There are many ways of dealing with the challenges that come with being smart, and each challenge requires a different sort of response. One overarching response, however, is taking better care of meaning and engaging in value-based meaning-making. In the previous chapter, I provided several tips for making daily meaning. In this chapter, I want to continue our chat and describe how you can deal with meaning shifting on you.
Natural psychology begins with a splash of cold water by identifying meaning as primarily a subjective psychological experience. But it follows that icy start with the assertion that meaning is a regularly available psychological experience, as available as any other. And it continues with the notion that you can form a potent idea about meaning—your own definition of meaning, as it were, one that helps you make powerful decisions about life, including the decision to live life with pride. Meaning arises because it is natural for it to arise, and we do not need to pine for some other supposedly better or bigger meaning connected to wishful thinking about a more purposeful universe.
An adherent of natural psychology thinks in the following way: I sense that many things have the ability to provoke the psychological experience of meaning in me. One is pleasure. Another is achievement. Another is ego gratification. Another is just being. Another is acting in accordance with my values. And so on. As I think about this, I see that while I want and need the psychological experience of meaning, it also matters how I acquire it. I would prefer not to acquire it in ways that run counter to my values and that make me feel disappointed in myself. I am in the position of making the bold decision to create value-based goals and to chase value-based dreams—while at the same time allowing myself pleasure, ego gratification, and anything and everything else that produces the psychological experience of meaning.
This is a considerably more complicated self-chat than concluding, “I want a dance career,” “I believe in God,” or “I can attract whatever I want.” But it is a tremendously profitable chat that points a person in the direction of experiencing life as meaningful on his own terms. By speaking this way, a person can make smart predictions about what might feel meaningful to undertake, make sense of the tension between meaning and value, factor in idle pleasures and respites from meaning-making, calculate how much meaning he actually needs, and respond to the unremarkable truth that life has no single meaning with a robust “Yes, life is full of meanings!”
According to natural psychology, a person can act to change her circumstances if her circumstances provide her with too few opportunities for meaning and too few experiences of meaning. She can make sense of how her day feels and how her life feels and she can communicate with herself about meaning. She can reduce her reliance on big meanings by asserting that a mosaic of meaningful experiences that flow from her chosen idea of meaning and from her evaluation of life as worth something is meaning enough. She can reduce her defensiveness, increase her self-awareness, and change her habits of mind. Understanding that life is exactly and precisely this complicated, she can approach living intelligently rather than by dumbing it down.
By speaking honestly and clearly, an adherent of natural psychology can translate his value-driven impulses into concrete actions without second-guessing himself as to whether those actions have any ultimate value or whether they will make a real difference. Say, for example, that on a Tuesday it wells up in him to help feed certain hungry children. He does not have to make that the meaning of life because he understands that there is no such thing as the meaning of life. There are a multitude of life meanings—a multitude of psychological experiences of meaning—and he can invest a little of his human capital in his desire to help hungry children without having to invest everything.
In most traditional views, you need to know if what you are doing is considered higher than something else, in line with something else, or adherent to some sort of mandate, principle, or necessity. A follower of natural psychology understands that such worries are completely unnecessary. He knows that values compete, that values are contextual, that sometimes it is right to tell the truth and sometimes it is right to lie, that sometimes it is appropriate to sunbathe, and that sometimes it is appropriate to bear arms—that, in short, life is a puzzle made up of pieces that do not fit together perfectly and that can't fit together perfectly. He does not bother himself about some unreal ideal of perfection but rather asserts that he will put his personal puzzle together as sensibly, mindfully, and honorably as he can.
His self-chat about investing a little of personal capital in helping feed hungry children might sound like: “I understand that I can't be certain what effects my efforts will have. By the same token, I am convinced that if I feed those children over there, they will be less hungry. Now, I recognize that by feeding them and helping them survive, I may in fact be adding to the world's misery, because who knows if they will be good people, whether they will act in ways that increase or reduce goodness for others, and so on. That is, I understand that my feeding them is not a guarantee of anything with respect to increasing the amount of good in the world.
“I nevertheless feel like deciding that feeding hungry children, in the absence of powerful reasons not to do so, is a value I want to support. I do this with my eyes wide open with respect to life's absurdities and ambiguities. Because the argument I just presented to myself makes good sense to me, I believe that helping feed those children will provide me with the psychological experience of meaning. Even if it doesn't, however, I know that feeding those children aligns with my idea of what makes for a meaningful life. I'm predicting that it's going to feel meaningful, but even if it doesn't feel meaningful, I believe it is the right thing to do.”
