If you are smart, you are likely to have more problems with meaning than the next person because of your ability to form abstract ideas, appreciate the existential nature of reality, appraise the workings of the universe, and so on. If, however, you come to understand the exact nature of meaning, meaning can become that much less of a problem for you.
You can finally stop pining for meaning to be something different from what it actually is, settle in to making value-based meaning on a daily basis, and let go of the need to seek meaning or impatiently wait for meaning to arrive. As a result, you become the arbiter of meaning in your life and, by so doing, reduce your distress and begin to solve many of the problems we've discussed so far.
Natural psychology holds the following views on meaning. Meaning is first of all and primarily a mere psychological experience. When our running subjective experience has a certain resonant quality to it—maybe it's a feeling of rightness, maybe it's an oceanic quality, maybe it's some integrative quality, maybe it's an experience of significance, maybe it's an experience of joy or pleasure—we have the sensation that life possesses meaning. This is the psychological experience of meaning. At such times, life feels like it matters, makes sense, is all right, and so on.
Because human beings aren't trained to notice these as experiences of meaning and because we don't possess a robust vocabulary of meaning, we often don't notice that we've just had the psychological experience of meaning. We might spend an afternoon walking the back streets of a French town wearing a smile because something has been stirred in us by the experience and nevertheless not credit that afternoon as a psychological experience of meaning. We had the experience, but we didn't quite know to label it as such or to credit it as such. For this reason, the majority of our psychological experiences of meaning pass by unnoticed and in a certain sense discredited.
This is a vital point to remember because when you engage in the process of evaluating life as meaningful enough or not meaningful enough, an idea that we'll get to in a moment, it is easy to evaluate life as a cheat and not meaningful enough because you haven't been noticing or crediting all those passing psychological experiences of meaning. Life is likely more meaningful than you thought it was—but you may not have noticed.
These psychological experiences of meaning can arise unbidden, or they may arise because we actively invited them. You might have business in that French town and have that psychological experience of meaning come to you unbidden, by virtue of you being there accidentally. Or you might enjoy that afternoon of meaning because you actively made the decision to travel there and because you had the suspicion, which proved accurate, that your time there would provoke the experience of meaning. That is, without any guarantees in place and strictly on a hunch, you booked that trip to France as a meaning-making effort and you were rewarded with the experience of meaning. In the first case, you had meaning arise unbidden; in the second case, you arrived there on purpose and, by having taken the necessary action to turn your intention into reality, you made meaning.
Next, we come to the idea of meaning as evaluation. Why might we not credit a given psychological experience as meaningful, even if it was? We might not credit the experience as meaningful because we may have already evaluated life itself as meaningless, as a cheat, a fraud, and so on. Measuring all of our experiences against that background negative evaluation, we may have gotten in the unfortunate habit of dismissing all our experiences as meaningless. To put it aphoristically, no experience can feel meaningful to a nihilist—that is, to someone who has already decided that life is meaningless.
Consider as an analogy the following. If, because you've experienced too much pain or been disappointed too many times, you decide that nothing in life can ever feel genuinely enjoyable, then you will instantly sour experiences that might have had the chance of being experienced as joyful. You will continually pour rain on your own parade. How we evaluate life matters because we experience life against the backdrop of our evaluation of life. If that evaluation is negative, nothing has much of a chance of feeling positive. Indeed, a lot of what gets labeled as the mental disorder of depression is in fact a persistent negative evaluation of life.
Why might you evaluate life that harshly? Maybe because you went unloved as a child, maybe because you have to spend a stupendous amount of your time just earning a living, maybe because you never met your soul mate, maybe because you see immorality rewarded and good deeds punished, maybe because you had dreams that never materialized and goals that you never met, maybe because you had just expected more out of life—more from it, more from others, more from yourself. Add on all the smart challenges we've discussed so far and I think you can see how easy and natural it is to evaluate life as a cheat—maybe easier and more natural than evaluating it as something worth the candle.
A great many people have evaluated life this way, without, however, realizing that they have made that decision and without realizing how many unfortunate consequences flow from that decision. One of the ways that an adherent of natural psychology makes meaning is by refusing to evaluate life negatively even though she has ample reasons to do so. Even though you have ample reasons to feel that life is a cheat, you must, for the sake of experiencing meaning, evaluate life as worth living. You must decide that life matters, that your efforts matter, and that you matter. Can you manage to evaluate life in a positive way even though you've been badly disappointed in the past and even though you find life taxing and unrewarding? That is a conversation that you must have with yourself. You must air this question and with luck come down on the side of deciding that life matters despite everything.
The psychological experience of meaning will not want to arise in you if you've made certain negative calculations about life or if you've decided that unless life looks like x—say, fair—or provides you with y—say, success—you will consider it a cheat. How charming will a sweet little cottage feel if you have in mind that you were supposed to live in a castle? How much meaning can you extract from a solid paragraph of writing if you had in mind that you were supposed to write great novels? Your own experiences of meaning may not amount to enough or serve you well enough if you evaluate life as requiring more than it has so far offered you or more than it can offer.
This is not the same as saying that an adherent of natural psychology learns to settle. Rather, he tries to think this all through, recognizing that he is dealing with his own personality, his own desires, his own habits of mind, and his own fears as he tries to thoughtfully make these calculations and evaluations. Because he knows that how he evaluates life colors how he perceives his experiences, that his evaluation provides him or fails to provide him with moment-by-moment motivation, and that his evaluation determines whether or not he will bother to live according to his principles, he attempts the odd work of thoughtfully deciding if he can possibly evaluate life more positively. Maybe, just maybe, he can find the way to do that—maybe, that is, he can come down on the side of affirming that life matters.
