Say you are born into the smartest 15 percent of the population and face many of the challenges that I've described—along with all of the other challenges of living. How might you proceed? That will depend in part on whether or not you agree with the vision of life described by natural psychology. If you agree with that vision, there's a reasonable (though, of course, imperfect) path to follow. Here is that vision reduced to its essentials. See if it makes sense to you.
You are born because nature makes creatures. You are one of nature's experimental models, like all creatures, and must deal with the peculiarities that come with being evolved rather than designed. This means that:
In short, you are not immune to being human. You will have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of our species, idiosyncrasies that are often experienced as pain and distress. That pain and distress are regularly so severe that chemicals with powerful effects are used to mask and ameliorate them, as is the specialized talk known as psychotherapy. At the same time, reasonable ways of dealing with that pain and distress, ways rooted in the idea of making personal meaning, are too often ignored.
To begin with, you are born with an original personality made up of genetic messages, capacities, instincts, drives, awareness, and everything that you, a new human being, brings squirming into the rough and tumble of existence. This endowment may include a good mind, a touch of melancholia, a huge appetite, a clear sense of self, an innate stubbornness, a weakness for sweets, an easy smile, an ego that can be bruised, and so on. Your original personality includes aspects of your self that are hardwired and aspects of your self that are open—often too open by half—to the facts of existence. All of this, you come with into the world.
It would perhaps be nice to know the person you were meant to be—that is, the exact dimensions and qualities of your original personality—but that information is not available to you, which produces an odd lifelong sore spot. You come into this world not as a blank slate but as a living, breathing human being who perhaps already has doubts and who perhaps already suspects the worse. The contours of that unknowable original personality matter; however, it is far more important that at some point you decide how you intend to live rather than remain pining for the person you might have been or ought to have been.
You are born, and then the world grabs you. You learn about doors slamming and neatly folding your hands and eating your peas and hiding out behind the hedge. You become the formed you, the child who daydreams or runs wild, the scared child, the helpful child, the beaten child looking for revenge, the child who associates with saints because her family is Catholic, the child whose natural intelligence makes her curious but whose schools dull her down. You become the child who, without giving it any thought, starts to dream of weddings or fast cars, great adventures or great sacrifices, novels to write or money to make. You start growing up.
You remain you and you become you—someone reminiscent of the original you but now a formed you. You become sexually active or sexually stifled, inclined to conform or inclined to rebel, with a focused love of physics or poetry or a diffuse interest in many things or no real passion for anything. You are driven in simple ways—aching for your friends' approval, hungry for a hamburger, craving victory on the basketball court—and driven in complex ways that are fueled by simmering doubts, failed undertakings, and the huge tension between what is and what you wish there was. You make it through your perhaps very dark teenage years and start to make predictions about your future, predictions called career choices and relationship choices.
It turns out that everything you do produces consequences. You ditch a test and end up changing majors. You meet a boy or a girl and end up in Bolivia. You have children early. You are completely embedded in reality, harboring dreams and feeling surprising distress, and no unseen friendly sprite exempts you from life. You have bills to pay. You need glasses. And throughout these years, a certain powerful self-interrogation commences: Have I done the right thing? Why doesn't this feel more meaningful? What do I really believe? Is this all there is? How could I have been so stupid? What am I missing? And so on.
Some of these pestering self-interrogations sound to your ear like therapy questions and some sound like spiritual questions. They are certainly not weird questions or neurotic questions, but it is hard for a person not schooled in natural psychology to accurately identify what sort of questions they are. They are the existential questions that arise before we understand our natural predicament and how to respond to life by making value-based meaning. Once we come to understand the nature of that response, we know how to matter, how to negotiate our days, how to meet meaning crises, how to reduce our distress, and how to make ourselves proud. Those questions quiet themselves or vanish entirely. Until then, however, we look very much like the next person, doing work that doesn't quite satisfy, dashing off for a spiritual quest or an affair, and convinced that meaning is hiding somewhere, maybe in the Himalayas, maybe just behind that door over there that we can't get open.
