Planetary Humility: Michael C. Patterson

Michael C. Patterson is a writer, educator, and podcaster who explores the art and science of successful aging, brain health, and mental management. He is the host and producer of the Flourish As You Age podcasts and newsletter.

It’s a cliché that the more we know, the more we realize how little we understand—but it’s true. I’ve spent my life trying to figure things out, especially the big questions, like: What’s the meaning of life?

I remember coming home from college and confessing this struggle to my mother. She looked at me and said, “The meaning of life? There is no meaning of life. It just is.” At the time, I thought she was brushing me off. Only later did I realize she was a philosopher in disguise.

Raised as an orthodox atheist, I never searched for meaning in religion. God, Christ, heaven—those seemed like comforting myths. So, I turned instead to science. Darwin’s theory of evolution offered a brilliant explanation for how life works, and Richard Dawkins’s idea of the selfish gene seemed to reveal the engine of survival and replication. Yet while these mechanisms explained how life functions, they said little about why it matters. Was our sole purpose simply to survive and reproduce?

I clung to science and shunned metaphysics. My stepfather, another staunch rationalist, scoffed at the word spirituality. “What does that even mean?” he’d ask. “Everyone defines it differently, so it means nothing.” I adopted his skepticism. I wasn’t religious, and I wasn’t going to fall for the fuzzy notion of being “spiritual but not religious.” Meaning, I believed, wasn’t something you felt—it was something you proved.

So, it startled me when, years later, I found myself becoming more… spiritual. I resisted the word at first. Another cliché: that people get more spiritual with age. Was I going soft in the head? In a sense, yes—softer toward mystery. With age, I developed a new kind of humility. Not just the humility of ignorance, but the humility of limits—the acceptance that some things are simply beyond knowing.

In the 1990s, neuroscience was exploding with discovery. I followed eagerly, convinced that mapping the mind would unlock the secret of existence. But the more we learned, the clearer it became that our brains—amazing as they are—are not built to reveal ultimate truth. They evolved to help us survive and reproduce, not to comprehend reality. We see only a sliver of the light spectrum, hear only a narrow range of sound, and notice only what keeps us alive. Consciousness, miraculous as it is, offers only the faintest glimpse of the universe we inhabit.

That realization is deeply humbling. We can’t comprehend the meaning of existence because we aren’t equipped to grasp it. My mother was right: there is no “meaning of life” in any grand, knowable sense. But that doesn’t make life meaningless. It invites a different kind of understanding—one grounded in wonder, not certainty.

When I read Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, I was struck by his claim that the deepest question isn’t the meaning of life but why there is something rather than nothing. We can’t answer it, yet here we are—living proof that existence exists. The fact that anything lives at all, that consciousness arose from stardust, is astonishing beyond measure.

And yet, human hubris persists. We behave as if we are the meaning of existence—as though the world exists to serve us. Our hunger to control and consume has pushed the planet’s balance to the brink. The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls for what she terms planetary humility: giving up the fantasy that humanity stands above creation and recognizing that we are woven into a living web of astonishing complexity. The task now is not to master the world but to be in right relationship with it—to care for it as kin.

That, to me, is the heart of intellectual humility: accepting that we don’t stand apart from existence, that cleverness is not wisdom. Human ingenuity, dazzling as it is, pales beside the quiet intelligence of living systems—the countless interlocking relationships that sustain balance and beauty on this planet. Meaning isn’t something we can solve like a puzzle; it emerges when we stop grasping for control and allow ourselves to belong.

I should have listened to my mother’s wisdom, but perhaps I was too young to grasp what she was telling me. Meaning isn’t hidden in the stars, in scripture, or in scientific research—it’s embedded in the living, in the caring, in the act of belonging to something infinitely larger than ourselves.