periodically, we try to clear the ground of old concepts and narratives because it gets too complex to hold in our heads.

4. Individual Narrative Orientation

The Narrative Orientation that individuals do is mostly at the subconscious level, although it can rise to the conscious level from time to time. We can see a reflection of this process in young children who pick up language by imitating sounds and words. Soon after that they begin telling stories. Every parent is familiar with this stage where the child is eager to share their endless stories that don’t make any sense. The child is learning to create narratives that do make sense. Children use these narratives to comfort or soothe themselves because it helps them make sense of their world.

As we grow up, we stop sharing these stories with others, but we continue to make them up in our head. Perhaps because we do it continuously, we don’t realize that we’re doing it. Whenever something happens to us, we update our ongoing narratives about ourselves, our world and our relationships. “Why did that happen?” “Why did she say that?” “What did he mean by that?” Such questions arise constantly and are answered by our mind in one way or another and that adds to our ongoing narratives.

When I say that we’re asking and answering questions, this does not mean that a voice in our head verbally speaks every time. Often this type of subconscious Narrative Orientation happens at an emotional level. We often believe in narratives that our inner voice has never made explicit to our conscious mind but our actions reveal the narratives we believe.

We have ongoing narratives about all our relationships, our career, our place in society and our life in general. We sometimes call it our life story and it is one of the most important narratives for individuals. When disoriented or poorly oriented in this narrative, we suffer a lot. We also have narratives about the world and how it works. These individual narratives about the world are often tangled with narratives of the groups we belong to so let’s talk about that next.

5. Collective Narrative Orientation

Any collection of individuals that has a shared group identity also does Narrative Orientation. These groups can be tribal, national, religious, cultural, political, ideological, or based on race, caste, economic class, sex, or even more casual groups such as fandoms and subcultures. The act of doing collective Narrative Orientation, leads to stronger group identity and cohesion as it gives the members of the group a shared narrative to believe in and helps them with their own individual Narrative Orientation.

At the individual level, Narrative Orientation is done consciously or subconsciously. At the group level, Narrative Orientation can be done consciously but most of it happens in an emergent way. When some members of a group create a narrative consciously, we call it propaganda. But collective narratives mostly emerge on their own. This happens through sharing collective trauma, participating in rituals, sharing cultural norms and taboos, using symbols, sharing aesthetic norms, celebrating festivals etc. An evolutionary process selects elements that speak to the majority of the group and these are added to the collective narrative.

5.1 Inherited Collective Narratives

Everyone is born into a community of some sort and inherits the narratives of that community. People belong to multiple communities simultaneously as these are not mutually exclusive sets. Most people are born into at least two groups: a religious and a national identity. Depending on their parents, they might also be born into racial, caste-based, economic and regional identities.

Because they belong to so many groups, their inherited Narrative Orientation might not be coherent and some identities might be in conflict with others. As they grow up, they find new groups to identify with and discard certain identities that don’t speak to them. Many individuals feel lost because they don’t feel like they belong to any group. All these narratives shape the way people think and act and have a major impact on their lives.

5.2 The Default Path

It’s obvious how we can’t help but believe the narratives we’ve inherited, unless there has been a reason for us to question them. This is usually the easiest path as it requires no expenditure of cognitive energy and effort. We just have to copy everyone else around us and live as they do. For most people today, this default path gives them a strong chance of survival, unless they’re born in highly unfavorable conditions such as extreme poverty, famine, war etc. But the default path does not guarantee happiness or high life satisfaction.

Collective narratives emerge to ensure the survival of the group and that is achieved by ensuring the survival of the majority, even if their life satisfaction is low. People at the margins of society often find that the collective narratives don’t work for them at all and in fact, try to oppress them to preserve the group. This is why collective narratives are often highly contested as people at the fringes of personality trait distributions, sexual orientation, economic or political fringes etc. try to change the narratives while the conservative middle tries to resist change.

6. Narrative Orientation Vs Reality

Orientation itself means aligning oneself with reality. It is easy to understand this in terms of Spatial Orientation. When insects get trapped by artificial lights, they are spatially disoriented. Their senses have evolved in such a way that they fly while keeping their backs towards the brightest area. Usually this means the sky or the moon. They haven’t evolved to deal with man-made artificial light. So, they fly while constantly aligning their back towards the light bulb and thus get trapped in a spiraling orbit towards the light.