When we learn that meaning is not lost and that meaning can't be found and that meaning is exactly and precisely a subjective psychological experience that we can influence and even create, we suddenly stand in a new relationship to life. We stand up. And an odd thing happens. We become the beauty in life. We become beautiful to ourselves. To a smart person, this can sound like a soft, strange, flowery answer to the problem of existence, but it is our actual experience. Your loving heart was a beautiful thing while you loved. Your fierceness in defense of the defenseless was gorgeous. Your willingness to smile amounted to a small miracle. Reality has no mercy, but while you were the beauty in life, you were the beauty in life—all that merciless reality notwithstanding.
You may have come into this world already sad, already too knowing, already upset with reality. You may have arrived into a cold or careless home. You may find yourself indoctrinated in those first few seconds, belittled thereafter, and attacked by life. How can anyone be beautiful who begins by being attacked? Only a human being who, after a long journey down the usual broken and misleading paths, says, “Oh, I see how to be that beauty!” You stand up, you update your personality, you mindfully decide on your next meaning investment, you stand open to meaning opportunities, and you feel a glow that I dare not write too much about without sounding ridiculous. But that glow is true; you are being true to yourself and, as a result, you feel beautiful.
You don't have to be beautiful. There is no one to tell you that you can't bellyache, whine, collapse, hate, hoard, criticize, or sneer instead—there are no arbiters of such matters. You can be as cruel and as miserable a person as you want to be. No fires of hell await you. There will be no retribution. You may even become president or chairman of the board by virtue of your cruelties. So be it. The universe allows you to be your worst self. Is that what you want? You can be meek and not like that; you can be rude and not like that; you can squander your intelligence on trifles and not like that; you can proceed through life by not doing what you should and not being who you should and not liking that. Or you can stand up and be the beauty in life, using your available personality and the freedom you possess in the service of your efforts to live life intentionally.
Over the past 150 years, we have taken the 19th-century ideal of truth, beauty, and goodness to the woodshed and given it a necessary postmodern thumping. Truth got deconstructed. Beauty got ripped and shredded. Even second-rate relativistic arguments pounded goodness into submission. All this battering was completely necessary and absolutely right in its own way because we needed to look language in the eye and refuse to be seduced by its lure. But now, having done that appropriate analysis, we can refresh the ideal of truth, beauty, and goodness in a lovely reconstructive postmodern way that puts you and your meaning-making efforts front and center. You struggle to assert your truth based on your principles and your values—based, that is, on your goodness—and you become the beauty in life. Truth, beauty, and goodness return in the shape of a single human being.
What about tremendously taxing problems like a meaningless career, chronic sadness, a dissonant formed personality, daily money problems, cruel self-talk, and all the rest? What sort of answer is value-based meaning-making? What sort of answer is the exhortation to be the beauty in life? Isn't a better answer a comforting mysticism that predicts an idyllic future? Isn't a better answer chemicals that soothe you and alter your experience? Isn't a better answer fantasizing revenge, sleeping the pain away, or keeping frantic? What do you think? You get to decide.
You are not beautiful because there is some unseen force that made you in its image and holds you as an object of beauty. You are not an object of beauty. You are a subject of beauty. You know the difference between trying and not trying, and you know that it is beautiful to try. You feel that: you feel beautiful as you try, even if you are sweating buckets. This is a fierce beauty. This isn't the beauty of flower arrangements and classical columns. This is the beauty of pride and responsibility. This is the beauty of starting each day oriented in the direction of your life purposes. This is you mattering.
You've written five novels and none have been published. You've failed the bar exam six times. You teach in a school where no one listens or learns. Your mate belittles you. You have no one to love, and you doubt that love is in your future. Your father beat you. You have a chronic illness. You can't make ends meet. How can you possibly be the beauty in life in these circumstances? Why would you even want to be? Why bother? Shouldn't you hate life? Shouldn't you get what pleasure you can from cookies, from movies, from sleep? Isn't it asking too much of you to endure all this and make value-based meaning? Isn't that preposterous, ridiculous? You will have to decide.
