The Physics of Meaning: Stop “Finding” It. Start Working With It.

You don’t really “find” meaning. You move it. You concentrate it. 

It behaves less like a lost object and more like energy you’re constantly directing.

You already know this on some level.

You feel meaning spike around certain people or projects.

You feel it evaporate when your story about life stops matching your reality.

You feel the drag when you keep a job, a relationship, or a belief system that no longer fits, but you stay anyway.

We talk like meaning is hidden treasure.

In practice, it’s a dynamic process you’re embedded in: psychological, social, and linguistic.

Philosophers analyze what “meaning” is. Psychologists track how you make sense of events. Cognitive scientists and sensemaking theorists model how we turn messy situations into patterns we can act on.

Put together, these fields suggest a different frame: meaning isn’t discovered once;

Meaning is created, maintained, and transformed continuously by you, by your communities, and by your culture.

In this essay, I’ll use a metaphor: a “physics of meaning”. As a practical way to see how meaning:

1. gets created,
2. flows through your life and institutions, and
3. can be worked with deliberately instead of passively endured.

What Do We Mean by “Meaning,” Exactly?

Before we talk physics, we need to get clear on the thing we’re moving.

We use the word “meaning” to point to at least three layers:

1. Semantic meaning: what words, sentences, and symbols mean.
2. Psychological/existential meaning: what lives, events, and roles mean to you.
3. Social meaning: what communities agree something stands for.

Most philosophical work in analytic philosophy is focused on the first layer.

A “theory of meaning” usually means a theory of semantic content:

How sentences get truth conditions, how words refer to things, and how context changes interpretation.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes a useful split between:

1. Semantic theories: which systematically assign meanings or truth conditions to expressions.
2. Metasemantic theories: which explain why those semantic facts hold in the first place.

Psychological meaning research lives in the second layer. Park (2010) synthesizes this literature by distinguishing:

1. Global meaning: your overarching beliefs, goals, and sense of purpose.
2. Situational meaning: the meaning you assign to a specific event.

Meaning-making, here, is the process of reconciling those two, especially when something painful or unexpected happens (Park, 2010).

Social constructionism adds the third layer.

In Berger and Luckmann’s framework, summarized by Nickerson (2025), reality is “socially constructed” through interaction, language, and institutions.

Interaction, language, institution.

We externalize our meanings, they solidify into seemingly objective structures, and then we internalize them as “just the way things are” (Nickerson, 2025).

In this article, I’m focusing mainly on psychological and social meaning while pulling in semantic theory, where language helps explain how meaning is actually created and transmitted.

The Physics Metaphor: Meaning as Orienting “Energy”

So why bring physics into this at all?

Physics studies how matter and energy behave under constraints.

Energy is “the capacity to do work”.

In everyday life, meaning plays a similar role.

You can’t put it in a jar, but it organizes where your attention goes, what suffering you tolerate, and what you call “worth it.”

Meaning is orienting energy.

If we run with the metaphor (carefully), a few “laws” appear:

Meaning concentrates around value and vulnerability. 

The most meaningful situations are those where something you deeply value is at stake:

1. The relationship that could break.
2. The work that could fail publicly.
3. The illness that could change who you are.
4. The creative risk that might not land.

The points of greatest vulnerability, grief, illness, moral conflict, and radical change often become the most meaning dense moments, especially in hindsight.

These are the “high energy” regions of your life.

Meaning requires work. 

Energy does work when it moves. Meaning does work when you:

1. Reflect and recreate story events.
2. Sit with uncomfortable feelings instead of numbing them.
3. Have hard conversations.
4. Test new actions in the world.

Park’s review shows that people actively engage in meaning-making efforts after stressful events.

This includes searching for reasons, reframing, adjusting goals, or revising spiritual/philosophical frameworks.

You don’t just think your way into meaning; you work it into place.

Meaning dissipates without maintenance. 

Entropy hits your meaning systems, too.

Habituation, cynicism, and cultural drift all act like friction.

1. Practices that used to ground you become empty ritual.
2. Work that used to feel like a calling decays into mechanical life.
3. Belief systems that once oriented societies lose grip as contexts change.

At the societal level, Vervaeke’s “meaning crisis” frames this as a large scale problem:

Inherited religious and cultural frameworks no longer adequately orient many people, which leaves them fragmented and vulnerable to pseudo profound narratives and conspiracy like over patterning (Vervaeke, 2019).