If an animal’s orientation in the physical world is poor and it falsely believes itself to be safe when there’s a predator around, it will get itself killed. This is often the trick used by some predators to hide their presence and lull the prey into a false sense of confidence. Similarly, we can see how being poorly oriented in the social world can make an animal behave in a way that is detrimental to it.

The same goes for Narrative Orientation as well. Our narratives control our actions. And our actions can only be successful if they are in accordance with reality. But success for humans is not always binary. The amount of success we achieve is dependent on how closely our actions match reality, and that depends on how well our narratives align with reality.

We can call this Narrative Alignment. The actual narratives don’t matter as much as how closely they align with reality. As long as they lead to actions that are successful, the narratives themselves can be considered successful. But when Narrative Alignment is weak, our actions can’t be successful.

For example, let’s imagine three tribes of hunters. One believes that in order for a hunt to be successful, they have to first hold a ceremony praying to the spirits of their ancestors. Second one believes that the hunt is only successful when the shaman receives a message from the gods about when it’s a good time to hunt. And the third one believes that to succeed in a hunt they have to beat a drum made from the skin of a jackal, throughout the hunt, to ward off evil spirits.

The reality about what makes a hunt successful is the same for all three tribes, as it is for animal predators. We know that stealth is an important part of it. So, the third tribe is going to suffer because their narrative doesn’t align well with this reality. The other two tribes have a higher chance of succeeding. Based on whether or not they succeed, they’ll adapt their narratives to make sense of it. For example, if the second tribe fails, the shaman might say that the gods are angry and won’t tell him when to hunt till they make a sacrifice.

When we don’t know which narratives to believe, we feel disoriented. We are in a similar state physiologically to a disoriented animal. But believing in narratives with weak Narrative Alignment can also produce a similarly anxious state. An animal who is really in a new environment is really disoriented and rightly using all its cognitive capacity to stay alive, but an animal who wrongly believes to be in a new or dangerous environment experiences the same state but in this case it’s a dysfunction. The same goes for humans and Narrative Orientation. Many people who suffer from anxiety do so, not because they don’t know which narrative to believe but rather that their narratives are not well aligned with reality.

7. Meaningmaking

The process humans have used to fulfil the need for Narrative Orientation is what I call Meaningmaking. It is something more complicated than Narrative Orientation. First of all, when humans do Meaningmaking, we do not believe that we are creating narratives. Most of the time we think that we are accessing the truth about reality. In our modern world, we’ve become aware of how science works and so when we do Meaningmaking, we often say things like “this is a higher truth” or “science and reason can’t access this type of truth”.

Secondly, when we create our narratives, we don’t look for evidence and facts and reason. We rely more on instincts, emotions and feelings. Even though we claim that we are dealing with truth, we don’t use scientific methods. Our narratives are meant to have emotional valence and motivational power. We’re looking for psychological coherence and an alignment with our existing narratives. We want to reaffirm our identity and feel secure about the world. If we don’t believe our narratives to be true, we can’t get many of these psychological elements that make our narratives meaningful.

When we believe in a narrative strongly, we get a sense of existential certainty. We know what the world is, who we are, what matters to us and what we have to do. No number of facts and figures can change our mind. We feel strongly oriented but, how useful our narrative is, depends on how well it aligns with reality. If our narrative has weak alignment, we might suffer in other ways, but we don’t suffer the existential crisis.

There are different levels at which we do Meaningmaking. The kind of meaning described above is achieved from the highest level narratives about life itself, but this process happens at lower level narratives as well. Even at the individual level, we come up with narratives about our relationships with others and we believe them to be the truth. Often, these narratives are wrong but our belief in them makes us behave a certain way that affects the relationship.

Meaningmaking has been the engine driving human progress. Shared meaningful narratives have allowed us to cooperate with strangers and build large societies. Powerful narratives have motivated humans to do amazing things like build great monuments or spread civilization or work to create so much more value than we need for mere survival. But this same motivational power has also driven us to do great acts of evil like war and genocide.

8. The Inherent Flaw of Meaningmaking

Just because Meaningmaking was our default solution to the need for Narrative Orientation, it doesn’t mean it’s the only, or the best, solution. There is an inherent flaw in Meaningmaking: it eventually stops working as Narrative Orientation.

All collective narratives emerge because they work as Narrative Orientation in the beginning. The Narrative Alignment is high and they lead to actions that work for the individuals as well as lead to increased group cohesion. But Meaningmaking requires believing the narratives to be true. We have faith in our narratives and faith by definition is opposed to revision. But Narrative Orientation is an ongoing need because the environment of the human world is always changing.

