When sailors and surfers talk about ocean waves, they refer to Significant Waves. To understand this concept, think about floating out on the ocean amid the swells. Some waves are smaller, many are about the same, some are larger, and a few are big ones. Your attention will focus primarily on the larger waves and the big ones; those are “significant.” These are the waves that stand out above the ordinary, the ones that make us prepare for action. Surfers try to paddle into them, and sailors try to prevent them from rolling the boat.
A Hint at The Meaning of Life
I’ve previously suggested that a human life is like a wave, so I think there’s something in this idea of wave significance that hints at a definition of “meaning” for one’s life: uniqueness, salience, impact, memorability, and reproduction.
For example, the statement “Sailing means a lot to me” is rooted in the following observations that look like Significance. Sailing is different from shopping, eating, driving, typing, reading, or a thousand other things I do (uniqueness). I notice and am drawn to the slightest hint of sailboats, sailors, or sailing (salience). I remember a lot of experiences that happened when I was sailing (memorability). My thinking, skills, actions, priorities, and decisions in life outside of sailing have been shaped by my relationship with sailing (impact). And I love to introduce others to sailing (reproduction).
So, significance provides a useful working definition of meaning: something unusual that we notice and remember, something we respond to, something that changes us, and something we propagate.
We can each be to other people as sailing is to me: Significant. We inhabit a world of noise and chaos; that is the norm. When an inspiring soul emerges from the chaos, she recruits our attention, inspires our thoughts, develops our skills, and draws our energy into her arena. We notice and focus on this special moment in which ordered energy—signal in a sea of noise—somehow, improbably emerges in our world. We are affected by such people; they are significant. You can be, too.
If someone else feels that you are different from most people, that you are memorable, that you inspire them or help them, that they want to tell others about you, that they think about you, that they want to spend time with you because they expect something interesting to happen in your presence, or that they would like to emulate something about you or build upon something you have done, then you are significant to them. If someone’s life—their sense of self, their creativity, their strength, their happiness, their courage, their resilience, their imagination—is enlarged because of your life, that is the evidence of your significance. That is the meaning of your life.
The Medium of Your Wave
Imagine that the universe had for a moment a little more focus, organization, beauty, structure, inspiration, resonance, order, harmony, and signal because of you. That would make your life a rare and beautiful moment. Unfortunately, it would also be a fleeting moment, because entropy is tenacious. A lifetime is less than a tick in the clock of the universe, whose persistent chaos and entropy will eventually unravel your handiwork. So, there is only a short period of time in which the evidence of your existence will be perceptible above background noise. The critical question is how best to extend that period. I think the answer is other people.
Significant individuals tame a part of the chaos for the rest of us, reminding us that we no longer live in Hobbes’ everyone-for-himself chaotic state of nature but in a beautifully organized collaborative dance. Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Fleming’s penicillin, Bach’s cello suites, Einstein’s General and Special Relativity, Newton’s calculus, and MLK’s marches are all examples of remarkable departures from chaos, when heroic human creativity conjured order upon the world in ways that would inspire and energize and elevate and equip many generations. On a less glamorous level, drivers on the highway who make it just a little easier for the entering car to merge into the flow, a fellow sailor on the dock who offers a hand with lines, volunteers who help everyone navigate Election Day, the crossing guard who keeps a child safe on her walk to school, researchers who make their work readily accessible to others who want to build on it, co-workers undistracted by who gets credit for solving a big challenge, and the person who holds the door open for a fellow shopper whose hands are full are all significant individuals. All these people are significant by virtue of their effect on others.
To rise above background noise and achieve significance, your life must inspire, empower, and resonate with our Brothers and Sisters. They are the only way to postpone entropy’s eraser removing all evidence of your existence. If your life becomes significant to others—if they notice what you do, are attracted to it, inspired by it, derive energy from it, and combine their energy and creativity with it, such that the joint result propagates even further—then it is possible that some tiny part of you will be amplified and remixed and repeated across many human relays long after all of your direct works have returned to background noise.
Sartre was wrong: other people are not hell. Entropy is. Other people are the medium through which your wave of meaningfulness travels, and as such, they are your only hope, however improbable, for immortality.
