Economies of Meaning

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire,
and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water,
and made the children of Israel drink of it.”
— Exodus 32:20

The sign arrived on a gray morning, slipped onto my desk beside a half-dead basil plant that hadn’t made it through the weekend. It began as a scrap from our community garden — a rough board, leftover paint, a message brushed on with the last of the bristles: Gardening is cheaper than therapy. It was humble, almost shy, the way handmade things often are. Later my daughter lifted it from the wall and brightened it, tracing the tomato and carrot with fresh color and letting the old lines show through. Now it hangs above my sink, carrying two sets of hands in its grain. It reminds me of repair’s first lesson: noticing what still carries life and choosing to tend it.

It would have been easy to replace the sign, but instead two people chose to care for it, first in the making, then in the renewing. It shows the slow work of recognizing what still has strength and offering it another chance. When I see it in the noon light, I remember that most things worth keeping follow the same rhythm: beginning, tending, renewal. We planted more than we harvested that year, but the soil didn’t hold it against us. It never does. It simply asks us to return and to stop pretending growth obeys our timetables.

Caring for that little sign taught me something I keep forgetting; what’s truly valuable is what asks to be kept in the light, not thrown away. The same is true far beyond a garden bed. We talk about inflation in terms of numbers and prices, but we rarely name the appetite that drives it. We say prices are rising, but what we mean is that we are still hungry. The official explanation for inflation is “too much money chasing too few goods.” The truer one is simpler: we’ve built a system that panics when it isn’t fed. Seventy percent of our economy depends on people buying things they don’t need, a structure upheld by longing, measured not in wisdom but in clicks. When spending slows, the prophets of progress sound the alarm: growth has stalled, markets tremble, and quarterly gods demand another sacrifice.

It’s a strange religion, this faith in appetite.

We stoop at self-checkouts and hope meaning will arrive in two-day shipping, filling our carts to fill the hollow that community once held. Yet meaning can’t be manufactured, and our kind of hunger can’t be cured by more. When I walked the rows and beds of that half-forgotten garden, I was struck by how different its logic was from the market: the soil didn’t panic when I paused. It waited. It held the memory of rain not yet fallen. It knew growth rises from rest as much as labor. The economy measures transaction; the earth measures transformation. Some of the truest profit appears only when the frenzy pauses. We’re no longer sold products—we’re sold the signals of transformation. A car poses as freedom, a phone as connection, a brand becomes a tribe. Consumer culture doesn’t cultivate change; it packages the feeling of having changed. What we once became, we now buy.

When my colleague and I began that small garden, there was no app for it. We faced stubborn ground, borrowed shovels, and a few seed packets found in a drawer. There were no followers to count or sponsors to thank, only a sense of belonging that asked for nothing but existence. Maybe that is why real community feels rare. It requires patience, not visibility. Across the small distance between two chairs, I witness what happens when meaning thins and management takes its place. We diagnose discomfort, prescribe distraction, and call it care, but the soul grows only through the kind of work that whispers, reminding you that you are capable of tending something real.

Some nights I find myself leaning into the glow of my phone the way people once leaned toward a fire, hoping for warmth or a sign that I’m not alone. The light never comforts; it only delays the quiet that might have healed me. Beneath all our buying and scrolling lives the same hunger — not greed, but fear — a fear of isolation that we try to outrun with movement, noise, and quick connection. We worship whatever answers the fastest. Every false god begins as a small attempt to soothe the ache of waiting, which is why the calf in the desert was born from absence, not malice. And every generation relearns the same truth: meaning grows through endurance, not speed.

While Moses was on the mountain, the people below grew restless. They melted their gold, those quiet tokens of comfort and memory, and shaped a god they could see. Their faith didn’t collapse from doubt but from discomfort; they simply could not endure the waiting. Every age reenacts that moment with new metals. We no longer melt jewelry. Instead, we melt our attention, scrolling and buying and upgrading until our anxiety cools into distraction. Our screens become the new golden calves, hammered from rare earth and precious ore, each one humming with the same ache that forged the idol in the desert: the longing for something bright and immediate to obey.

Moses made the Israelites drink the dust of their creation; we’ve been swallowing ours for decades. Mine runoff slips into rivers, and smoke from refineries rides the wind. We breathe it, wear it, and cradle it in our palms. We call it progress, yet it tastes exactly as it did in the wilderness: bitter, metallic, and holy in its warning. Both the calf and the soil offer the same lesson. The wrong worship poisons us, and repair begins only when we choose attention over spectacle.

Viktor Frankl’s life stands as the counter example, a reminder that whatever cannot be bought or built quickly is what endures.

Frankl was a young Jewish psychiatrist from Vienna, trained in the long shadow of Freud and Adler. Where Freud sought pleasure and Adler sought power, Frankl sought purpose. He called his approach “logotherapy,” or healing through meaning. When the Nazis came, Freud fled to London. Frankl stayed, hoping to protect his family and his patients. He was sent to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz, and lived to write about both. Freud chose escape; Frankl chose abiding. Both choices were human. Only one taught us how meaning survives. Frankl lost his parents, his wife, and the child she carried. Yet from that abyss he brought back what our age keeps forgetting: the soul can bear almost any suffering except suffering stripped of purpose.

He came to see that people fail not from pain but from meaninglessness. In the camps he watched men endure starvation and cold, yet collapse when they lost the reason to continue. Those who lost their why could not bear the how. Our culture mistakes ease for salvation and try to manage the ache of being human instead of honoring it. We treat silence as loneliness and waiting as failure, even though meaning grows in the very spaces we refuse to fill. When I returned to the garden, I thought of those camps – like Mount Sinai; they were places where endurance meant life.

By evening, the garden in my yard is mostly shadowy. The sign above the sink catches the last light, and for a moment everything hums: the weeds, the insects, even the silence. I kneel where the peppers once grew and press my hands into the cool soil. There is always that brief stillness before the work begins, a pause where the world seems to remember itself. Frankl called it the space between stimulus and response, the moment when meaning can take root if we remain present. Therapy begins there too, not in talk alone but in the willingness to touch the ground of one’s life and name honestly what is growing there.

Working close to the earth changes how you see yourself. Inside, there is a smaller, strange cathedral, not of stone but of ribs and breath, where silence hangs like incense in slanted beams of light. Down here, anger loses its currency. Discernment speaks last, and not always aloud. Nothing flattering survives the distance between breath and soil. You can shout into that chamber and hear nothing back, or you can kneel quietly and hear everything. The weeds loosen easily in the evening, their roots surrendering with a soft tear. It isn’t triumphed, but it feels like forgiveness. The garden doesn’t condemn neglect; it accepts return. Each pulled stem leaves a small, clean wound that will close by morning.

The sign still hangs above my sink; its paint fading where the sun lands hardest. The words almost merge with the grain: Gardening is cheaper than therapy. It always was. But the saying leaves out the truth Frankl spent a lifetime teaching: tending the self takes the same posture as tending the soil. Therapy is not a product. It is the long obedience of staying, of turning the earth inside us rather than fleeing it. Soil teaches what no system or slogan can: renewal begins on your knees, quiet knows more than noise, and mercy, like topsoil, waits patiently for us to remember what we forgot. The soil doesn’t ask for apologies. It only asks for a return.

Healing begins there. Not when we feel whole, but when we stop trying to earn the right to grow again.

Image Credit: Nikolai Astrup, “Spring night in the garden” (1909) via Wikimedia.