If we believe that something is true, we don’t stay open to evidence that can make us change our opinion. We make a psychological commitment to our narrative and that means resisting any information that might weaken our commitment. Any feedback from reality, any attempt by someone to change the narrative, is seen as an attack. Because we are emotionally invested in the narrative, we see it as an attack on our identity and who we are. Successful attacks on narratives can shatter the entire world of the believers of that narrative.

This leads to meaningful narratives becoming dogmatic over time. At the collective level, any individual that tries to alter the narrative is ostracized from the community. There are many feedback loops that work at the group level that ensure that any faith grows more dogmatic over time. This isn’t the place to go into all of them in detail but in short, one element of group identity is performative in nature. People want to show to the group that they have strong faith, which makes others discard their doubts and try to outperform them in the expression of the faith. “If everyone believes, then who am I to question it,” they might think. In fact, they might overcompensate in their performativity so that no one realizes that their faith is not strong.

A group hierarchy is formed and there’s power to be had by climbing that hierarchy. Those who perform the faith most strongly, can rise up the hierarchy. This means that even if someone at the top of the hierarchy understands that the narratives need to be updated, they can’t do it because those below them will use it as a sign that their faith is weak and try to overthrow them.

We’ve seen this cycle play out repeatedly in the world. Old religious narratives that are based on faith and give people a sense of meaning, become dogmatic and stop working as Narrative Orientation for more and more people. Any attempts at changing or creating a new Narrative Orientation is brutally suppressed. Change often comes when a critical mass of individuals become disillusioned and it often accompanies violence. Then a new narrative replaces the old one, or the old one splits into multiple sects. But either way, people still think they are seeking the truth and so meaning is preserved and we’re doomed to repeat the same cycle again.

This is how Meaningmaking eventually stops working as Narrative Orientation. This, combined with the fact that Meaningmaking motivates us to commit great acts of evil, is enough to argue that if we can find something to replace it, that would be best.

9. Truthseeking

Humans did not rely only on Meaningmaking to operate in the world; we also did direct Truthseeking. Today, science is the formalized method for Truthseeking that we now understand abstractly. It involves empirical observation as well as rational thinking. We’ve developed the scientific method: generating a hypothesis, designing an experiment, and updating our hypothesis based on the results.

But the fundamental core behind science is Truthseeking. We can argue about when and where science first developed but we can agree that humans have always been interested in discovering the truth about the world directly through observation, reasoning and trial and error.

When we call it Truthseeking, we can see that trial and error is a valid method of discovering the truth. You try to achieve a goal in whatever way seems best to you. If you’re wrong, you’ll fail, but if you keep trying different methods, eventually you might find something that works, fully or partially. Every failure helps you get closer to what might work. You might not understand reality abstractly like a scientist but you have learned some truth about the world.

We can take this all the way back to tool making. We now know that many animals can use found tools but tool manufacturing is a big leap from there. Our ancestors would have probably started by using sharp rocks that they found. It would have required high intelligence to figure out that a sharp rock can be used like a sharp tooth or nail. But to make tools you need to figure out more truth about the world.

They first needed to understand that a rock that isn’t sharp can be made sharp by hitting it with another rock. Then, perhaps by trial and error, they discovered which rocks are best for making flints and which rocks are best for hitting them. Even if they didn’t know theories of geology, and even if they built mythical narratives around it, what they ended up doing was Truthseeking.

From there humans figured out truths about how to build and tend fire, make spears, bows and arrows, pottery, metallurgy, domestication etc. It would be silly to claim that civilizations that built the pyramids or the impressive canals of Indus Valley did not know any truth about the world.

When humans do Truthseeking, they are not doing Narrative Orientation but something different. They are building Maps of Reality. A map contains locations and directions and topographical information. Maps of Reality built through Truthseeking contain little bits of information about the truth of the world; like which kind of mud makes best pots, which colored rocks melt into metal etc. And once we started doing science these maps grew to contain theories and laws and formulas about reality.

Our maps and narratives have both played a role in the story of humanity. Maps helped us achieve our goals but the narratives told us what goals to pursue. Maps do sometimes change the narratives we believe in, but we’re also quite capable of using the maps instrumentally to achieve our goals while holding narratives that have clearly been shown to be false by our new knowledge about the world. This is because what’s useful always gets adopted even if it shows our meaningful narratives to be false. We don’t struggle with such contradictions because Meaningmaking is more about psychological power.

