I. Mean is one of these. Ideas that can be really difficult to put into concrete terms what's something means what the meaning of life is is really tough to kind of operationalize and it becomes one of these philosophical and abstract discussions about morality and ethics and all of these things that are really important in our lives but kind of escape our ability to kind of point to it and say this is this is meaning this is a this is the way we understand.
Things this is the way we attribute value and operationalize things. I I think about meaning and meaning making quite a bit because in my work a lot of a lot of science and a lot of knowledge I needs a framework it needs framing in order for us to understand what that new knowledge means and this is not about definitions this is not about defining something because defining something can be relatively easy, you can just look at different sources of definitions and then you can say well this definition is more.
Valid than this one or it's more generally accepted than that one but meaning is much more interpretive and it's much more subjective so trying to put meaning behind what is often very complex ideas complex issues, complex phenomena anything that you're exposed to in your daily life is almost by definition complex, there are no simple and easy ways of understanding things.
So meaning becomes an interpretation the the kind of some interpretation of all of our lives and experiences all the things that we do all of the people who we know so many becomes very interpretive and so what we understand what we understand as any given thing even is something that might be very very empirically founded so we could talk about the temperature of a room what it means to us is very very different it may be the same temperature for everyone in that room, but what it means can from person to person.
Can really change dramatically so we might be in the same temperature room and let's say it's 22 degrees Celsius I and for me that that would be very comfortable but for someone else it might be a little bit too warm for another person, it might be a little bit too cold so what the temperature of that room means to someone is as a very different thing than what it's what it's defined as how we define it we define it as a specific measurement of heat of temperature and what it means to an individual can be a very different thing, so this is just a basic.
Our argument that we have to think a little bit differently about what how we're how we're interpreting the world around us and understand that everyone's going to interpret things slightly different because they're frame of reference is slightly different there are interpretations of things are going to be slightly different and that doesn't mean that there aren't issues that we we have to have resolve and that we have to.
Kind of see in black and white terms but there are multitude of other issues that we really have to understand more about perspective and we have to really take a critical lens not only to our own view of that that reality of that meaning but to the view of others and take even an empathetic lens to the view of others, it's really important that we stop thinking just in terms of what this means to me, but what does it mean to us what does it mean to our society or the world that we live in?
