A Meaningful Life
These young women are probably not questioning the meaning of their lives, on this day.
I remember being young and feeling a certain kind of despair. The work I was doing for a paycheck felt hollow. I kept thinking I’d missed some crucial fork in the road, that college was supposed to hand me a map to a meaningful life and somehow I’d walked right past it. I felt lost. Sometimes, I felt suicidal.
Decades later, my job isn’t any more “meaningful” in the cosmic sense. It provides for my family, and I’m grateful for that. I like the people I work with. But does the work itself matter in any way that lasts? It'd be easy to say "No," but I think the better answer is, "I can't know."
I’ve met physicians who were disasters as human beings, and I’ve met people with ordinary jobs who quietly made the world better. The truck driver who coached my little league team comes to mind. I ran into him twenty years later, and he was still kind, still steady, still himself.
Meanwhile, my grandfather was a pediatrician who became addicted to morphine, abandoned his three sons, and ran off with his nurse. Which one contributed more to the world?
I can’t know. Maybe my grandfather saved children’s lives and inspired future doctors. Maybe that truck driver later made a terrible mistake and hurt people. None of us get to see the full ledger of another person’s life. We can barely see our own.
What I can say is this: that truck driver mattered more to me than the pediatrician I was related to. Maybe that’s the only scale any of us get. The meaning of my life isn’t something I can fully understand. It’s determined by the people I’m connected to, over decades.
Meaning, ultimately, isn’t a job description. It’s relational. And it’s not mine to assign, not even to myself.