There’s something overwhelming about searching for the meaning behind humanity when the answer could be different for everyone and evolve thousands of times over a lifetime. Really, the only limitations to an individual’s answer are the creativity and thoughtfulness behind their search. Like most things in life, you’ll miss what you’re not looking for almost 100% of the time. Then, where is a sensible place to start searching for meaning beyond having a pulse and experiencing things through five senses?

There’s actually one very natural starting point. Humans do a surprisingly solid job at taking stock of every meaningful moment by storing memories. Whenever we have an experience that’s above average in terms of meaning, the conscious and subconscious mind work together to ensure a memory gets created and set in place for long-term storage. In the past, when humans were far less sophisticated, the process of creating memories for meaningful events was critical to our survival. You can imagine earlier humans eating the wrong type of berries and becoming life-threateningly ill. If they didn’t remember the berries, the same result, or perhaps worse, would be waiting for them instead of a tasty treat.

While survival has always been the primary focus for our memory system, it certainly hasn’t been the only focus. In fact, the more humans have been able to use technology to reduce the burden of basic survival, the more our memory system has been able to lock in on other meaningful events. So that leaves the question-- how does our mind decide which events are meaningful enough to encode into long-term memories?

Much of the science that explains memory speaks to the creation of memories by building and altering connections between neurons. As a guideline, the more connections there are to a new concept, the easier it is for that concept to take hold in memory. But that guideline is where the simplicity ends. The mechanics of memory get complicated quickly as you uncover ideas like memories being altered by the very process of recalling the memories. Such an idea is a helpful marker for the complexity of memories, but for this context, we’re focused on meaningful events.

One consistent attribute of meaningful events that get locked in as memories is the existence of emotional impact. Whenever we experience an above average amount of trauma or fulfillment, it creates an emotional response that dramatically increases the priority of our mind to create a lasting memory. Picture a student who gets hundreds of assignments back from being graded in a given year. The process of receiving a paper is the exact same across the hundreds of iterations, but they remember the couple times where they had a sinking feeling from getting a failing grade and a glorious feeling from getting the best grade in the class. In those cases, they literally remember receiving the paper into their hands because it was more meaningful.

The case of the student and papers is more straightforward, but it helps illustrate that meaning is often times driven by emotion. And it doesn’t take a particularly storied life to realize that the human emotional system is unexplainably complex. At the same time, we can’t find an emotional driver behind every meaningful event in our memory. Sometimes, we remember small things and don’t exactly know why, but in all of those cases, the labyrinth of complexity that is the human mind has a reason for deciding something is meaningful. Realistically, we might not even have the concepts to explain why our mind encodes meaning, but that doesn’t mean there’s not tremendous value in the patterns behind what gets stored or not.

So if we’re searching for meaning behind our existence, taking stock of our most noticeable memories is a good place to start. In the love, pain, glory, and countless other characteristics woven into the events of your memories, you’ll find plenty of lessons in meaning. From those lessons, there’s an opportunity to move forward in life with a refreshed clarity around the meaning of your human experience.