It's the sanest approach, because thinking about their lost innocence or what they might have been is devastating to me, and I don't need to be devastated. But if I think about me—or about a friend or a family member—I can't maintain that same neutrality. I grieve for what's been lost. I rebel at the idea that this is all that's left or that this is all that's available. I see and feel the diminishment.
Why do I lose the beauty and simplicity of saying, “Hey, here's what's available today?” Why do I feel paralyzed when I begin thinking about what I should have been or about what life should have been? The idea of available personality goes from feeling useful, simple, and beautiful when it comes to working with rescue animals to feeling like a prison sentence when I apply it to me. I bet I'm not the only one who feels this way. It may be true that we only have so much available personality left to us, but I don't really find that truth acceptable.
A child is born; he is already somebody. To pick one set of circumstances, let's say that he is a bright boy born into a middle-class family that demands good grades and promotes a worldview that includes playing musical instruments, playing sports, admiring nature, going to college, and getting a good job.
The parents pay lip service to the idea that thinking is a good thing but do not do much thinking themselves and do not really like it when their son thinks. They pay lip service to the idea that family members should love one another but don't love much and aren't very warm or friendly. They likewise pay lip service to the ideals of freedom but present their son with the clear message that he is not free to get mediocre grades, not free to dispute their core beliefs, and not free to really be himself.
Of course, this all confuses him. In this environment, he becomes sadder than he was born to be, saddened by having to perform at piano recitals that don't interest him and that make him woefully anxious, saddened by having to take his boring classes seriously, saddened by his parents' inability to love him or take an interest in him, saddened by what he learns in school about how human beings treat one another, and saddened most of all by his inability to make sense of this picture of life—a picture that everyone seems to be holding as the way to live but that to him feels odd, contradictory, empty, and meaningless.
His anxiety at piano recitals is noticed, and he is put on antianxiety medication. His restlessness in class is noticed, and he is put on anti-ADHD medication. His sadness is noticed, and he is put on antidepressants. Now, to go along with his sense that this can't really be the way that life is supposed to feel or be lived, he has three mental disorder labels and three sets of medications that make him a perpetual patient and that produce all sorts of side effects. Everyone in his family seems to think that it is normal that he has three mental disorders—they, of course, all have theirs as well.
Then come his teenage years. Teenagers in first-world countries are underutilized by their society and strangled by the nothingness of school. No amount of tennis lessons, spring vacations, camping trips, or extracurricular activities—including sex, drugs, and rock and roll—can fill the void created by having nothing asked of them. There are only two solutions to this epidemic problem that causes the havoc of Columbine High tragedies, anorexia, teenage suicide, careless sex, video game addiction, social media frenzy, brand name fixation, and deep sadness—that society ask something of its teenagers or that teenagers ask something of themselves. But nothing is asked of this young man except that he do what he is told to do and that he get ready for college.
Somewhere along the line, he begins to have feelings about what work he might like to do and what work he doesn't want to do. His parents—troubled themselves, anxious themselves, with their own opinions and agendas—add their input and try to influence his decision. Since he seems to like biology, why shouldn't he become a doctor? He shrugs, not wanting to think about the future; what he really wants to do is listen to music, watch movies, spend time with his friends, and find a girlfriend.
College comes, and he is obliged to act like he is deciding about his future. His classes are not meaningful to him, and he has trouble not wallowing in sadness. He manages to graduate, and the part-time job he takes one summer as an intern in a large corporation leads oddly and inexorably to a full-time, entry-level job in the corporate world. His early twenties pass in a characteristic haze of happy hour drinking, escapades and infatuations, office politics, and relentless sadness.
In his mid-twenties, he gets lucky. At that point, having had to survive the consequences of his environmental challenges and his own spotty past, he comes into contact with a psychology like natural psychology that alerts him to the fact that the place he has arrived is rather to be expected. Now he has a pivotal choice to make: whether or not to make use of his available personality to reduce his distress and begin making meaning.
He begins to see that the language of natural psychology—in which we talk about original personality, formed personality, and available personality; about meaning investments and meaning opportunities; about the unfortunate but completely normal (as opposed to abnormal or disordered) consequences of environmental challenges, and about distress relief rather than diagnosis and treatment for mental disorders—can help him think about what is now required of him if he is to reduce his distress and right his ship.
He readies himself to deal with all of this. But there is still the problem of his meaningless work. It is one thing to accept the challenge of making meaning, but how exactly does that relate to the world of work? A serious challenge that loomed early on and grew more pressing as he moved from high school through college and into his young adult years was the necessity of choosing a line of work. What young person understands that jobs and professions do not exist to serve his meaning needs and that whatever choice he makes is unlikely to really satisfy? Now he is beginning to understand that.
Challenged to feel less sad, challenged to deal with what is at once an inflated and deflated sense of himself, challenged to actually manifest his smartness, and in pain on many fronts despite his new understanding of life, he must still pay the rent and buy groceries. As much as he might like to, he can't put the matter of work on a back burner. He is forced to grapple with that tedious, slippery, unrelenting challenge that we look at next: the world of work.
CHAPTER QUESTIONS
1 Do you have the sense that you can intuit your original personality? If so, what were its contours? Who do you feel you were supposed to be?
2 What are the major characteristics of your formed personality?
3 Which of those are strengths, and which of those are more like liabilities?
4 If you would like a personality update, describe that update.
5 What do you see as the relationships among your original, formed, and available personalities?
4
OUR EXPERIMENTAL MODEL
Human beings are products of nature, and nature neither does nor can aim for perfection. Perfection is not a word that makes sense in the context of evolution. Nature merely tries things out—that is all it can do. It allows life to evolve, which is a lovely, process-oriented way to produce not perfection but endless variety. It tries out this fly and that fly, this virus and that virus. Some endure, some vanish, and each in its own way is merely yet another of nature's experiments.
We are not designed.
Nature creates a creature like us, gives us a super-sized, experimental brain, and tries out thinking. What a fascinating capacity with which to aid or burden a creature! Since the goal of nature is not to create perfection but rather to create functionality within a context, you would naturally expect an immense, wild,
