face when it comes to finding meaningful employment, surviving dull, routine work, avoiding a lifetime in a claustrophobic corner of a profession, choosing between work that pays and work that interests them, and generally adapting their smarts to the contours of society's configurations are worth a book in themselves. You may prove one of the lucky ones and make a beautiful match. More likely, however, you will find yourself among the majority of smart people who perennially find the world of work to be a problem.
CHAPTER QUESTIONS
1 Can work ever feel meaningful? If so, what do you suspect are the necessary conditions for work to provoke the psychological experience of meaning?
2 What work have you found meaningful?
3 Since much work in the service of meaning, like licking envelopes for a good cause, does not itself feel meaningful, how do you intend to treat boring work accomplished in the service of meaning?
4 What new work might constitute a meaning opportunity?
5 What loves from your childhood might be turned into contemporary meaningful work?
3
ORIGINAL, FORMED, AND AVAILABLE PERSONALITIES
Each of us comes into the world with a unique mix of aptitudes, characteristics, inclinations, genetic information, aspects of temperament, and other qualities and capacities that in natural psychology we call “original personality.” You are not born a blank slate; no parent believes that nor does anyone who has seen a litter of kittens. Your original personality includes everything from your native intelligence to your basic mood structure and all those aspects of temperament (like adaptability, sensitivity, and distractibility) that developmental psychologists study.
There was a time when people thought that fully a quarter of the human race was born melancholic. It is not unreasonable to suppose that people are born happier or sadder, just as they are born smarter or less smart. Likewise, it is reasonable to suppose that each individual is already born with a certain worldview—or primed for a certain worldview. Probably we are born with sets of both qualities and capacities and also with a unique blueprint—one that may haunt us as a ghostly memory if and when life deflects us from who we might have been or who we ought to have been.
There is nothing surprising about the idea that we are born with an original personality. What is surprising is that, except for a very limited exploration of that cluster of traits known in psychology as temperament—an exploration that, by the way, the helping side of psychology makes almost no use of—all psychologies have avoided thinking about original personality. Psychology does not credit human beings with an original personality or take it into account when psychologists diagnose and treat their clients or patients. Doesn't it matter whether or not the person across from you came into the world already naturally sad if you are going to pin on him the label of clinically depressed? Of course it does.
Picture a litter of kittens. One is more curious than the next. One is more aggressive than the next. One is a leader, and another is a follower. The first is not potentially curious; she is already curious. The second is not potentially aggressive; he is already aggressive. The third and the fourth are not potentially leaders and followers; they are already that. In exactly the same way a human infant is not potentially smart; he is already smart. True, he doesn't have language yet; true, his environment can dumb him down; true, he can't write War and Peace or solve quadratic equations. But he is already built a certain way and already looks out at life with a particular mind-set and apparatus.
A smart person is smart right from the beginning.
Then comes the environment. The child looks out at the world with his original personality, interacts with the world according to his original personality, and has his developmental blueprint altered by the world, producing his formed personality. He forms or doesn't form secure attachments, his world is safer or more dangerous, he sees an array of options or few options, and so on. To take a simple analogy, our curious kitten in a loving household becomes a gentle cat but if thrown out into the world, becomes feral. Her curiosity manifests one way in that loving home and another way if she must fend for herself in back alleys. In one environment, it keeps her amused; in another, it helps her kill.
To say this simply, a person's original personality is altered into his formed personality through the circumstances of living. This complex alteration may produce a weakened or a strengthened person, a smarter or a less smart person, an open or a defended person, and so on. Your formed personality may be more than as well as less than your original personality, or more in some regards and less in others. Maybe you were born selfish—not so unusual for a creature with selfish genes—and nevertheless learned generosity. Or maybe your selfishness grew into everyday narcissism. Either is possible, although it is rather the rule that for most people their formed personality will be less than their original personality, since living is a hard game that tends not to bring out the best in us.
All the while, some free personality remains available to us. To use the language of natural psychology, we are born with an original personality, grow into our formed personality through living, and retain available personality—that amount of awareness that allows us to make changes, see our formed personality for what it is, make guesses about our original personality, and, most importantly, set a meaning-making agenda. It is with our available personality that we say, “I am not a slave to my upbringing, and I can make myself proud through my efforts.”
You may have been born sad, and life may have made you sadder: it is with your available personality that you deal with that reality.
You may have been born anxious, and life may have made you more anxious: it is with your available personality that you deal with that reality.
You may have been born smart and forced into dumb work: it is with your available personality that you deal with that reality.
The more defensive you are, the less your available personality. The more addicted you are, the less your available personality. The less you think for yourself, the less your available personality. The more the engine of your brain has gone off racing on its own, the less your available personality. The more you've succumbed to one lure or another—we'll examine four lures later on: the lures of language, logic, fantasy, and mysticism—the less your available personality. The more you are being fooled or ruled, the less your available personality.
In short, we may possess much less available personality than we wish we had—and we may know that and experience that as pain.
The following report from Maxine does a lovely job of tying some of these themes together. Maxine explained:
I've done animal rescue for years. Currently I have a feral cat and her litter of three kitties in my attic. It took almost three months for me to see the kitties because she's taught them that the sight and sound of humans is a dangerous thing. I know that I have only their available personality to work with, which even after just a few months is a very fixed and reduced amount. I bet if I could've handled them within days of their being born and played with them in the early weeks, they would've expressed their original personality to me. But as it is, their mama did what she considers a mighty fine job at forming their personalities; and she has very limited skills herself. So every day I just show up, I work with what's available, and original and formed don't really matter. I meet them where they are. There's a beauty in that simplicity and a real honoring of these cats.
But it's all very different when it comes to me. When it comes to dealing with rescue animals with behavior problems, I accept