Yes, this self-chat is full of ironies and doubts. But an adherent smiles at those doubts and ironies, knowing that they come with the territory. He is well aware that the psychological experience of meaning is never guaranteed. In the end, he may find himself mildly or even gravely disappointed that his efforts to feed those hungry children did not provide the experience he had hoped they would provide. But he isn't surprised at such an outcome, and that result doesn't make him second-guess his approach to life. He knows that he only made a guess; he opted for a value he wanted to support and played a hunch about how it would feel to support that value. If it turns out that he guessed wrong, so be it.
He also recognizes that the meaningfulness of feeding starving children can change in the blink of an eye, meaning it is primarily a psychological experience. He might learn that he has an incurable cancer and not have the psychological space to think about anything but his own demise. He might learn that those children are the offspring of people he despises and discover that the thought of feeding them no longer interests him. He may learn that the food he is trying to provide them with is being diverted and now find the very idea of being of help losing a lot of its luster. That isn't to say that he might not still want to help, but it is also the case that he might indeed stop wanting to help.
He also recognizes that he is a tricky creature who must double-check his motives to make sure that he is telling himself the truth. Is he operating according to a value in wanting to feed those hungry children, or is he attracted to their mother? We are such wily, defensive creatures that we rarely put our cards face up on the table or make ourselves vulnerable by exposing our actual thoughts and desires, even to ourselves. By embracing natural psychology, he becomes aware of this human penchant for rationalization and self-delusion, and he includes among his menu of values the value of self-honesty.
Might he sometimes fool himself into believing that something he merely desires secretly has value? Of course he might. Say he really wants a lot of sparkly lights all over the outside of his house for exactly the sorts of reasons that a child might, because they would be pretty. Might he concoct a value to justify his desire and assert that the neighborhood would be safer with more illumination or that the beauty of light is its own justification? Of course he might. But, as an adherent of natural psychology, he knows to wonder about his motives even as he strings up those thousand lights. In the end, we might see him do the sort of thing that a self-aware person regularly does: he might string up those lights, stand back, smile a wry grin of comprehension, and take many of those lights down.
Natural psychology adherents recognize that the psychological experience of meaning is provoked in all sorts of ways and by all sorts of small moments: by the look of a ruined wall they pass, by the interplay of light and shadow on the sidewalk, by passing sights as they drive, by snatches of music coming from an open window, by the taste of something, by the feel of something, by the look of something. They are moved to the experience of meaning by winning, by flirting, by fantasizing, by feeling that they are liked and appreciated. They are moved to the experience of meaning when a meaning drain ends: when they find employment after a long layoff, when they opt for recovery rather than addiction, when they stand up to a bully and watch him back down. Many experiences provoke the psychological experience of meaning.
An adherent of natural psychology recognizes that there are large meaning opportunities, meaning adventures, and meaning events like choosing a career, falling in love, manifesting potential, being of lifelong service, and so on. But she also understands that there are an infinite number of small meaning opportunities, meaning adventures, and meaning events as well, from making a personalized birthday card to seeing the sun reappear after a cloud passes by. Both small stimuli and big stimuli affect her experience of meaning. She fashions her idea of meaning from her experiences of meaning, she remembers to include the reality of this infinity of small events in her calculations, knowing that a given lost day may still be saved by virtue of nothing more dramatic than her catching sight of the last rays of sunlight.
An adherent of natural psychology knows that many challenges in the realm of meaning are coming. He understands that even though the sky is clear, a storm may be brewing. Therefore, he monitors his relationship to meaning in a daily way, not to find problems where none exist or to make trouble for himself but because he doesn't want to be blindsided by a meaning crisis. He learns how to be proactive in the realm of meaning. He learns how to think about, identify, and seize meaning opportunities and plug up meaning leaks. He monitors the idea of meaning that he has created and checks to make sure that he is not evaluating the meaningfulness of his life too harshly or too negatively. He does all of this in part to avoid the quiet growth of incipient meaning crises.
As he makes these calculations, evaluations, and decisions, he realizes that how he talks to himself makes a tremendous, even crucial, difference as to whether his efforts will bear fruit. Say he decides he might enjoy writing a novel that he's been contemplating writing. He guesses that writing it would feel meaningful, reasonable shorthand for “would evoke the psychological experience of meaning.” But what if as he writes his novel, he badgers himself every day with self-talk that undermines his efforts? What will that badgering do to his experience of meaning and his ability to continue making meaning?