The point is that meaning isn’t a one time achievement.

It needs maintenance to resist entropy (aka randomness of life).

Psychological Meaning Making

Crystal Park’s integrative review gives a psychological model for how meaning is created, especially under stress.

Global vs Situational Meaning

1. Global meaning: your big picture beliefs about how the world works (“people are basically good”, “the universe is random”, “everything happens for a reason”), your core values, and your overarching life goals.
2. Situational meaning: how you interpret a particular event in light of those beliefs and goals.

A major loss, illness, or shock happens. Automatically, you appraise it:

1. How bad is this?
2. Why is this happening?
3. What does this say about me, other people, the world, my future?

Then your system compares that appraisal to your global meaning.

Recently, I was reading Dan Koe’s newsletter. In one piece, he lays out his idea of an “idea museum” for capturing and organizing thoughts, notes, and inspiration.

He’s talking about content creation, but the pattern is bigger than that.

Your own database of ideas becomes the knowledge base your global meaning pulls from.

It’s the archive your mind consults when it asks, “What does this event mean, given everything I know and believe so far?”

Discrepancy, Meaning-Making Efforts, and “Meaning Made”

When there’s a discrepancy (the event doesn’t fit your global beliefs), you experience psychological “pressure”.

In our physics metaphor, that’s a gradient.

To resolve it, you engage in meaning-making efforts:

1. Searching for causal explanations (“Why did this happen?”).
2. Reframing (“This might be an opportunity for growth, not just a loss”).
3. Adjusting goals (“I can’t chase that path anymore; I need a new one”).
4. Revising or deepening belief systems to accommodate what happened.

Over time, these efforts result in meaning made:

Relatively stable updates to your beliefs, priorities, or narrative that reduce that internal gap.

Discrepancy is pressure; meaning-making is the work you do to rebalance the system.

Sensemaking: Meaning in Motion

Meaning-making research often zooms in on individuals confronting disruptions. 

Sensemaking theory zooms out to look at how individuals and groups build meaning in real time, under ambiguity, so they can act.

Turner et. al. (2023) review decades of sensemaking literature and propose a Multifaceted Sensemaking theory with nine stages and defining characteristics.

The details vary, but a common pattern looks like this:

1. A situation presents ambiguous signals.
2. You experience a gap between what you know and what you’d need to know to act confidently.
3. You and/or your group engage in a process: noticing, framing, bracketing, labeling, hypothesizing, and sharing interpretations.
4. You arrive at a “good enough” outcome to guide action and then update as feedback comes in.

Sensemaking is:

1. Ongoing: It never fully stops; the world keeps throwing new data at you.
2. Action oriented: You don’t wait for certainty; you construct enough meaning to move.
3. Socially shaped: Your sensemaking is influenced by others, by power structures, and by the tools and channels you use.

If Park’s model shows how meaning aligns beliefs and events, MSM theory shows the tempo and process of that alignment in messy, real-world contexts.

Sensemaking is the dynamic rule set for how meaning energy flows and reconfigures when a system is far from equilibrium.

Social Construction: The Infrastructure of Meaning

You never make meaning in a vacuum.

You make it in a social reality that’s already under construction.

Social constructionist theory says that what we call “reality” is built through interaction, language, and institutions.

Nickerson (2024), summarizing Berger and Luckmann, breaks this down into three processes:

1. Externalization: We project meanings into the world through language, behavior, rituals, artifacts, and institutions.
2. Objectivation: Over time, these projections harden into structures that appear objective: money, laws, nations, roles, “normal” careers.
3. Internalization: New members are socialized into this world and take its categories and norms as given.

Suddenly:

1. “Success” means specific status markers.
2. “Adulthood” means specific lifestyle milestones.
3. “Normality” means fitting into certain scripts.

It all feels natural, but it’s historically culturally specific.

Social constructionism exposes the “circuits” your meaning energy flows:

Media systems, legal frameworks, educational systems, interfaces, rituals, and the everyday language you swim in.

If you never examine those, your meaning-making defaults to low power mode:

You inherit meanings rather than deliberately constructing or revising them.

Language: The Compression Algorithm of Meaning

Semantic theories ask: how do expressions get content?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy frames semantic theories as attempts to systematically assign meanings or truth conditions to sentences and explain how complex meanings depend on simpler parts (Speaks, 2010).

This matters more than it seems for existential questions.

Language doesn’t just describe meaning.