If you agree with this vision of life, then you would proceed in the following pretty obvious way. You would engage in value-based meaning-making because you understand that such a way of life will do the very best job possible of upholding your values and principles, identifying your particular smart problems, making you proud, and reducing your distress. You accept that you can't do things that aren't available to you—you can't literally design and execute D-Day, reduce our species' way of expressing its self-interest as cruelty, repaint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or have a good meal with your deceased loved ones—but that you can create a menu of meaning opportunities that actually matter to you and as a result stand in a different, better relationship to life, as one of the few people who wake up each day and can honestly say, “I have a decent sense of what matters to me, and today I get to live intentionally.”
Likewise, by recognizing that we are an experimental model with many built-in challenges—from the way our anxiety early warning system overdoes it and gives us outlandish symptoms in the face of minimal danger to the way our racing brain feels so dangerous to us that we hold ourselves hostage to a forced calmness that feels like going through the motions—we can better surrender to and accept the fact that we are human, that we are not super-creatures, that we are bound to the facts of existence in simple ways that, however, do not need to cause us to badmouth ourselves and self-identify as bugs. We are neither gods nor bugs but members of a species that has evolved exactly as it has evolved and that is built to allow each member who cares to stand up to matter exactly as much as a human being can matter.
If your particular smart problem is that you were told you were brilliant too often and you got it into your head that you could do brilliant work without actually having to work, then now you make a meaning investment in actually working. If your particular smart problem is that your smartness (and all smartness) was disparaged by your society, your group, your parents, or your teachers, then you make a meaning investment in releasing old messages, healing old wounds, and standing up as a smart person. If your particular smart problem is that, being smart, you see reality a little too clearly and get chronically sad, you make a meaning investment in not adopting the customary label of depression but rather investigating your own case of sadness and what you intend to do to relieve that distress—say, by deciding that you will have meaning trump mood in your life and that you will pester yourself less about your mood and spend your days mattering.
If your day exhausts you without, however, providing you with much satisfaction, you use your smarts and make a meaning investment in discerning what must change. You discern what must change, and then you use your available personality to make those changes. If the challenge you identify is the super-large, super-powerful, super-painful one that nothing really can be made to matter—that you can't take your own menu of meaning investments and meaning opportunities seriously and you see through them instantly as merely created by you and not some universal imperative—then you stop everything and think through natural psychology's adamant request that you flip an inner switch and move from holding life as essentially meaningless to realizing that meaning is an infinite wellspring of a poignant humankind. You stop everything and reevaluate life as meaningful, in human terms and in human ways.
If people, including loved ones who have left you because of it, tell you that you are too arrogant, too inconsiderate, too full of yourself, and so on—and you can't help but agree, even if it irritates you to admit it—then you use your smarts and your available personality to make a meaning investment in updating your personality. If people, including you when you stare in the mirror, tell you that you have all this potential that you have never really manifested, then you use your smarts and your available personality to manifest that potential in ways that matter to you. You patiently face each challenge that I've identified and any other challenges that I haven't named but that you know exist.
It goes without saying that the challenges we've discussed do not vanish because you are able to keep your life purposes in mind, because you orient your life around making value-based meaning, or because you decide to make yourself proud by your efforts. Your mind will still race; incipient mania may still threaten you; the poignant distance between the smart work you would like to do and the work you are currently doing will still get you down. Life will still prove troubling. But side-by-side with these troubles is a picture of you as the beauty in life. I hope that you can see and feel this picture.
In the ways I've described, you become the beauty in life—the beauty in your own life. The 1.5 billion people in the smartest 15 percent of the world's population do not constitute an army for good, do not agree, and will never march together. In the aggregate, they do not amount to a beautiful thing. They are simply the smartest 15 percent of our species. But you can reduce your distress, meet your challenges as best as they can be met, and turn beautiful yourself by virtue of making the effort that you have always known to make—the effort to make yourself proud on a daily basis. Be smart, stand up, and live intentionally. We are members of a species who can do exactly that.