“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.”
“For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
“The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.”
“Even though worker capacity and motivation are destroyed when leaders choose power over productivity, it appears that bosses would rather be in control than have the organization work well.”
“I will say, for Wu-Tang, money wasn’t the motivation, it was artistic domination.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about meaning and motivation lately. In particular, what should be the primary focus of our attention—the meaning of our work and life or what motivates us to make the choices we make.
I’ve never really been sure, for example, if leaders are motivated by power and control or by productivity and performance.
And, I clearly don’t know if Wu Tang was motivated by money or by domination. To be honest, I’m not always sure about my own motivations as I search for meaning.
To help me get a better grasp on this issue I read four books through the lens of meaning and motivation. I suspected all of these books might provide deeper insights on the question, and I wasn’t disappointed. The four books were: American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabelle Allende, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, and This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel.
Before I share the reviews, however, let me define the terms and share some thoughts about what motivated me to write this post and what meaning I might be able to take from it. Here are the definitions.
Meaning is defined as the end, purpose, or significance of something.
Motivation is defined as the internal and external factors that stimulate desire and energy in people to make an effort to attain a goal.
Some thoughts.
I see this issue as different than the question of whether the end justifies the means.
In that case, both the ends and the means are fairly explicit. It’s not that difficult to weigh both and reach a “yes” or “no” conclusion.
With meaning and motivation, we need to evaluate significance as well as the psychological dynamics that causes a person to seek out a particular end or a specific purpose.
I believe it is important to question motivation, but I have learned to accept the fact that I can never really know what stimulates the desire or need to act. And who am I to evaluate what a significant purpose is for any given individual?
I think it’s always more fruitful to assume good intentions instead of assuming mal-intent at the beginning of new relationships—until evidence requires you to change your mind.
With those thoughts in mind, here are the reviews. I hope you will find meaning in all of them—independent of the authors’ motivations for writing them.
American Dirt has been criticized for its cultural appropriation as well as its poor syntax and stretched similes. Personally, I found the book very meaningful. It shined a bright light on the plight of immigrants trying to escape desperate and dangerous conditions at home in search of a better, safer life in another country.
The book covers a journey of 1,600 miles over 18 days from Aculpoco, Mexico to Tucson, Arizona. The story revolves around a mom, Lydia, and her son, Luca. They are running away from a ruthless cartel leader who is trying to kill them because Lydia’s husband wrote a damning expose about his heinous crimes. Cummins describes in captivating detail how migrants hop on treacherous freight trains in a desperate attempt to reach the border without being robbed, raped or ruined. She reveals the dangerous process of selecting a coyote to lead them across the border and avoid border patrols or vigilantes once they have crossed. Lydia and Luca accidently link up with and look out for two beautiful young sisters who have to endure the harrowing liability of their looks. Danger is always lurking at every turn.
To me, Cummins’ book paints a horrifying picture of the trauma migrants have to endure before and after they cross whatever border they are aiming to cross. I thought the book was very meaningful because it enabled me to have deeper empathy for the migrant and refugee experience. While the author never had to suffer the abuse and humiliations of being a migrant or refugee herself, she did spend five years doing the research to ensure that she was as accurate as she could be in presenting the facts. While some critics might say she appropriated other’s experiences in an opportunistic way, my sense was that her motives were fairly pure.
The point is that we will never really know. All we can evaluate fairly is whether or not the book provided meaningful insights into the migrant experience.
I have always been a huge Isabelle Allende fan, but I found her latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, to be one of the most fascinating of her 24 previous books.
This book starts in January of 1939, three and a half years after a devastating civil war in which Francisco Franco defeated Spain’s Republican army, clinching a dictatorship that would last for nearly a half-century and displacing hundreds of thousands of soldiers, activists and Republican supporters. Many fled into France only to find themselves behind barbed wire in concentration camps. In an attempt to rescue some of the migrants, Chilean diplomat and poet Pablo Neruda went to France and saved over 2,000 of the refugees by cramming as many people as he could onto a ship called the Winnipeg. In this book, Allende weaves together fact and fiction, history and memory, to produce one of the most meaningful books in her career.
