meaning conference sketch, pt. 2

Having distinguished meaning and purpose, I want to know how are they related, and why do people tend to conflate them? They must be close, given how the terms are used mostly synonymously.

Here are a few ways they seem to be related. First, one's overall purpose could give one's life meaning. If my purpose is to raise children out of poverty or score more points in an NBA game than anyone has ever done before, those both can lead to patterns of actions in my life that are, themselves, meaningful precisely because they jointly lead to this purpose. Practicing free throws or making phone calls are not meaningful on their own. In fact, it might not even be clear how they are united in a single pattern--is going to a protest part of a pattern that includes making phone calls to state representatives and trying to raise money? What unites the actions into a pattern is the end that they're all aiming, ultimately, to achieve.

Some meaningful patterns are not unified by a goal, which doesn't make the ones that are unified by a goal any more or less important or valuable. Having lunch every week with a friend doesn't have a further goal, but it might be just as meaningful as practicing free throws every day or calling state representatives. (Not more valuable or more important to the world: none of this is a claim about what makes things important "to the universe," so to speak.)

Extending a meaningful pattern can be a goal. Having lunch every week with a friend might happen out of convenience, and the friends might not even realize that it's meaningful while it's happening, but they might realize it was meaningful if there were an interruption to the schedule and it took more effort to make the weekly lunches happen. Then the goal might be simply to extend the pattern, not in order to accomplish something further, but just to keep the pattern going. In that case, the purpose is to continue to make something meaningful.

I'm not sure when and why meaningful patterns are valuable, at least not as a general rule, but it's interesting to note that sometimes they're an achievement, and sometimes they're not. They're achievements when there's some effort to get them going or keep them up. It can be an achievement to preserve a friendship for decades, but maybe not if it's always a friendship of convenience, something that would quietly fade away if circumstances changed. I could discover that some pattern of my life is done, and it wasn't meaningful. Or I could make extending a pattern my life's work, in which case it would be meaningful.