Reaching Beyond The Trivial: A Quest For Meaning In A Bullshit-Filled World

MD Luna

A year ago today, I released an essay titled ‘The Good Life’ Is NOT The Four-Hour Work Week. The essay preaches about how happiness—true happiness—is derived, not from fame, money or luxury, but from spending one’s time doing meaningful work. True happiness comes from cultivating a sense of Life Purpose.

The main criticism I received on the essay was that it failed to address the systemic causes of the, as Jon Vervaeke calls it, ‘meaning crisis’. My readers seemed to agree on the notion that the problem is not that us young folk cannot find our purpose because we are too busy pursuing fame, money and luxury. From their perspective, the problem lies in the forty-hour work week; for, if we are to spend at least a third of our lives working, and another third sleeping (ideally), then how are we supposed to find and realize our purpose in the limited time that is leftover?

Upon reading these criticisms, my heart sank. As a writer who currently makes bread by working in the beauty industry, this really is the fight I am up against: Because ‘time is money’, I have a limited amount of time to tell all the stories I want to tell, and a limited amount of time to communicate all the ideas I dub meaningful.

Through all my writing—from my fictional works such as The Sun and Moon Saga to essays like this one—my intention is to help the reader find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world, in a world filled with more and more bullshit each and every day. But is capitalism solely to blame for our meaning crisis?

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The Tale of Holly the Christmas Elf

MD Luna

There is an elf named Holly. Like most elves, Holly has long pointy ears. But, unlike most elves, for much of her life, Holly had the honour of working for Santa Claus.

Yes, Holly is a Christmas elf—and, because she is a Christmas elf, she has vibrant red hair, and her face is laden with freckles. She is also kind-hearted, of generous spirit, and a very hard worker.

For many years, Holly toiled away for jolly old Saint Nicholas. Centuries, in fact. She started her position at the North Pole in year 1324, and she only just retired in 1954. Blimey! That’s six hundred and thirty years!

For the sake of her privacy and solitude, which Holly now truly enjoys, I have promised to keep the location of her retirement home secret. For the purposes of our story, all you really need to know is this: Holly moved into an old abandoned cottage in the middle of the woods, somewhere on the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Having spent so much of her life in the North Pole’s forever Winter, she had grown tired of seeing the snow year-round. Although she didn’t want to lose Winter altogether, she was craving some change, a turning of the Wheel. And here, in her woodland cottage, Holly could witness and appreciate each of the four seasons…

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The Splitting Fawn: ‘I hate me—don’t leave me!’

MD Luna

If you are familiar with my non-fiction work, then it is likely that you are aware of my struggle with borderline personality disorder. For those unfamiliar, borderline is my Achilles’ heel. When I was fifteen, I endured some trauma, and I believe it was this trauma that caused my BPD. In my essay, How Borderline Personality Disorder Manifests In Me, I wrote…

I am not sure if there is much to this scientifically, but I swear I remember the day the BPD emerged. I was walking to school (probably listening to Marilyn Manson). It was a beautiful Sunny Autumn day. But I felt somehow different. I still had not yet acknowledged that I was being raped and abused. However, I had become aware of just how worthless I was feeling. As of that day, the seed of the belief that I am unloveable had sprouted.”

BPD is a mental health disorder, specifically a personality disorder, rather than a mood disorder. While people with borderline can, and typically do, experience extreme mood swings, these mood swings are not the root of the disorder, the way they are with a mood disorder such as bipolar. Rather, quick-changing moods are a symptom of borderline.

Sufferers of borderline struggle, not with a chemical imbalance, but with their cognition. Their perception of both themselves and the world are easily distorted. Perhaps the most common symptom of borderline is an intense fear of abandonment—or at least this is the case in my personal struggle with BPD. Another is to lack a sense of self, to not know who you really are. But the symptom I want to focus on today is ‘splitting’.

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