It shapes the idea space you can move in:

1. If your culture has no word for a certain emotion, it’s harder to recognize, share, or organize around it.
2. If you only have one word for “work”, it’s harder to distinguish between craft, labor, meaningless work, and calling.
3. If your language frames time or influence in specific ways, that slips into your default sense of what’s possible.

There’s also the pragmatic layer:

Who’s speaking, to whom, where, under which norms.

The same sentence can mean radically different things depending on context and shared background.

Any long question quickly becomes a map of:

1. Encoding (intent + language),
2. The channel (text, voice, interface),
3. Decoding (the listener’s schemas, beliefs, state), and
4. The shared cultural scaffolding that lets the message land at all.

Language is a meaning infrastructure technology:

1. It concentrates meaning (stories, theories, memes).
2. It transmits meaning across distance and time.
3. It transforms meaning when we remix metaphors, narratives, and frames.

You can treat language as a mechanical tool… or as an interface for steering your own and other people’s meaning energy.

Narrative and Moral Imagination: Rewiring the Field

Meaning doesn’t show up as a spreadsheet.

It shows up as story.

In a blog essay on moral imagination and fiction, Eileen John (2020) explores how art can reshape how we see moral situations and ourselves.

She looks at attempts to “reclaim” songs like “Dixie” by altering their use and surrounding narratives, while noting that such attempts are ethically contested.

John frames moral imagination as:

1. The readiness to see situations afresh.
2. The willingness to notice your role as a “maker and sustainer” of meaning, not just a consumer of it.
3. The sensitivity to hypocrisy, self deception, and structural injustice.

Fiction and art aren’t just entertainment; they’re rehearsal spaces.

They let you experiment with value configurations and roles without wrecking your actual life.

Narrative is like a field configuration. It defines:

1. Who matters.
2. What counts as success or failure.
3. Which actions are available or forbidden.

Moral imagination is the power to reconfigure that field, sometimes against the inactivity of inherited stories.

This is where high power meaning work often begins:

Not with a grand answer to “What is the meaning of life?”…

But with a brutal look at the stories you’re currently running and whether they’re actually meaningful or just memetic.

The Will to Meaning: From Essence to Encounter

Viktor Frankl argued for a “will to meaning”:

A fundamental human drive to see life as significant, especially in suffering.

He suggested three main pathways:

1. Creative work (what you bring into the world),
2. Love and relationships,
3. The stance you take toward unavoidable suffering.

Finn Janning (2024) revisits this idea, arguing that meaning isn’t a hidden essence waiting to be discovered but something that arises in events and surfaces in encounters between bodies, ideas, and environments.

On this reading:

1. Meaning is emergent, not pre-packaged.
2. The “will to meaning” is less a hunt for a single answer and more a capacity to create and recreate values through experience, echoing Nietzsche’s take on the will to power as creative force.

Modern approaches often follow this line.

Instead of solving metaphysical questions once and for all, they help people:

1. Build workable life narratives,
2. Cultivate practices that make life experientially meaningful, and
3. Treat meaning as an ongoing practice, not a static solution.

You’re not failing because you don’t have “The Answer”.

You’re simply inside the iteration, not at the end of it.

Collective Meaning-Making: Rewiring Systems

Meaning also moves at collective scales; organizations, movements, cities, transitions.

Odii et. al. (2024) look at meaning-making in sustainability transformations through Personal Knowledge Theory.

This method elicits and crystallizes shared values in specific contexts.

The process involves:

1. Surfacing what participants already find meaningful,
2. Making implicit personal knowledge explicit,
3. Integrating new insights with existing understandings, and
4. Supporting shifts in practice and policy.

That’s like rewiring the circuitry of a system so that different attractors such as long term sustainability instead of short term profit, start to guide decisions.

Turner et al.’s MSM theory (2023) similarly emphasizes that sensemaking is often organizational and political:

1. Who gets to speak.
2. Which data counts as evidence.
3. What stories leadership endorses or suppresses.

Collective meaning-making is where individual meaning work meets structures.

If you ignore that, you risk treating systemic issues as purely personal failures.

The Meaning Crisis and the Rise of “Deepities”

John Vervaeke’s “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” series maps historical and cognitive roots of a contemporary crisis:

We’ve lost shared, reliable frameworks that connect us to relevance, truth, and value.

