We forget meaning by default
(or: meaning is antimemetic)
I'm lying in my living room and my coffee table's freighted with stuff. Lots and lots of books, loose notecards, baggies, coasters, a hat, a plastic bag, a notebook, a water bottle, an XBOX controller, a couple shoe horns. So very much stuff.
By default, I relate to it as stuff, as generic objects. It's the same stuff I see every day, boring. I get habituated to it. I gloss over it. I forget what that stuff means.
But if I get curious about it, the details come back:
- The copy of The Children of Hurin, why is that there? I got it because of that excellent review I read comparing it to Name of the Wind, a book where I really liked the magic system and "kind of" liked the book overall. The review said unlike Name of the Wind, Children of Hurin tried to emulate a premodern mindset and not only that, it was written in this poetic style. And I keep it because I really like the aesthetic and the feeling of the prose and I want to get back to it someday.
- That Analog magazine back issue a friend of mine gave me, because he had lots of them from a bulk buy and knew I was reading scifi short story magazines to get a sense of where I might want to submit my work.
- This table, that couch, designers and factory workers and salespeople and a lot of others did a lot of work to bring these things into my life that serve me.
And with those details come appreciation and meaning automatically. I don't have to separately go looking for them — they just slot into place if I can find real curiosity about these things.
Of course, if I accept a pat answer, it doesn't work. If I accept some meaningless abstraction like, "because capitalism" or "oh, I got that a couple years ago," that's not good enough. I've got to get really curious about the purposes that hang around me — the achieved and the yet-to-be-completed. That's how curiosity functions to create meaning.