Getting your life together

Is the problem for people today not that life seems to have too little meaning but rather too much?

This is a point I heard raised recently by Dr Jonathan Rowson of the RSA's Social Brain Project on one of their podcasts.

What I think he meant is that the real challenge for people today, especially young people growing up, is finding an inner sense of unity. We live in an increasingly complex and fractured world, in which old certainties of who we are and our place in society have all but disappeared.

We are expected to form our own identities, to be whoever we want to be. Yet with so many competing demands, it's not clear exactly what that identity should be.

We feel like we should be all kind of people - the breadwinner, the friend, the family (wo)man, the socially aware, the creative, the man or woman. As each of these roles is increasingly defined, the expectations we place on ourselves increases. We are pulled in different directions at once. No wonder we have a sense of multiple selves.

The big challenge for our times then is maybe not to find meaning to our lives but to find one meaning that can run across these different aspects of our lives.

Gives the phrase 'get your life together' a whole new light.