Two of his worries are especially relevant:

1. Pseudo profound statements (“deepities”): sentences that sound deep because they blur a trivial truth with a grand claim. They tickle the meaning circuits without actually doing work.
2. Pathological worldviews: overly integrated but low credibility worldviews (like certain conspiracy theories) that offer “too much” pattern, vs. highly credible but existentially flat outlooks that don’t help people live.

In “physics terms,” both are unstable configurations of meaning energy:

1. Too coherent in the wrong way (closed, paranoid, unfalsifiable).
2. Too fragmented to orient a life (true but hollow).

This is where meaning-making becomes an ethical practice:

1. Not all meanings are equally responsible.
2. You’re accountable for whether the patterns you construct are both plausible, for you and others.

If your current meaning system makes you chronically miserable, or isolated, it might be coherent… but not worth keeping.

Practicing the Physics of Meaning: A Four Step “Meaning Work” Loop

So what do you do with all this?

If meaning behaves like energy, your job isn’t to “find” it once and relax.

Your job is to work with it deliberately.

Here’s a simple four step loop, adapted from Park’s discrepancy model, sensemaking theory, and social constructionist insights:

Step 1: Locate the discrepancy.

Ask: Where does my life feel meaningless, misaligned, or confusing right now?

1. A job that drains you.
2. A relationship that feels wrong.
3. A project that used to matter but now feels hollow.

Name the gap: how things are vs. how they “should be” according to your global meaning (values, hopes, assumptions).

This is your pressure gradient.

Step 2: Name the meanings at stake.

Split the problem into two columns:

1. Situational meaning: What does this currently mean to me? (e.g., “This job means I sold out”, “This breakup means I’m unlovable”).
2. Global meaning: What do I believe and value here? (e.g., autonomy, contribution, love, honesty, growth).

You can do this via journaling, talking with someone you trust, or facilitated reflection.

The point is to externalize the field configuration so you can see it instead of being trapped inside it.

Step 3: Experiment with new stories and actions.

Now ask:

1. What alternative framings might be both honest and more life giving?
2. What small, concrete actions could embody my values differently in this situation?

This is where moral imagination (John, 2020) comes in:

1. You try on different narratives like prototypes.
2. You explore new roles you could play.
3. You challenge inherited scripts that don’t serve you.

Then you tie it to behavior:

Micro shifts in routine, conversations, boundaries, creative work.

Meaning changes when you build new patterns, not just new sentences.

Step 4: Test in relationship and context.

Don’t keep your new story sealed in your head. Bring it into:

1. Dialogue with others (friends, partners, communities, therapists, colleagues).
2. Contact with reality (actual attempts, experiments, iterations).

Ask:

1. Does this story hold up when I live it?
2. Does it increase resilience, connection, and ethical responsiveness?
3. Or does it collapse under real-world feedback?

Then you adjust. Again. And again.

That’s the loop:

Locate discrepancy → name meanings → experiment → test and revise

Not as a one time fix, but as a lifetime practice of meaning work.

Conclusion

If you take the physics of meaning seriously, you drop the fantasy of “finding” meaning as if it were buried under a rock.

You start to see meaning as an ongoing energetic practice of coordination between:

1. Your inner world (beliefs, values, narratives),
2. Other people (dialogue, conflict, collaboration),
3. And the broader systems you live inside (institutions, culture, technology).

Psychological research shows you’re constantly working to reconcile global meaning with disruptive events, and that how you do that impacts your wellbeing (Park, 2010).

Sensemaking theory shows how you and your groups build just enough meaning to move through ambiguity (Turner et al., 2023).

Social constructionism reminds you that the “realities” you inhabit are built and can be rebuilt (Nickerson, 2024).

Work on moral imagination and the meaning crisis warns that some meaning configurations are seductive but irresponsible (John, 2020; Vervaeke, 2019–2023).

The physics metaphor is just a too, but a useful one.

It helps you notice:

1. Where your meaning energy is currently concentrated.
2. Where it’s leaking into meaningless work, outdated identities, or empty rituals.
3. Where you might reconfigure it toward more truthful, engaging, and ethical ways of living.

The practical questions are simple, but not easy:

• What am I willing to work for because it is genuinely meaningful, not just socially rewarded?
• Which inherited meanings do I need to update, or drop?
• With whom am I co-creating the worlds we currently live in, and the ones we could live in next?

You’re not a passive receiver of meaning.

You’re a node in the physics of it.

Whether you like it or not, you’re already doing meaning work. The only real choice is how deliberately you do it.