The Sea of Insignificance

One can say farewell to the question of the meaning of life. The question of whether one’s own life has had significance is not so easily dismissed. It is also the harder one.

I. Sense and reference

In 1892 the logician Gottlob Frege separated two words that mean the same thing in everyday German: Sinn and Bedeutung, usually rendered in English as sense and reference. The evening star and the morning star refer to the same celestial body, Venus. That is their reference. But they present it in different ways, once in the evening, once in the morning. That is their sense.

We borrow the distinction and shift it a little. Whoever asks about the meaning of their life looks upwards. They want to know what the whole thing is for, whether there is a plan, a mission, a goal. Whoever asks about the significance of their life has to look sideways, at other people. They want to know what has changed in others because they existed.

The first question can be done without. Many have done so without their lives becoming any poorer. The second cannot be switched off, not even in those who finished with the question of meaning long ago.

II. The last question

In 1963 the American psychiatrist Robert Butler described something that doctors had until then regarded as a sign of mental decline: old people tell stories about the past again and again. Butler interpreted it differently. It was, he said, a normal and necessary process, a kind of balance sheet, which he called the “life review”. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson had already in 1950 placed the last stage of life under the tension of “integrity versus despair”: either one can accept one’s own life as something that had to be the way it was, or one despairs that it is too late to lead another.

The Australian palliative care worker Bronnie Ware wrote down what the dying told her most often. Her book is an account of experience, not a study, but the list is revealing. At the top is the wish to have had the courage to live one’s own life and not the one others expected. Then, not to have worked so hard. And, to have stayed in touch with friends. No one regretted having acquired too little prestige. Almost everything the dying missed lay with other people.

III. How the sea forms

One might suppose that the sea of insignificance is simply the loneliness of old age. The figures say something else. According to the German government’s Loneliness Barometer, in 2021 around ten per cent of those over seventy-five felt lonely, compared with more than fourteen per cent of young adults between 18 and 29. Whoever is alone is not necessarily insignificant, and whoever is insignificant can be surrounded by people. One can receive visitors every day in a care home and still know that nobody expects anything of one.

The sea forms differently. Our society measures significance by usefulness: by paid work, by income, by consumption. Whoever works has a position, a business card, a telephone that rings. The day after the farewell party it no longer rings. Retirement is therefore not only a discharge from work, but also from significance. The engineer, the head teacher, the master craftsman, the senior physician: none of them knows any less overnight than before. All the same, nobody asks them any more.

The megamachine has no use for people who no longer produce anything and consume little. It administers them, provides for them, cares for them. It does not need them. And what is not needed loses its significance in such an order, no matter what it carries within. The sea of insignificance is therefore not primarily a feeling. It is a distance: between what someone can do and the others who no longer call on it.

IV. Belated significance

The question “What significance did my life have?” presupposes that one can know the answer oneself. That is a mistake.

Gregor Mendel, abbot of a monastery in Brno, published his crossing experiments with peas in 1866. Nobody understood what he had found. He died in 1884. Only in 1900 did three botanists independently rediscover his work, and with it genetics began. Vivian Maier worked for decades as a nanny in Chicago and took photographs on the side. Her negatives were bought at an auction in 2007 from a lapsed storage locker. By the time her pictures became famous, she was dead. In 1983 Stanislav Petrov decided in a single night not to pass on a nuclear alarm. For fifteen years almost nobody knew about it; even in his own army he was considered not a hero but a man who had written an untidy report.

Significance often shows itself late, sometimes after death, often never. Whoever draws up a balance sheet at the end does so with incomplete books.

V. Invisible significance

Most significance never becomes known, because it does not reside in an invention or a work, but in another person. A teacher says a sentence to a fourteen-year-old that keeps him from going down the wrong path. Forty years later he remembers it, but he does not tell her, because he does not know where she lives. A neighbour checks every morning whether the blinds go up at the old woman’s house across the street. A nurse holds a hand through the night, and in the morning nobody remembers her name.

None of this appears in a balance sheet. None of it would be named by the person concerned if asked what their life had meant. And yet it is exactly what the dying asked about in Bronnie Ware’s account.

VI. What does not help

Because the question hurts, there is a market for it. Lists of things one must have experienced before dying. Self-optimisation courses for the third age. A legacy industry that writes biographies, sets up foundations, screws names onto park benches. Whoever pays enough gets a lecture hall named after them.

All this can be pleasant, but it confuses significance with visibility. Fame is a form of being known, not of significance. And whoever sells meaning works with the same components as the founder in our “Building Instructions for a Cult”: he looks for a lack and offers to fill it. Old people who sense that they are drifting in the sea are the ideal customers for this.

Brooding does not help either. The life review that Butler described is necessary, but it is an account of the past. The significance one lacks does not lie in the past.

VII. The way out

Significance does not arise from establishing it, but from being needed. Erikson called the penultimate stage of life “generativity”: the need to pass on what one can do and knows. It does not end at sixty.

There are places where this works. Since 1983 the Senior Experten Service in Bonn has placed retired specialists as volunteers with businesses, schools and clinics in Germany and abroad. A retired master baker can thus show a bakery in Africa how to heat an oven evenly, or a bookkeeper can put a cooperative’s accounts in order in South America. Multi-generation houses bring people under one roof who would otherwise never meet. None of this is spectacular. It is simply the opposite of administration: here someone is not provided for, but needed.

The other thing is an attitude we described in “The Little Apple Tree”. Whoever plants a tree whose apples they will never harvest does not ask what significance this has for them. They do something whose significance lies with others, and are content not to know it.

VIII. The thesis

The sea of insignificance is not a state within a person, but a distance from others. It forms from two sides: a society stops asking because it measures people only by their usefulness. And the individual stops offering because they are waiting to be asked.

That is why no path leads inwards out of this sea, only one outwards. The significance of a life cannot be put on a balance sheet. One can only make sure that it continues to have some for as long as it lasts. The answer to the last question is written by others, and mostly one never learns it. That is not a deficiency. It is the way significance works.

Further reading: The Little Apple Tree · Building Instructions for a Cult · Where Is Petrov? · Which Boomers? · The Machine Without God