Science is the best tool we have to do Truthseeking, but science can’t do Meaningmaking. Scientists sometimes try to create narratives about the map they’ve been building but these often lack the motivational power of Meaningmaking.

10. Sensemaking

In a general sense, the term Sensemaking simply means to ‘make sense of the world’. Both Meaningmaking and Truthseeking help us make sense of the world. I’m trying to create a third category between these two with this term. It’s not pure Truthseeking like science, but it’s not purely about emotional and psychological coherence like Meaningmaking either.

I define Sensemaking as the process of ongoing Conceptual Clarification, Narrative Examination and Meta-Aware Narrative Recompression that generates clear Application Principles for our life. Let’s tackle these new concepts one by one.

10.1 Conceptual Clarification

We begin by looking at the Conceptual Compression that we’ve been taking for granted. I briefly mentioned how humans can stack layers upon layers of concepts. It helps us in holding complex ideas in our head but it also adds to the complexity, especially when we start treating these concepts as reality.

The conceptual world thus periodically turns into an overgrown jungle with branches, roots, vines all tangled up with each other. It’s overwhelming for anyone to try and navigate it. Philosophers have periodically tried to clean up the mess and turn it into a garden by doing Conceptual Clarification. This is an important step in Sensemaking because otherwise we might get stuck in the jungle and never get to the useful part of Sensemaking.

10.2 Narrative Examination

Along with the concepts we also need to look at Narrative Compression by examining our current narratives. We need to discover what narratives we believe without realizing. We can do this by examining the choices we make. For example, someone might think that they are a spiritual person, but when they examine their life choices, they realize that they’ve been making the same choices as everyone else regarding money, career, success etc. and they suffer the same kind of interpersonal problems as everyone else. Which means they believe in the same narrative as everyone else about earning money and status and improving one’s lot in life, which is not that spiritual.

Once we find the narratives we believe, we need to examine how they’ve compressed reality. Black and white narratives are psychologically satisfying and motivating but the truth is almost always grey. By believing our narratives to be true, we suffer unnecessarily. Like when we think that the world is full of evil and/or stupid people and there’s no way to stop it from going to hell. Understanding how the narratives we believe have compressed reality, can alleviate much unnecessary suffering.

10.3 Narrative Recompression

Once we do these two steps of unfolding the layers of complexity in our narratives and concepts, we need to recompress our learnings into a new narrative. It is important to note that this step is unavoidable. Humans need compressed narratives for orientation. We cannot orient ourselves with uncompressed facts or with Maps of Reality.

When doing Narrative Recompression, we have to remember that we’re not doing Truthseeking. We don’t need to know what the absolute truth about the world is. At the same time this is not a license to do whatever you feel like. We want narratives that make sense to us but that also align well with reality.

10.4 Meta-Awareness

But what if we start believing our narratives to be the truth again? That’s where Meta-Awareness comes in. The usual meaning of this term is to have awareness about your awareness. In other words, to be aware about your thoughts, emotions and cognitive processes. In this context, we’re focusing primarily on the cognitive process of Narrative Orientation. To attain Meta-Awareness of this process you have to first accept that this is what you do and then simply observe and examine your narratives.

When we consciously create new narratives, we start with the Meta-Awareness that they are narratives. But overtime, we can start to believe them to be the truth because that kind of existential certainty is psychologically pleasing. To avoid that, this process of Sensemaking has to remain an ongoing process.

10.5 Iterative Development

The term Iterative Development comes from the world of software. Instead of spending a long time building the perfect software, companies release the minimum viable version as soon as they can. They then take feedback from real users and let it guide the direction of development. This allows companies to create much better software that continuously adapts to changing hardware environment and user needs.

Sensemaking uses the same mindset towards Narrative Orientation. We don’t have to come up with a final philosophy for our life after years of dedicated work. We can begin by creating a minimum viable narrative that helps us orient ourselves a little bit and we can start living our life. Reality gives us feedback about how strong our Narrative Alignment is based on how successful we are in achieving our goals as derived through this process of Sensemaking. We should use this feedback and iterate on our narratives periodically to keep up with changing circumstances.

