Justin's Blog

A year since I completed walking El Camino de Santiago (Camino Frances), the following piece relates to my learnings from that experience.

Meaning

Around the time I turned 23 (2020), I found myself in the throws of a fairly classic existential crisis. Everything seemed meaningless. I was desperately trying to search for meaning. It was becoming increasingly clear to me, that I didn’t believe there was much inherent meaning to life. Gradually I was able to come to the realisation that the meaning of life was simply the meaning I assigned to it.

This core idea has stuck with me, and seems to continually re-emerge in new forms. I felt the film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, captured it perfectly. It asked why believe in this form of meaning over outright nihilism? The answer was that no matter how meaningless the world might seem from some rational perspective, we can never seperate ourselves from the experience we are having, in which things feel deeply meaningful. Even if that meaning exists only in the confines of our first-person experience, all we truly have is our first person experience, and by extension that meaning becomes very real. In some sense, that experience is the only thing that is real.

It also seems we should challenge some of the traditional discourse around ‘the meaning of life’. We often think of the meaning of life as being some terminal state we should reach, something to optimise for. Rather, I would suggest we are thinking about the question in the wrong way. What is the meaning of a door knob? It is not what the doorknob desires, but rather it is what the doorknob is meant to do. The question is why should the doorknob exist, as opposed to not exist? The meaning of a doorknob is to open doors, that is why it should exist as opposed to not exist. Similarly, I believe the meaning of my life is not something to pursue, but rather it is to answer the question, why should I exist as opposed to not exist.

By extension, we should seek to maximise meaning. I should want to have as much reason to exist as opposed to not exist. Every moment of my life, should be overflowing with meaning. It should be very clear to me in any given moment, why my life should exist as opposed to not exist. In some sense the meaning of life to me is to be able to continuously assign meaning to life. It is this line of thought that lead me to a big question:

How do we find meaning in suffering?

Suffering

In June 2023, I was tackling the above question. I had been solo-travelling the world for 6 months at this point. Loneliness had set in. I had no clear purpose. An experience that was supposed to be the ‘time of my life’ was riddled with suffering. I was feeling very depressed, very often. The invasive thought that was puncturing me at this point, was that it all felt so meaningless. I was supposed to be on this grand adventure, yet so often I was suffering, and it was incredibly unclear how this suffering was at all meaningful. I had all the time in the world to think about these questions (often it felt like too much time).

Conventional wisdom suggests that the meaning in suffering is about it’s instrumental value. The value of suffering is said to be from the growth and learning it inspires. This does not seem to be sufficient to me. If we are to think of suffering as a means to an end, then we are accepting that the suffering itself is meaningless in isolation, until it is realised in the form of growth and learning. I was not content this, the suffering should be meaningful in and of itself. Consider that eventually most of us grow old. We gradually decline and increasingly we will suffer. This will be our final experience, we will suffer and then we will cease to exist. If we are to accept suffering as meaningless unless growth is realised, we are conceding huge portions of our life to have been lived in vein.

If the meaning of life is to find meaning in every experience, then it seems incredibly important to find more pertinent meaning in suffering. But, at that point in time, my issue was that it was unclear how I could find meaning in my suffering.

Meaning in Suffering – The Camino

June 11 2023 I started walking the camino in Saint Jean Pied de Port, France. Ahead of me I had an 800km pilgrimage, that would take me 33 days. Day 1 we crossed the Pyrenees, the mountain range dividing France & Spain. I was carrying 15kg on my back, we walked 25km, 1km up and down of elevation change. It was brutal. Even more brutal, was waking up the morning of day 2 in Roncesvalles and knowing I had to walk again that day, and that I’d have to do this every day for the next month.

The first 5 days were coloured by exhaustion, the next 5 days by overuse injuries & the following 10 days by boredom & mental exhaustion. At one point, I had 12 blisters on my feet, one an inch wide on the ball of each foot. At that time, every step was agony. We were walking ~30km per day, I would sometimes spend hours fighting off tears.

Yet this experience was profound. To overcome the adversity was a challenge of a spiritual order. The meaningfulness, was not derived from the thought of what it would feel like to finally arrive in Santiago. It wasn’t about the thought of finishing each day. The meaning came from each individual moment of overcoming adversity. Each step was divine. The Camino created an environment in which I relished suffering. The suffering was self inflicted, and as a result I embraced it. Through embracing suffering, the suffering became transcendental.

The meaning in suffering comes from the opportunity to overcome it. This meaning isn’t just a consolation prize, it is quite possibly the highest form of meaning we can experience. To suffer is to be presented an opportunity. Suffering is an opportunity to overcome. If we keep our eyes open to this, we can find great meaning in even in our darkest moments.