Meaning and the Garden

Shadowlands #4

In the short story, The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster (1909) humans have built a giant, all powerful machine that solves all of their problems and takes care of every need. Kuno, a resident who lives inside the Machine, hates this. He does not want a sterilized existence, where everything is handed to you, and longs for a life of struggle and adventure outside the boundaries of the Machine. Eventually the Machine breaks down, but because it’s been centuries since its construction, no one alive knows how to fix it and trouble ensues.

In the film, The Edge, by Lee Tamahori (1997) a group of city-slickers crash land their plane into a remote lake in the Alaskan wilderness. Charles and his comrades struggle to build a fire, fail to catch any food, and are relentlessly pursued by a man-eating grizzly bear as they attempt the perilous and meandering journey back to civilization. By the end of their trek, three of them are dead and the traumatized Charles only survives due to a chance rescue by helicopter.

So in The Machine Stops, Kuno finds himself in a place that is too tame, too domesticated, too solved; he wants to bust out of civilization and escape into the wild. In The Edge, Charles finds himself somewhere too chaotic, too dangerous, too unsolvable; he wants to escape the wild and return to civilization.

However, they don’t want to switch places: Kuno doesn’t want to freeze to death or be eaten by a bear; Charles doesn’t want to confine himself to a small room to be coddled by machines. They both want something that’s not too ordered, and not too wild, but somewhere in between.

They want a garden.

A garden is a middle place, with both aspects of the untamed wild—brimming with life and potentiality—and aspects of the man-made machine—deconstructed and conformed to human productivity. Though a garden has vegetation and greenery, it is not an impassable jungle. Though a garden has walls and walkways and trellises, it is not a mechanized factory. It is a place where a human can creatively cultivate a harmony between wild nature and man-made order.

Because that harmony is what we tend to find meaningful.

Typically, the most desirable places to live have a great deal of natural beauty combined with a great deal of ordered civilization. People generally prefer not to live in the middle-of-nowhere and not to live in the center of urban activity, but something more like a park: man-made structures, conveniences, and affordances, shaded by trees, speckled with flowers, surrounded by abundant green space, mountains, and trails.

A brick wall covered with vines. A bedroom littered with potted plants.

That’s because neither the extreme of sterilized order nor the extreme of overwhelming chaos can house a living reservoir of meaning. Rather, a reservoir of meaning is borne out of the creative transmutation of one into the other. And you can see that creative transmutation—the successful channeling of chaos into order—in virtually all things that people find purposeful, invigorating, or fulfilling.

A good game of chess is not being demolished by a super computer (overwhelming chaos), and not wiping-the-floor with a toddler (boring order), but playing someone at your level (where creative transmutation is challenging, but doable).

A good music composition is somewhat predictable and somewhat unpredictable: otherwise the piece feels wooden and cheesy, or jarring and incoherent. A good film has a plot you can follow, but is novel and fresh: otherwise it’s cringe and boring, or too avant-garde and confusing. A good romantic relationship is both stable and adventurous: otherwise you swing wildly and break up constantly, or you get restless and become tempted to cheat.

Take, for example, the hobby of skiing. A route down the mountain that is too difficult—too chaotic you might say—is no fun; a route that is too easy—too tame, too solvable, too orderly—is also no fun. A skier wants a route that is somewhere in the middle: chaotic enough to be challenging and novel; ordered enough to not be constantly falling over, crashing into things, or injuring herself.

Because, specifically, the skier wants to actively participate in the transmutation of the little pockets of disorder thrown at her—the unpredictability, the varied terrain, the steepness—into the embodied order, which gets integrated into experience and skill. That’s what’s engaging and fun. That’s why she goes skiing in the first place.

She doesn’t want to fast forward to the part where she’s at the bottom of the mountain. She doesn’t want to fast forward to the part where she’s already mastered all the routes. She wants to actively swim through the untamed wilderness and subdue it into embodied order. If she repeats the route enough it becomes fully mapped—fully ordered—and loses its thrill over time. There’s no more chaos to transmute. So she moves onto a new route, which will present a new source of novelty, a new untapped reservoir of meaning.

You can see these dynamics of meaning at play over the course of people’s lifetimes, coming and going, crashing and receding like ocean waves. In the throes of vibrant adventure—where constant creative transmutation is required—meaning can rush into our lives, filling it with exhilaration and wonder. At other times we can be left barren—in a kind of meaning vacuum—when the act of creative transmutation between chaos and order isn’t available, or isn’t possible.

People often experience that momentary vacuum, for instance, when they retire. They’ve had decades of work—where they are constantly, creatively problem solving—and then, abruptly, that fertile wellspring of disorder disappears. They often phrase this as “being put out to pasture”: the feeling of being exited from a meaningful and purposeful vocation into a fully ordered emptiness, where nothing needs doing, where nothing requires creative transmutation.

