I am neither a subscriber nor a regular reader of Vanity Fair magazine, but its July 2007 issue on Africa and the various initiatives being undertaken to ameliorate the continent’s longstanding problems caught my attention. While paging through the issue, I came across an ad for the (RED) business model designed to create awareness and a sustainable flow of money from the private sector into the Global Fund, to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. The first page of the multi-page ad presented this simple, yet provocative statement: “MEANING IS THE NEW LUXURY.”
I would posit that the statement generally rings true for my generation, the Baby Boomers, as many of us have engaged in, at times, prolific conspicuous consumption, experiencing the benefits of material things, but also their limits in terms of satisfying our deeper needs. I remember attending (and feeling out of place at!) a highly exclusive, over-the-top party at a lavish setting in tony Atherton, Calif. around the very peak of the dot-com boom. I remarked at the event that it was like a frat party on steroids! No expense was spared in putting it on, but for all its glitter and charm, there was a sense of emptiness about it, a lack of meaning. For today’s uber-rich, in economic terms, the actual marginal utility gained from marginal consumption is virtually nil, if not negative. How many more homes or cars can Bill and Melinda Gates benefit from?
For the Millennial generation, I have gotten the sense—and some sociologists have written—that they are generally more meaning-driven. My Millennial daughter skipped an all-expense-paid trip to the Bahamas this past summer, opting instead to help (again) rebuild homes in sweltering New Orleans as part of the continuing post-Katrina relief work. Why did she make that choice? Quite simply, it was all about meaning. As she has often said to me, “Dad, I want to make a difference.”
Meaning is a core element of being human, so it’s not surprising that it is increasingly being sought. Arthur C. Brooks, professor of public administration at Syracuse University, writes in Who Really Cares: “In his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning the psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl defines meaning as the objective of human striving, and he explicitly links it to charity. Frankl believes that giving can be a source of meaning, a way to personal enlightenment: ‘Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself…self-actualization is only possible as a side-effect of self-transcendence.’”
Ken
