In this chapter, I'd like you to do some thinking and some writing. You can do the following exercises in your mind's eye, if you like, and making just that effort will prove beneficial. It would be even better, however, if you engaged with these exercises and wrote out your answers. My goal is to have you experience how the principles and practices of natural psychology can help you deal with the smart challenges we've been discussing. I hope you find your own answers enlightening!
To begin with, please describe what you see as the differences among the following three ideas:
Your goal, if you would like to live authentically, is to make sufficient meaning and also to have that meaning align with your values. A sunny day, a bit of tomfoolery—anything might provoke the experience of meaning. That unbidden meaning is of secondary importance to the meaning that you make your way, in alignment with your values and your life purposes. The phrase value-based meaning-making stands for your thoughtful judgments about how you want to provoke the psychological experience of meaning, not as an imperative to provoke those experiences at any cost.
Ah, but the effort to make value-based meaning is such a serious and challenging one! It is not at all simple or straightforward to choose to do the right thing when you want to do the impulsive thing. It is ever so hard to honor your values when your liberty or your ease is at stake. It is seriously challenging to escape from or transcend your formed personality, with its habitual demands and its repetitive thoughts. It's quite a project even to know what values to support in the real-life situations that tumble before us one after another without pause.
Explain in your own words what the concept of making value-based meaning represents and what it would take to implement this concept in your life.
What are you valuing? An ongoing practice of natural psychology is articulating your life purposes, your values, and your principles so you know what you intend to stand for and how you intend to live. By adopting the practice of regularly checking in on these three, you help point yourself in the direction of activities that you think will provoke value-based meaning.
Because of our ability to think, to form ideas, to evaluate, and so on, we find ourselves in the position of being able to come to conclusions about how we want to live our life and what actions we want to take in the service of those conclusions. We can decide that we want to uphold certain values, that we will endeavor to provoke meaning by upholding those values and not in other ways, that we can articulate and also alter and update our life purposes, and so on.
Take a little time to articulate your life purposes, your values, and your principles. Then consider (and write a bit) about the following: what actions have you taken in the service of your purposes, values, and principles?
Let's say you have a picture in mind of exactly how you want to live your life. Where could you keep that picture so you could refer to it and have it remind you of your intentions? You might begin by creating a small life purpose statement that you use to help remind you of your life purpose vision. But let's say that you lose touch with, or lose track of, your life purpose vision. What might you do to regain touch and get back on track?
Natural psychology takes as its starting point the reality of the human experience, the reality that we are not just acted upon, that we are not mechanical creatures who are programmed in a certain way and then play out our instructions. Rather, we are complicated creatures who experience life in a dynamic, interactive way. The best way to name this dynamism and this interactivity is psychological subjectivity.
Human life is a series of psychological experiences; a human being is a creature completely caught up in her own idiosyncratic, subjective, ever-changing personal reality. Given that this is our reality, how do you want to hold the fact that everything that is must be filtered through your psychological experience of life?
Limiting our self-awareness is our defensiveness. Self-awareness gives us a chance at apprehending what we are up to, but our defensiveness limits that self-awareness. Our self-awareness is limited, sometimes severely, by our need to protect ourselves from confusing, unpleasant, or painful realities. That defensiveness is a human need for self-protection.
That term doesn't mean something completely negative. You might have a defensive need to discount the risks involved in doing something that you believe is valuable to do—you defensively discount those risks so as to allow yourself to take those risks. Like self-awareness and psychological subjectivity, defensiveness is a rich, rounded concept full of the same complexity that we see everywhere in the human condition.
Take a few minutes to describe the nature of your defensiveness—how does defensiveness manifest itself in you?
A concept to add to the ideas of psychological subjectivity, self-awareness, and defensiveness is the concept of habits of mind. Since it is just too difficult to reinvent ourselves every split second, we human beings are built to repeat ourselves without giving our current situation a lot of thought.
Through some combination of inheritance and living that, in natural psychology, we call our formed personality, we arrive pretty early on at our particular ways of saying things and doing things, our reflexive reactions to situations, our sets of beliefs and opinions, our prejudices and biases, our anxiety levels and thresholds, and our ways of looking at the world.
Once we are formed, we are hard-pressed to make changes to those habits of mind. In the context of natural psychology, part of an individual's work is to begin to update his habits of mind so that they serve the person he currently intends to be. Because we settle early on in life into hardened habits of mind that, along with our defensiveness, limit our self-awareness, our experience of life is more mechanical than it might be if we were less defensive and more open in our thinking.
Please describe as best you can how you would like to update your habits of mind.
Natural psychology helps us understand that we can let go of our debilitating talk about the meaning of life and the purpose of life and can concentrate instead on creating a life that matches our vision of principled living.
We craft a smart, functional idea of meaning to deal with the fact that meaning is primarily a mere psychological experience, and we rally around our idea of meaning rather than pining for the experience of meaning. This is an amazing step forward for each individual and also a tremendous step forward for our civilization, since it is the value-based meaning-makers who do civilization's good work.
