Creators of Meaning

We are essentially creators of stories. Builders of meaning!

Whether we realize it or not, we are, and have always been, artists.

The world and everything in it appear to us as a blank canvas upon which we project colors, scents, melodies, narratives, stories… And then we believe that all of it truly comes from reality, from people, from situations.

Unlike other animals, we rarely connect with direct experience, unmediated by our meaning-making structures.

We have an impressive and fully equipped atelier within our minds.

From there, we blend tactile sensations and scents with melodies, colors, landscapes, memories, desires, fears, and expectations. We create mixtures that we then use to paint people, jobs, and moments in our lives.

But we don’t only create and assign meaning to others; we also do so with ourselves. We invent characteristics, craft characters, and play those roles with varying degrees of stability or change.

If we maintain a role relatively consistently, we might believe that is who we are and call it “identity.” However, it remains another creation—a product of associating different pieces of information.

Lacan once proposed: “To love is to give what you do not have to someone who is not”—highlighting that neither we are nor possess what we believe we are or have, and neither is the other what we think they are. We relate from one construction to another construction.

This is nothing the Stoics or Buddhism hadn’t already pointed out a couple of millennia ago.

Cognitive psychotherapy embraced these ideas, reminding us that we don’t interact with real events but rather with the interpretations we form of them.

Behaviorism broke away from the concept of the mind and emphasized how the reality we experience is shaped by learned behaviors that are established as we interact with stimuli and observe the consequences in specific contexts.

We can go through life without ever becoming aware of our extraordinary talents as artists!

That love we paint with virtuous qualities, associate with songs, scents, and places, and for which we create poetic stories and elaborate dramas…

That little corner of the world that no one else cares about, but that we fill with meaning! We paint it with memories of childhood, amplify its brightness, reduce its noise, highlight its noble aspects, and render its less favorable ones invisible.

That person was never that person. That place was never that place. That moment was never that moment. We were never who we thought we were.

All of them were artistic constructions we made without knowing it. And we react to them as if they were concrete, tangible facts.

Being artists and craftsmen of our lives gives us IMMENSE power! Power we can use to create drama and catastrophe or to write a story worth living and later remembering.

Even death is seen by many as the ultimate terror, while others view it as an opportunity for transcendence or a heroic finale.

In the end, as humans, we will always create relationships, associations, and stories. We cannot access an ultimate reality. But we can learn to refine our artistic talents to write a better story!