The Ethics
The Right to Meaning
Every person has a right to participate in the meaning of their own life.
Not a right to comfort.
Not a right to have every experience explained.
And not a right to be handed a purpose by someone else.
A right to meaning is something more basic.
It is the right to remain a participant
in the interpretation of your own life.
To know what is happening to you. To ask questions about the conditions shaping you. To have access to the information required to understand those conditions.
To be able to say, That is not what this means to me.
To revise a name that no longer fits. To challenge an interpretation imposed from outside. To remain in relationship with your own experience.
Meaning is not merely a story we tell ourselves after something happens.
It is part of how we orient.
Meaning tells us what matters. What belongs together. What threatens us. What we value. What we are responsible for. What is possible. Where we belong. What an experience asks of us.
Meaning develops through relationship: with other people, with language, with place, with memory, with the body, with culture, with history, with institutions, with the natural world, and with whatever we understand to be larger than ourselves.
Because meaning develops relationally, the conditions surrounding a human life matter.
A person who is repeatedly denied information cannot interpret their circumstances in the same way as someone who has access to it.
A child whose experience is continually contradicted may begin to distrust their own perception.
A patient whose body is discussed entirely through measurements may lose access to the felt experience those measurements are supposed to describe.
A worker whose life is represented entirely through productivity becomes legible to the institution while becoming increasingly invisible as a person.
A citizen can be reduced to a category.
A human being can become a file.
None of these representations are automatically wrong.
The problem begins when the representation becomes more authoritative than the person being represented.
When there is no meaningful path to answer back.
Meaning requires that reality remain capable
of answering the story being told about it.
That includes the reality of another person.
A diagnosis may reveal something important. It does not exhaust the person.
A statistic may reveal a pattern. It does not contain every life inside that pattern.
An identity can provide language, history, solidarity, and recognition. It cannot become a boundary beyond which a person is no longer permitted to change.
A model should help us perceive.
It should not make perception unnecessary.
This is why meaning is not simply private.
Meaning can become structural.
A belief about productivity becomes a workday.
A belief about illness becomes a medical system.
A belief about value becomes an economy.
A belief about danger becomes a law.
A belief repeated long enough can become part of the environment someone else is born into.
Meaning moves outward.
It becomes schedules, buildings, policies, rituals, technologies, expectations, roles, and institutions.
Then those structures begin shaping the meanings available to the people living inside them.
This is why the right to meaning cannot only mean the freedom to think whatever we want.
It requires conditions that preserve our capacity to participate.
None of this means every interpretation is equally accurate.
Reality places limits on meaning.
Evidence matters. Other people exist. Bodies exist. Consequences exist.
The world can contradict us.
A living meaning-making process does not protect us from contradiction.
It requires our ability to encounter it.
That may be one of the clearest differences between meaning and ideology.
Meaning remains in relationship with reality.
It can be revised. It can deepen. It can become more complex. It can survive the discovery that something we believed was incomplete.
When meaning can no longer receive correction, it begins to close.
An identity becomes enclosure.
A model becomes doctrine.
A system becomes unable to perceive the people it was built to serve.
The right to meaning is therefore also a right to remain in a living relationship with reality.
Not merely to be categorized. To answer.
Not merely to inherit the world as it has been explained to us. To encounter it ourselves.
We do not make meaning alone.
But neither should the meaning of a human life belong entirely to someone else.
Every person enters a world already full of names, stories, histories, structures, and expectations.
We cannot begin outside them.
But we can become increasingly able to see what we have inherited, decide what still holds, recognize what no longer does, and participate in what comes next.
Perhaps that is the right underneath many others:
the right not to become an object
inside someone else’s explanation of reality.
And alongside it:
the right to participate
in the meaning of your own life.
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Everything on this page is part of how I work — there’s no separate booking for it. We begin with an Orientation: ninety minutes, by video or in person, where we talk about what’s bringing you here and decide together whether there’s a useful way to continue.
Book an OrientationI’ll send a short note beforehand asking what you’re hoping for, so we can use the time well.