The consolations of retirement money, of being on perpetual vacation, of not having to get up in the morning and go to work, are often not consolations at all. People don’t like having nothing to do, no problems to solve, no one in need of their experience and expertise. Because of this, many people will wisely seek out new wellsprings of novelty—situations where they can exercise their powers of creative transmutation—by volunteering, taking on a community project, writing a book, or caring for their grandchildren.

In a different example, an individual may be stuck in a job where creative transmutation is blocked: perhaps they are micromanaged to death and prohibited from engaging in any decision-making or problem-solving. Generally speaking, people hate this, and will usually take a serious pay cut if they can be allowed more autonomy, more freedom to explore their creative faculties. There’s a reason artists choose their path, despite the meager financial incentives.

So no one wants to live in a maximally chaotic war zone; no one wants to live inside an everything machine that solves all your problems for you; rather we want the active, ongoing mediation between disorder and order, the creative transmutation of the dangerous wilderness into the habitable living space. That existential in-between place, that liminal arena where we find meaning, is where we feel at home.

We want to live in a garden.

Our ancestors spent hundreds of thousands of years living in a kind of existential garden; a middle place between wild nature and human ingenuity. It happened during a geological period called the Pleistocene and lasted from about 2.5 million years ago to about 12,000 years ago. It looked like this:

Small tribes of hunter-gatherers, living in the wilderness, surviving together, creatively improvising against the forces of entropy, and collectively carrying a bio-cultural Torch. It wasn’t just ‘living in the woods’, it was being deeply embedded in an ancient, intergenerational, social, cultural, tribal matrix. It was very direct, very embodied participation in active torchbearing as an ongoing, all encompassing way of life.

It was the constant chaos of the natural world, both the cosmic provider of water, and meat, and shelter; and the cosmic destroyer, eating away at your life force with constant barrages of cold, starvation, and disease. But it was also the brilliant and beautiful adventure of transmuting those entropic forces into a habitable order, constant creative problem-solving, pathfinding, hunting, building, mythologizing, and ritualizing, directly and viscerally tied to the passing of the Torch. There were no problems of nihilism or boredom, no crises of meaning. There was just pure, deeply engaging, all-encompassing torchbearing, all the time.

For our purposes, we’ll call this historical state of human existence—both an external way of life and internal configuration of consciousness—the Garden.

Our time in the Garden forms the bulk of human history by a wide margin: hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering in tight-knit tribes of around fifty individuals, deeply intertwined in an intergenerational biocultural matrix of passing the Torch. By comparison, humans have been living in some form of civilization for less than 1% of that time.

Accordingly, all of our heuristics for successful torchbearing—all of these drives and behaviors by which we instinctually attempt to protect, promote, and propel the Torch—are designed and optimized for the Pleistocene. That’s where our distinctly human psychology and physiology were calibrated and finely tuned. Essentially, the mutations that were selected through the process of evolution—that were passed onto the next generation—were selected because they were advantageous to hunter-gatherer life in the Pleistocene.

Put another way, the things we find most meaningful and fulfilling and ‘real’ are re-creations of activities, behaviors, rituals, and mythologies that would have helped us pass the Torch 100,000 years ago. And it is when we’re actively participating in these prehistoric torchbearing patterns—in the way we did during the Pleistocene—that we feel like we are where we’re meant to be or doing what we’re meant to do.

Generally speaking, people find things like camping, hiking, swimming, mountain climbing, kayaking, fishing, hunting, and all around being-in-nature to be—not simply enjoyable—but spiritual and grounding. It’s not exactly the most addictive or pornographic of activities, but there is a sense when people walk through river valleys, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, that they are returning somewhere, that they are going home.

Nature is a gateway back to the Garden. And so we find it beautiful—usually in some inexplicable, unspoken way—because it’s where we belong.

Mix that with being in the presence of your closest people, actively exploring and creatively problem solving—like on a backpacking trip through Europe, or a school camping trip with your classmates—and you generate some of the most memorable experiences of your life.

These patterns of the Garden are being played with very directly with things like Burning Man: a collective of friends brave the entropic forces of a remote desert landscape, united by a common project of building a functional camp from scratch and exploring an unmapped, mysterious territory of novel artwork, parties, and performances, with relatively loose, autonomous jobs, all deeply intertwined with the heavy, very real project of collective survival. People who attend Burning Man often describe it as the most meaningful and impactful week of their lives—not because it easy and comfy and everything is taken care of for you—but specifically because it is hard, you suffer, you struggle, you’re pitted against the wild forces of nature and forced to creatively transmute those waves of chaos into a habitable order in collaboration with other people.