Because we human beings wall off knowledge that upsets us, we may well not know that we have evaluated life as pointless, a cheat, and a fraud. We may diligently farm our small farm or show up at the office every day and refuse to notice that we find our life absurd. It might be expected that we would get some clues from our behaviors—that we drink a lot, that we take antidepressants, that we fantasize about taking our revenge—but rather than drawing any logical conclusions from our behaviors, we continue going through the motions. A great many people, and especially our smartest, have come to negative conclusions and evaluations about life but, supposing that it can do them no good to notice or because they are too embarrassed to notice, deny that they have given life a thumbs-down.
An adherent of natural psychology believes that it does a person good to notice—great good—even if that noticing brings pain. She knows that if she has evaluated life as a cheat, as a fraud, as pointless and ridiculous, then she is bound to dismiss out-of-hand her psychological experiences of meaning as even less than mere experiences—she will dismiss them as the merest of experiences. She will even use them as evidence that life is a cheat, providing, as they do, proof that nothing but occasional experiences of a certain sort exist in what is otherwise a vast sea of meaninglessness.
If, on the other hand, you paint a different sort of picture for yourself, one in which you conceptualize life not as a cheat and a fraud but as a project, an obligation, an opportunity to make yourself proud, and even as an adventure, you will discover that you experience meaning more often and that those experiences of meaning begin to count. Furthermore, holding to this new, positive view, you realize that meaning can even begin to recede as an issue—that in order to make yourself proud, you are obliged to focus on manifesting your values and your principles and, when you do that, the problem of meaning begins to vanish.
Next is the matter of meaning as an idea. Human beings, but smart people especially, are able to think and to form abstract ideas. They not only can feel joy, but they can also conceptualize the idea of joy. Likewise, they not only can experience meaning, but they can also conceptualize the idea of meaning.
How you conceptualize meaning matters. If you hold that it is outside of yourself and must be tracked down, you have one idea of meaning. If, however, you conceive of it as I've been describing it—that it is a subjective experience, that it sometimes comes unbidden and that it can also be coaxed into existence, that when it is absent we must try to create it rather than search for it, and so on—then you are holding a very different idea of meaning. It should go without saying that what sort of idea you hold about meaning matters a great deal—in fact, it completely dictates how you will live your life. How you construe meaning dictates how you will live your life.
The way you construe meaning affects everything, from how much pleasure you get from ordinary things to how sincere an effort you make in manifesting your values and your principles. I think that the idea of meaning that I'm promoting, by being true-to-life and by returning meaning to your hands, will help you live more intentionally, more richly, and more happily. Be that as it may, you get to form your idea of meaning—and whatever you decide about meaning dictates how you will live.
Remember that life is not set up to meet our meaning needs. It only sporadically provides us with the experience of meaning. Yes, we can endeavor to make our meaning—and we should make that effort. But those efforts come with no guarantees, and it may happen that we may not be able to produce the experience of meaning often enough. Consider the following situation: You find yourself in a job that bores you, and sixty hours of your week are taken up with experiences that do not provide the experience of meaning. You also find yourself in a relationship that isn't working, and those hours with your mate also fail to provide the experience of meaning. A person in this situation is going to experience meaning as a tremendous challenge, since virtually all of her hours are taken up with experiences that do not provide much or any meaning.
Meaning is a challenge in a second sense as well. As soon as you so-to-speak burden an experience with the need that it feel meaningful, you likely reduce its ability to provide that psychological experience. Let's say that you begin writing a novel because it wells up in you to write that novel. You don't think about whether or not writing your novel is going to prove meaningful—you just start writing. That experience is entirely likely to provide you with the psychological experience of meaning. Say, however, that you are hungry for meaning and make the conscious decision that writing a novel will be one of your meaning-making activities and that you expect that working on it will provide you with the psychological experience of meaning. In this case, and ironically enough, you may be less likely to experience meaning. A self-conscious demand on an activity that it feel meaningful is likely to reduce its chances of actually feeling meaningful.
You want to make meaning, but you also do not want to burden your efforts with the demand that they feel meaningful. This is not a paradox but rather a matter of outlook. You can hope that something will provide you with the experience of joy without attaching to it the need that it provide you with that experience. You can hope that the vacation you take will prove enjoyable, maybe by virtue of all of the sunbathing you intend to do, without needing the vacation to prove enjoyable. Then if it happens to rain every day while you are there, you may still be able to enjoy the vacation because you weren't attached to all that sunbathing. Similarly, you can hope that a given meaning opportunity will produce the experience of meaning without attaching to needing it to produce that experience.
You can't force life to meaning, and you don't want to try to force life to meaning. Rather, you want to make conscious decisions about what efforts you think amount to value-based meaning-making efforts, and then you want to relax. This deep relaxation is a philosophical stance that translates as the following: “I choose to do this next thing because I see it as a thing of value; and who knows what will happen.” The meaning-making is in the choosing, the valuing, and the doing—and whatever happens, happens. By remembering that this is what making meaning involves, you will experience a sense of pride at having chosen, valued, and done something even if you don't happen to experience meaning from the activity itself.
Meaning is a tremendous challenge in precisely this sense—that while we use phrases like making meaning and creating meaning, what we are really advocating for is a certain sort of effort because we can't guarantee a certain sort of result. An adherent of natural psychology, calculating what she values and what matters to her, points herself in the direction of meaning, makes the requisite effort, and then relaxes. Natural psychology starts with the premise that human beings are built to experience virtually anything as meaningful but that we respect ourselves more when the meaning we experience arises because we have followed our values and principles rather than because meaning arose unbidden in us. That is, the principled meaning that we mindfully make is our most valuable meaning. There is a great deal in this view of meaning for a smart person to apply to help meet the challenges we've discussed so far.