10.6 Application Principles

The output of this Sensemaking process is not simply a narrative that works for us but rather general principles and guidelines about how to live life, what goals to pursue and how to pursue them. It is important to have these Application Principles as the output because it allows us to measure the utility of our narratives and incorporate the feedback that reality gives us. A vague philosophical or spiritual mindset is harder to evaluate as to how, or how much, it is affecting our life.

This process is similar to both Truthseeking and Meaningmaking but tries to avoid the flaws of both. Science is great for acquiring useful Maps of Reality but it is too slow and too fragmented to provide Narrative Orientation to the common man. Whereas, Meaningmaking is too certain of its narratives and ends up failing as Narrative Orientation in the long run. Sensemaking solves both problems without resorting to a pure relativism where every narrative is equally valid and you can do whatever you want.

This process that I’ve described is primarily working at the individual level. It is for individuals to orient themselves in our deeply fragmented world, but it can be scaled up to the collective level as well. Without going into the details, we can use the framework used by open source software developers to collaborate on a collective narrative with full transparency and a distributed decentralized control of the shared narrative.

An analogy for this process of Sensemaking is to think of a sailor out at sea. The sailor has maps and tools like a compass or a sextant and he uses this to plot the path he wants to take but the job isn’t done there. He has to continuously update the ship’s position on the map and reorient the ship to keep it heading in the right direction. The reality of the sea and the weather is not in the control of the sailor but he survives because he’s continuously receiving feedback and applying it to his orientation so that he can navigate the sea successfully. Sensemaking is a similar process for us on the sea of life.

11. Closing Thoughts

11.1 A Paradox

There is a paradox that I would like to acknowledge. I’m saying that instead of trying to discover absolute truth, through science or faith, how about we just accept a provisional narrative and judge it based on its utility.

But as you might have realized, this entire essay itself falls under Sensemaking. I’ve done Conceptual Clarification and Narrative Examination and then Narrative Recompression to explain the need for Narrative Orientation. I’m not claiming that this is the absolute truth about how humans work. I’m asking you to consider if viewing it through this framework is more useful. If yes, then use the framework. If not then disregard my work. If it speaks partially to you, adapt it.

Essentially, I’m asking you to judge the framework of Sensemaking by using the framework of Sensemaking. This doesn’t make my argument tautological but I have to acknowledge the paradox of the situation.

Scientists will say that they can only judge this framework using the Truthseeking framework they know and trust and if it turns out to be true, then they can begin using it. Meaningmakers will decide on an instinctive and emotional level whether this framework speaks to them and aligns with their existing narratives. If it does, they’ll claim it to be the truth.

If you fall somewhere outside these two categories and are dissatisfied with both Truthseeking and Meaningmaking as orientation tools, then overcome this paradox by giving this framework a try. I’m not quite asking you to take a leap of faith. I’m simply suggesting an alternative option that might work if you give it a try. If it doesn’t, write to me and I’ll give you a full refund.

11.2 Open Questions

To end the essay, I would like to leave you with some questions that might have already arisen in your mind. I will tackle these questions in my next few essays. For now, I just want to acknowledge that I’m aware of these questions and I’m at various stages of answering them. If you think this framework is useful, maybe you can consider these questions and see what answers you can come up with.

Can Meta-Aware narrative even work as orientation for humans? Or do we always need meaning?

Where do ethics and morals come into this framework? If an evil narrative, like the one the Nazis believed in, provides sufficient orientation and utility to its believers, does this framework consider that to be alright?

If we let go of meaning, we’ll enter the hell of nihilism. What protection is there to prevent that from happening?

I hope that you’ve found value through this essay and it has made you think in new and interesting ways. If you’d like to leave some feedback, leave it in the comments below or write to me at rudyaaditya@mail.com.

This framework has definitely helped me deal with the malaise I described in the introduction. Like so many others, I used to feel a general frustration and anger towards humans and humanity. This narrative has genuinely flipped my perspective. Once you understand how some apes managed to bootstrap themselves into a space-faring civilization, you can’t help but think that humanity is awesome!

I’m no Rational Optimist though. Humanity is at a dangerous place in our story. Technology has achieved civilization destroying power in the form of nuclear bombs and yet we’re still trying to orient ourselves using Meaningmaking and still killing each other over inherited narratives. Meanwhile social media and AI have introduced new factors that we’ve never had to deal with before. We’re in urgent need of a post-faith framework for Narrative Orientation and Sensemaking is my attempt at it.

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Cover Photo by Tomas Williams on Unsplash