You see the Garden at play in our modern mythologies. What is Lord of the Rings, other than a band of tribesmen navigating a beautiful and mysterious natural world of forests and rivers and mountains, creatively transmuting an incoming army of chaos into habitable order of peace and prosperity? That transmutation is presided over by the ranger—master of the wilderness—Aragorn. He is the archetypal creative transmuter of chaos into order, otherwise known as the Hero. We’re compelled by the myth, we even long to live inside its universe, because it taps into the life we feel we were meant to live, a life in the Garden.

The Garden is on full display in our video games, where our most popular and possibly most addicting titles simulate the Pleistocene. Zelda, Elden Ring, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, and Skyrim quite literally simulate hunting and gathering: you hunt down monsters and gather treasure, which help you grow stronger, and you heroically do so to save your people, or save your kingdom, or save the world, which are all mythological stand-ins for saving the Torch.

What is considered a ‘healthy lifestyle’ usually involves a re-creation of our lifestyle in the Pleistocene in terms of nutrition and exercise. Meat, fruit, and veggies (the products of hunting and gathering) are considered healthier than processed carbs (the products of civilization). The amount of exercise humans ‘need’ is perfectly tailored towards how much they would have gotten, had they been on their feet all day hunting and gathering. The body is designed for this, expecting this, anticipating this. When we don’t follow these patterns, the body gets confused, its mechanisms get out-of-whack, and weird things start to happen like obesity, cancer, and depression.

In all these ways—body and mind—we are constantly yearning to return to the Garden, to return to a place of epic wilderness, where we creatively transmute the forces of the chaotic natural world into a habitable order, in direct collaboration with a community of tribemates we deeply trust and love, in service of a biocultural Torch.

So why don’t we return to the Garden? Why don’t people just leave the cities and walk off into the mountains to live more meaningful lives?

Well, they do. In Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction book, Into the Wild, Chris McCandless attempts to forgo modern civilization in favor of living a simple ascetic existence in nature. Then he dies from a combination of sickness and starvation in the Alaskan wilderness. Though he re-created much of the natural beauty, rugged lifestyle, and meaningful struggle of the Garden, he did not re-create the more important intergenerational, social, cultural matrix of torchbearing; he didn’t re-create the tribe.

Okay so why not try it with a tribe of people?

They do. Sometimes we refer to them as communes or cults, and they almost always fail. Some of the more prominent cases—the People’s Temple of Jonestown, or the Branch Davidians of Waco, or the Rajneeshees of Oregon—may not be the most positive or representative examples of an attempted tribal re-creation of the Garden, but they illustrate the unforeseen complications—and potential for disaster—that arise when doing so.

Again, the Garden is not just ‘living in the woods with my friends,’ it’s an inherited cultural matrix of survival knowledge, skills, customs, traditions, ethics, and rituals from an ancient lineage that evolved over the course of millions of years. And virtually all of that—the living, breathing cultural Torch of ancient peoples who conformed themselves to the rhythms of the prehistoric natural world—is lost. If you demolish a temple that took millions of years to build, you don’t reconstruct it over a few months—when it’s gone, it’s gone.

Lastly, even if you could hop in a time machine and return to the Pleistocene to rejoin tribal living, it would not resemble the fantasy paradise it may sound like I’m describing. Lord of the Rings is obviously not a depiction of the Pleistocene; it’s an archetypal maximization of our torchbearing heuristics; it’s akin to Garden pornography. Just like literal porn taps into our archetypal sex drive and exaggerates reality to tickle the senses, our fantasy media exaggerate what it may have been like to live in the past.

Life in the Pleistocene was extremely difficult; it was brutal; in a way that’s virtually impossible to imagine with our modern sensibilities. You were always cold. Food was scarce. Disease and infection were rampant. Nature was always trying to kill you. If you fell and broke your leg, you were dead. Women regularly died during childbirth. Only a fraction of children ever made it into adulthood. Life expectancy was less than 40 years.

So, yes, the Garden calls to us. Yes, all of our drives and instincts are finely tuned to that prehistoric environment. But just like all archetypal potentialities, we tend to mislead ourselves with visions of perfection. We convince ourselves of the best, most exaggerated image of a thing (camping and hunting in a river valley paradise with my best friends and family) while ignoring the harsh reality that comes with it (starvation, cold, disease, violence, and death).

Would you choose a meaningful existence that came packaged with struggle, suffering, and an early demise? Or a bland, unfulfilling one that came with comfort and security? Don’t be so sure you know the answer. People from the past didn’t have a choice—they simply lived it.

With the dawn of techne, humans began to irrevocably change their world, and this happened way faster than our torchbearing heuristics could keep up with. We are the same humans, genetically, that lived 100,000 years ago. We were born to heroically inhabit a natural world overflowing with novelty and beauty, but instead we find ourselves living within a neon machine, a node inside a tangle of wires, utterly dependent on its sprawl of pavement, pipes, and pixels.

The Garden was our home, but we left it for the Shadowlands, and we can never go back. The only way out is forwards.