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I don’t know about you, but as a young adult, I’ve often felt a persistent, gnawing sense of meaningless seeping in around the edges of my life. I rarely acknowledge it forthrightly or share it, instead dismissing it as an unavoidable existential “ennui” that perhaps can be relieved by a YouTube video or three.
Lately, though, I’ve come to see our collective culture as a landscape where fulfilling value can be hard to come by, which contributes to this hollow feeling. And even more, our culture is a realm riddled with fools’ gold: the shiny and attractive treasures that bait us in but don’t satisfy as promised.
Russell Brand has spoken about this problem. He achieved everything most Americans chase: financial freedom, fame, abundant romance, and boundless pleasures, but the dissatisfaction remained. Brand said his life was like “eating a beautiful cake that tasted of ashes.”
I think many of us are realizing how starved of true value and meaning we are.
I hear it when people bemoan the “Selfie Generation,” materialism, nihilism, and moral decay. Collectively, we have myriad external comforts and unprecedented levels of ease, yet we are missing something. And from that void, all types of bitterness and judgments can arise.
Why aren’t we happy? What’s wrong with us or the world that we are still suffering, despite so much material abundance around us?
In Buddhism, this type of experience is called “dukkha,” which roughly means the “unsatisfactoriness” of existence itself. Perhaps some dukkha is unavoidable and just a side effect of being here. On the other hand, I believe we have also lost touch with hard-earned values that our ancestors developed and integrated to help make our existence better, and we could use an extensive resurrection and reincorporation of values that we’ve either dismissed or lost contact with.
Generally speaking, I believe we seek too much to secure value from our external environments and too little to create value through our virtuous actions.
The current popularity of thinkers like Jordan Peterson point to this. His message seems primarily about the rejuvenation of meaning as a compass for navigating life, and he refers to archetypal stories as value-laden guideposts for making our lives and the world a more inhabitable place. I personally have benefited from hearing these ideas, which have given me a more effective compass for navigating the vast uncertainty of my future. And even more, I feel an existential relief that the universe does seem to have real meaning and value to chase and create.
Explicit and Implicit Values
Our explicit values are those principles or aspirations from which we consciously guide our behavior. We can say that we strive to be “trustworthy” and live with “integrity,” and those virtues provide a constant measuring stick on which to judge our actions in the world.
Our implicit values, on the other hand, are what come out automatically in our behavior. For instance, most of us are polite, automatically, without requiring any effort or conscious awareness.
Integrating new, explicit values into ourselves requires conscious effort and self-monitoring. If my goal is to act with more integrity and become less flaky, for example, I can monitor how often I follow through on what I promise to others. And when I fall short, I can strategize about how to improve and also seek the impact of my less-than-integrous behavior on others in order to motivate myself to improve.
Through these tiny changes, I can create a better world. By incorporating more “value” into my behavior, I directly benefit those around me.
In the case of being a person with integrity and reliability, people can count on me and trust that I respect their time. The world gets incrementally better. If everyone began doing more of this, the world would get immeasurably better. And this isn’t some self-sacrificial ideal: it helps us as an individual first and foremost as we grow the respect for our character through value-creating actions.
By incorporating virtues from honor to humility, courage to compassion, and determination to dignity, we can build better versions of ourselves that effect positive change in the immediate local environments of our lives.
If enough individuals care about building value into their character, the macro change could be immensely positive for the world. In this way, we are creating value for ourselves and others rather than constantly seeking value from the world through material possessions, highs, and so on.
I’m also not saying there is no value to be found in the external world. Certainly, there is much to be enjoyed and discovered in what’s around us. But if we are looking for the type of meaning that can nourish us more substantively, we can seek to create value in the world by turning more towards value-creation and virtue-adoption.
Thankfully, the list of potential human virtues for us to embody is long and distinguished.
A Word on “Toxic Masculinity”
Last week I wrote that I’m not a proponent of the term “Toxic Masculinity” due to its inherent divisiveness. Much of the behavior that is included under this heading results from the absence of virtue.
This is not a gendered issue.
Men and women can both benefit from evaluating their behavior in comparison with their own individually defined virtue sets. A man who rapes a woman probably doesn’t value or respect individual autonomy, nor has he likely developed his powers of empathy. His behavior can be characterized as devoid of virtue.
Rather than designing programs to “deconstruct toxic masculinity,” as is happening in many American universities, we can begin to explore virtue development, explicitly. We seem to have lost touch with virtue development partly due to the large-scale rejection of religion, and in so doing, we’ve thrown out a communal forum in which we explore and develop better character. From my secular viewpoint, we haven’t created an adequate replacement.
So Where Do We Go?
It’s far easier for us to successfully change as individuals than take on and impact the inertia of the collective. Accordingly, I think we can initially draw up a list of the virtues we’d like to live by, think and write about how we are succeeding and also falling short, and then plan actions to improve.
If we’re even braver, we can invite our closest friends and family into this process and solicit their feedback on our actions. By doing so, we hone our compasses and become less adrift in life.
Once we begin to master ourselves and reliably create value around us, perhaps then we can talk seriously about drawing up plans to impact our education system and beyond. I’ve heard moving accounts of schools that are beginning to incorporate mindfulness into class, for instance, to great positive effect.
Perhaps our future will include an educational system that values and fosters character-development as much as it does knowledge acquisition.
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