The novel tells the story of a pair of exiles granted passage on the Winnipeg: Victor Dalmau, an auxiliary medic in the war, and Roser Bruguera, a young woman carrying the child of Victor’s brother Guillem who is missing in action. Even though Neruda was instructed not to select candidates who were political or intellectual, his compassion got the best of him. As a result of this unexpected blessing, Victor and Rosa were able to escape Spain and France only to find themselves in the middle of the Pinochet overthrow (aided by the CIA) of the socialist government. Thus, they had to migrate again—this time to Venezuela—where they waited out the dictatorship in Chile.
To me, this book provided a fascinating and meaningful account of the Spanish Civil War, the Chilean coup, and life in Venezuela. What motivated Allende to write it? I have no idea. Some might say she was trying to capitalize on her name and association with the Allende government, and some might say she was moved by Neruda’s courage and passion in arranging for the safe passage of 2,000 people who probably would have died without his intervention. Since I’m a big fan of Isabelle Allende, I choose to believe the latter.
Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid, explores the dynamics between an upper-class, white couple and the person of color whom they hire to help with domestic chores.
This book begins in 2015. In the opening chapter, Emira, the black baby-sitter for the white Chamberlain family, is accosted in the freezer aisle of an upscale Philadelphia supermarket by a security guard accusing her of kidnapping Briar, the toddler daughter. The situation is defused only by the arrival of Briar’s dad. This scene is merely a preamble for the main narrative about how two white people end up using their closeness to Emira as a signifier of their progressiveness.
In a parallel story, Emira ends up dating Kelley, a handsome white guy who caught the episode on his iPhone. It turns out that Kelley has an unresolved history with Briar’s mom. Back in high school, he dumped her, she never forgave him, and the memory of what happened convinces each one of the other’s exploitative attitude toward black people.
You can see the difficulty of finding the “truth of the matter” in all of these relationships.
Was the white mom feeling noble that she had a “close” relationship with her black Nanny? Or was she simply acting out her whole-hearted and inclusive values? Was Kelley trying to demonstrate his liberal values? Or was he genuinely attracted to and in love with Emira? I think it’s impossible to know what the real motives are. For me, the more useful questions are, 1) were all parties finding real meaning in the relationships, and 2) were their actions aligned with their stated purpose?
The novel This is How it Always Is unfolds in chronological order: Penn and Rosie date, fall in love, have five children, and then the last one (Claude) disrupts the expected order by declaring he is a girl (now Poppy). The parents find themselves on shaky and scary grounds trying to balance Poppy’s safety and happiness in a world where she might be bullied with her need to be herself. As Claude enters kindergarten, her friends are totally unfazed when she changes her name to Poppy and starts wearing dresses.
The biggest dilemma in the book is whether or not the family should keep Poppy’s real identity a secret. When they move to Seattle, they decide not to tell any of her friends she was born a boy. This tension electrifies the whole book. As she grows older, Poppy needs to navigate disruptive and dangerous situations.
By the end, Poppy and the whole family have to embrace her whole identity, not just the limited one they invented for the world. As it turns out, Laurie Frankel (the author) actually has a son who, in first grade, realized he was a girl. To me, Frankel’s experience lends credible and meaningful perspective on what it must be like to grow up being transgender and to be the parent of transgender child. What was her motivation for writing the book? I have no idea. I assume that her purpose was to provide kids and parents deeper insights for figuring out how to deal with sexual orientation and gender issues. A more cynical view was that she was trying to work out her own unresolved conflicts. I prefer the former. Assume good intentions.
So for me, the right questions to be asking when we are caught up in a meaning and motivation debate are:
1. What is the purpose of this action?
2. What meaning might I derive from exploring this further?
3. What’s the significance of this issue?
Trying to discern what internal and external factors might motivate any given action seems to me to be dangerous territory. Getting an accurate read on attribution of variance (how much of y behavior is a result of x motivation) is probably best left to behavioral scientists. Perhaps we need to dig a little deeper to find meaning and be a little more reluctant to assign motivation to a particular act.
So let’s work together to find meaning (Merton) in every moment of our lives (Frankl) with the purpose of better serving humanity (Tolstoy) so that, at the end of our lives we can feel at peace with the measure of our contributions in words and actions (Morrison). May it be so.
You are the man Ricky! Thank you my friend for sharing your intellect and interpretation of literature as a reflection of life, and our struggle to make a meaningful impact. I miss you buddy! RonnyDonny
What Ronny Donny said. :)