See if you can put into words your idea of meaning based on the concepts we've been chatting about. How do you want to hold the idea of meaning?
You have an original personality about which you will never really know enough, a formed personality that limits your freedom and increases your defensiveness, and an amount of available personality that is your current measure of freedom and self-awareness.
Discuss the idea of using your available personality in the service of value-based meaning-making in the context of this three-part personality model: unknowable original personality, limiting formed personality, and current available personality.
Feel in your body the difference between doing something versus investing meaning in something—that is, versus making a commitment because you believe that your choice is a value-based choice with the potential to make you feel proud of your efforts, that matches your idea of how life should be lived, and that may even provoke the psychological experience of meaning.
Describe in your own words what making a meaning investment signifies.
There is a difference between needing something to feel meaningful (or needing something to provoke the psychological experience of meaning) versus viewing something as a meaning opportunity because you have the hunch that it matches your vision of life and your idea of meaning.
Please describe what you see as the difference between needing something to feel meaningful versus looking at something as a meaning opportunity.
Let's say that something you are doing is in the service of meaning but doesn't feel all that meaningful (that is, doesn't manage to provoke the psychological experience of meaning). Describe how you want to be with this situation so you are able to do this necessary work even though you aren't getting the payoff of the psychological experience of meaning.
We use the phrase meaning neutral to stand for the idea that we do not need the psychological experience of meaning at all times, that some portion of the time we can operate in meaning neutral, and that the amount of meaning time and meaning neutral time each of us requires is for each of us to determine.
For one person, two hours of creating followed by eight hours of meaning neutral time followed by two hours of relating and intimacy may amount to a day that feels completely meaningful. Another person may have very different needs and very different requirements. Consider, and write about, the following questions:
An awful lot of people check in with themselves about what mood they're in but spend much less time checking in with themselves about doing something that matters to them. Can you see some advantages to focusing more on doing the things that matter to you rather than on keeping track of what mood you're in? We've chatted about the idea of allowing yourself to remain in meaning neutral for portions of the day. What do you think of the idea of remaining in mood neutral? Can you see mood neutrality as something you might want to cultivate?
Meaning is infinite, and meaning is also fragile. This is no paradox, since we are talking about a phenomenon that only exists because of the peculiarities of human consciousness. A chair is a chair even if the human race disappears. But meaning, since it is an artifact of consciousness and only exists as a subjective experience and a human idea, vanishes with the species. Because of this truth, meaning repair is a pivotal natural psychology practice. Not only would meaning vanish with the extinction of the species—it can also vanish for an individual. This happens all the time. You do not want to let this happen!
Naturally it would be nice to be able to meet a meaning crisis in a split second rather than having to do the heavy lifting of actual repair. And sometimes you can. Sometimes you can bring yourself back just with a sigh, a laugh, or a tiny reminder. But there will be other times when the crisis is powerful and profound, when it feels less like a button popping off your shirt and more like the whole fabric ripping. Then you will need to pull out your meaning repair kit and carefully chat with yourself about what just transpired and how you intend to realign with your life purpose vision. To think about: what might you include in your personal metaphorical meaning repair kit?
Someone with meaning needs will feel emotionally healthiest if she focuses on two areas, namely on making value-based meaning and on reducing her distress, insofar as that is possible. To use a simple analogy, she climbs the mountain but also tends to her blisters. As she climbs that mountain and as she tends to those blisters, she smiles a small knowing smile because she understands that she is living her life exactly as it ought to be lived.
However, she also understands perfectly well that she will sometimes create distress for herself because of the meaning investments she makes and the meaning opportunities she seizes. While she tries to minimize that distress, she nevertheless reminds herself that she has done this to herself and that she must live with some distress if she is to make herself proud. At the same time, she strives to reduce that distress as much as possible. This naturally leads to the idea of appropriate distress relief.
Think through this idea: that you want to reduce your distress but that you are also creating distress by virtue of the fact that you are actively making meaning.
It matters to a given human being whether he is born into this socioeconomic class or that one, whether his parents treated him well or poorly, whether his community lives peacefully or is continually at war, whether he is regularly healthy or regularly ill, whether the profession he would love to pursue is open to him or closed to him, and so on. Human life is nothing but psychological experiencing, and anything that affects our psychology—from growing up in a cult to growing up with a gold spoon in our mouth—matters.
All of that must be taken into account as we thoughtfully consider the sort of person we are, how we want to live, what we would like to change, and what about life we must accept. For example, which do you think would have the greatest impact on forming your personality: growing up poor, having mean parents, or being a minority member of your society? To consider: what are the current facts of your existence as they relate to the smart challenges we've been discussing?
If you think it would prove valuable and if you have the time and the energy, you might want to reread the first fifteen issue chapters with an eye to seeing how you might personally apply the principles and practices of natural psychology to each challenge. How, for example, might the idea of meaning neutral help you better deal with a boring job? How might the idea of making a new meaning investment prove a valuable technique for handling a smart gap? How might a morning meaning check-in serve to deal with incipient mania or other racing brain issues? And so on. If you feel up to it, this might prove to be the most valuable exercise of all.