Say that at the end of every writing stint, he reads what he's written and observes, as is likely there on the page in front of him, a very mixed bag of goodness and badness. He could choose to say, “Some excellent bits there!” or he could choose to say, “Wow, what a load of crap!” By saying the latter, he is draining meaning from the enterprise of writing and aiming himself in the direction of quitting. Quite likely, his novel will no longer feel meaningful to him after some weeks of such self-bashing. In natural psychology, we consider choosing self-talk that serves our meaning needs to be a pivotal choice that we are obliged to make.
Just as he chooses to employ language that supports his meaning efforts, he chooses to employ language that aligns with his life evaluations. Say he evaluates life as worth living and feels reasonably sanguine that his current path is value driven and replete with excellent meaning opportunities. He should then likewise know that on a dull, dreary day, one of those days that everyone must endure, it will not pay him to say to himself, “Wow, I must be entirely mistaken about meaning—life looks to be pretty darn empty and meaningless!” When meaning is absent for a bit, it makes no sense to overthrow your positive evaluations about life. That is too dramatic a reaction to an ordinary, completely predictable meaning occurrence.
What if you can't help but judge life negatively? What if yesterday felt awful, today feels awful, and tomorrow is likely to feel awful too? What if you are poverty stricken, coughing up blood, incarcerated, alone, under siege, helpless, and hopeless? How absurd is it to ask you to make meaning and choose the meanings of your life? Don't you need medicine, money, and a friend more than some hard-nosed philosophy? Aren't you better off with a romantic movie, a pitcher of beer, and a dream of heaven rather than a demanding, soul-searching regimen? Doesn't natural psychology make little or no sense in your circumstances?
Actually, it may still make perfect sense. Natural psychology may in fact serve a person in these dire circumstances as well as or better than any other philosophy or religion does, given that it provides concrete strategies for increasing the experience of meaning and advocates actions of the sort that might make life more pleasant and more meaningful. It may be the case that someone who has a hard life is exactly the sort of person who would benefit from a philosophy that respects the hardness of reality and that proposes solutions, especially if that person is smart enough to understand the alternatives.
That isn't to say that there won't be days when all of us need meaning to amount to more than this, to something more profound and important, to something that better soothes us and helps us forget that we are bound to suffer and that we will cease to be. The natural psychological view does not controvert the facts of existence, and there will be days—many days—when even the staunchest heart wishes that it could. We boldly stare at the facts of existence—and on some days, each of us will blink. Adherents of natural psychology know that days like that are coming.
Rather than conceptualizing meaning as a lost object or as a reward for aligning with the universe, we see that it is something evoked in us by all manner of stimuli and that providing ourselves with those stimuli is a way—not a sure way but a good way—to experience life as meaningful. We choose those stimuli: dating, if intimacy provokes meaning; a slow walk across town, if the look of our town provokes meaning; a day of effort, if effort provokes meaning; watching a documentary film, if its subject provokes meaning; embarking on a bold adventure, if bold adventures provoke meaning; engaging in a value-based action, if value-based action provokes meaning. We do this even as the actual meaningfulness of a given belief, action, or activity shifts: we dance on, dealing with those inevitable shifts in meaning.
An adherent of natural psychology arrives at her ideas about meaning: she articulates what sort of thing she thinks meaning is, how it's influenced, how it's acquired, and what it isn't. She knows that she might experience meaning by spending the day in nature, but she also knows that she might not, since neither the idea of nature nor a given glen are meaningful in and of themselves. She knows this about meaning, and she isn't floored when a day in nature that she hoped would prove meaningful leaves her cold. He accepts that there are no unfiltered human experiences, no absolute meanings, and no guarantees.
First and foremost, she recognizes that life has no single or ultimate meaning. Life only has human meanings of the following sort: psychological experiences of meaning, fleeting moments of meaning, best guesses about meaning, constructed ideas about meaning, personal evaluations about the meaningfulness of life, and so on. This may strike her as terrible news or as wonderful news, but in either case, she is smart enough to know that it is the truth. She accepts this truth, embraces it, and makes considered choices in the realm of meaning—so as to give herself the best possible chance of crafting a life that feels authentic.