That question again.

"Becky - I want some advice on my future...."

A phone call abrupt in the midst of an evening meal, which is echoed by a letter on creamy thick paper and a facebook message in an account I rarely check. Three people with separate considerations on what direction they should go.

It's a question that is echoed in my own reading at present, "What Should I Do With My Life" and in Da Berg's reading of Satre and ponderings as to how to make photographs meaningful. Which in turn is really to ask how we give our lives meaning.

And it makes me wonder why it is that we're all searching for meaning - and where we're going to find that meaning?In our capitalist system, our Godless age - can we still make our lives significant? Or is learning to come to terms with our lack of significance, our 'ordinariness' the key to living lives that are fulfilling and satisfying?

Often it seems tempting to revert to those definite guaranteed 'feel good' causes; you know the Mother Theressa lifestyles - orphanages and aids homes, hospitals and women's shelters - "saving the world". These jobs are so steeped in the status of 'meaning' and 'significance' that they are like a get out clause to the question of meaning. To give one child a home, protect one woman from domestic violence, give food to one starving teenager is enough to feed our own desperate attempt to feel significant. Maybe it's the same reason I write a blog - a desperate desire to be witnessed, for it to matter that I live and breath. Writing something that can be seen and touched beyond and outside of myself is a physical manifestation of my existence, and that gives me significance. I am real and I impact the world because these ideas that unravel and interplay within my head exist in part outside of that head. Even more importantly - those ideas and a part of me will continue to exist once I die. A symbol of my absence and my presence.

Almost everyone I know toys with the idea of 'working in development' as a sure fire means of answering this question of meaning. But sometimes our reasons for doing it seem kind of misplaced.

"Becky - do you know of a women's shelter I could work for in Central America? - I'd really like to do something like that..."

or

"What about that friend of yours who was working for a refugee camp in Somalia - how did she get that?"

I toy with 'development work' alongside with them. I ask the same questions - and wonder at my motivations - a mixed up batch of desire for meaning and what I hope is a genuine anger over injustice? A sense of guilt over the money, the time, the effort that has been spent in creating the person I am - guilt that the sense of 'my potential' must be put somewhere useful - somewhere recognized as 'meaningful' and 'significant'? Is my insistence that the theatre company I'm working for is a "political" theatre company my way of overcoming my guilt over doing something because I love it - rather than because it adds to that magical value laden idea of 'saving the world'? Da Berg calls it my left over christian sense of duty.

But what does it mean for the multibillion business of aid? As it incorporates this generation of 'meaning' chasers? Does it matter that we're in it in part because it's far easier to give than it is to ask. We're in it - because to be asked to do something, to be told that we are needed is the most direct way of feeling significant that I know? Does it leave the emphasis in the wrong place? Does it prevent truly questioning our own place in spheres of injustice? Prevent asking real questions about why others need 'help'? Even prevent ourselves from seeing the 'help' that we ourselves need - the grand scheme of give and take that we all perpetuate? If humanitarian aid work requires disasters and human tragedy - Is there some nasty symbiotic relationship that makes us perpetuate a relationship of need? We look to those 'less fortunate' in order to enjoy that sense of being meaningful, significant, needy and worthy? Soaked up with our own sense of goodness it doesn't really matter that the organization we're working for might perpetuate the injustice? Might ruin the local economy by overloading the local market? Might build a culture of reliance? Or that we might simply be better suited to working in a different field.

If we are subjective beings - who through the process of remembering construct the significance of our memories and create our own truth, then we are responsible for the creation of our own 'meaning'. To accept this, is to set ourselves free from what 'the world' considers significant or meaningful - it cuts out the quick fix route to meaning. Living a mother Theressa lifestyle isn't enough anymore. But so too - it might make us realize that we can be significant and meaningful without needing to fly to deepest Africa to raise orphans on the back of that enormous garage sale of all our worldly possessions. It asks us to examine all of our motivations carefully, but it also asks us to examine the actions we are taking more critically. Gradually I think this is already beginning to happen within the world of development. It's not enough to 'want to help' anymore - skills and training are needed, there are buzz words like local capacity building and sustainability. The discipline's critique must be matched by our individual ability to assess our impact, our motivation and the meaning of our actions and our lives. It's not a get out clause that hands us 'meaning' and 'significance' on a plate, ready to be eaten slowly at our own self satisfied pace.

So it's why I sigh just a little when people ask about future advice. In part because it's laughable that anyone should ask me. Their question reminds me of my own identical question, and makes me wonder to ask 'me too...any pointers?". And in part because often it seems a search for meaning is what they're really asking about.

It's our generation's challenge of religion and existence. A career is no longer simply a means of keeping body and soul together - it's expectation inflated to the grand level of making us truer to ourselves - finding our secular God. Right now, rather like those who have written to me of late, I'm a meaning chaser who is not sure how to answer the challenge of making life significant.