may also hold no meaning for a given smart individual. The sorting out of society's needs creates jobs and professions—some of which putatively allow for thinking, many of which do not—but that very sorting reduces the chances that a given smart individual can find a line of work that feels genuinely meaningful.
There is no necessary connection between the value that society puts on a line of work and its meaningfulness to a given individual. Society may hold the profession of doctor in high esteem, but if you do not find medicine a meaningful line of work, it is not meaningful to you. Society may not hold the profession of elementary school teacher in high esteem (whatever lip service it may pay to the value and importance of that work), but if you find that a meaningful line of work, then it is meaningful to you. To repeat a central fact about meaning and a core teaching in natural psychology, meaning is a subjective psychological experience. If certain work isn't meaningful to you, it simply isn't.
This problem is compounded by the following additional reality. People do not become lawyers, doctors, or scientists. They become corporate lawyers or litigators, pediatricians or brain surgeons, geologists or physicists. That is, people are forced to specialize—and that specializing typically further reduces the meaningfulness of that line of work. Maybe practicing law might have proven meaningful if you had not also wanted to make money and had chosen poverty law instead of corporate law. Maybe science might have proven meaningful if you could have stepped back to look at the biggest issues rather than having to drill down into a niche where you work with one organism, one atomic particle, or one geological formation. But the way that professional work is constituted nowadays, you are bound to have to specialize.
There is no contemporary category of general thinker that matches the ancient job title of natural philosopher, in which people could do science, philosophy, art, and anything else that caught their fancy. Smart people today must become clear somethings—college professors specializing in the early works of Melville, engineers specializing in bridges, lawyers who know tax law, and so on—and, having become that something, must stay right there, trapped with the duty of preparing another journal article, pondering another bend in the river, or familiarizing themselves with another tax code change.
Marilyn, a biological researcher, explained:
The journey to get where I am today as a biological researcher at a prestigious university was long and hard, and because it was so hard, with so many hurdles to jump over and hoops to jump through, I never noticed exactly what was happening. I never noticed that in some of my undergraduate classes, I was actually excited by the material and actually enjoyed thinking about the big questions but that as each year progressed and as I had to narrow my focus, find my niche, and choose my life form, as it were (I've ended up an expert on a certain worm), I stopped thinking and spent my days in pretty dreary fashion trying to find some enthusiasm for my own research. Biology is amazing—I am a biologist—and yet it has all come together in a very disappointing way.
Martin, a professor of philosophy, described his situation:
I've spent the last two months defending a journal article I wrote about praise and blame in Kantian ethics from the three peer reviewers who nitpicked my article to death. In order to have a chance to get it published, I need to address every one of their concerns—and the problem for me isn't so much that I'm spending all of my time on what feels like a silly and mind-numbing task but rather that this is the box I've put myself in, this exact box, where I make some fine logical or linguistic distinctions and then have to act like that matters, like I am increasing human knowledge or something.
The academy is a comfortable place to be, and I suppose I could turn myself into someone who does think bigger than I currently think. Maybe I can't really blame the system. But if I don't blame the system, then I would have to look in the mirror—which, by the way, Kant would have called a praiseworthy act, as for him, it was important that we praise that which we find difficult to do. You see that I could write about Kant all day. . . .
I don't know what the problem is: if it is the system, if it is philosophy itself that I don't believe in, if it's a lack of genuine interest in thinking, if it's a lack of confidence, if it's a lack of necessary arrogance, if it's a fear of biting off more than I can chew, or what. Can I really do this for twenty or thirty more years? That seems completely unbearable.
Professions and lines of work as they are currently constituted come with countless challenges. Most do not actually make much room for thinking. They look like thinking professions, but day in and day out, they may amount to something considerably duller instead. Maybe you find yourself in what you consider a really interesting corner of evolutionary biology working on enriching the concept of fitness. But what are you actually doing on a daily basis? Moving cultures from one controlled environment to another controlled environment and taking measurements. That is the nature of the beast, but can it provoke the psychological experience of meaning?
Genetic drift is one of the mechanisms of evolution. It is an important aspect of human existence and an interesting subject to study. But as important and interesting as it is, if you find yourself researching in a corner of genetic drift, perhaps researching some group analogous to the Bounty sailors and their Pitcairn Island experience to see if the group you've chosen also manifests the reduction of genetic diversity you would expect to find in such situations, you may find yourself quite bored. The concept is powerful, the subject is interesting, and your research is logical—yet it may amount to a yawn.
Can you know this growing up as you look out at the world of jobs and professions? How could you? You are probably going to do your best to shy away from jobs that allow for little or no thinking. Except under dire circumstances or as a day job to support creative endeavors, a smart person is not so likely to want to wait tables, file forms, work on an assembly line, or sell shoes. It isn't that he disparages these lines of work as beneath his dignity; rather, it is that he can see clearly how his days would be experienced as meaningless if he had to spend his time not thinking. But as well as you may know what you don't want to do, how clearly will you be able to gauge what you do want to do?
As a smart person growing up, you're likely to consider many of the traditional smart professions or be told that you ought to consider them. Casually mention that you might like a microscope for Christmas and you may be on your way to a job in the sciences whether or not you actually find scientific research meaningful. Get an A on a short story and that may mark you forever as someone who ought to write, even if your genuine loves are music and cooking. We've already discussed how your intelligence may be disparaged as you grow up. On top of that, the apparatus of society and the natural progression of life from childhood to adulthood will force you to pick some work—work that you can't really visualize and that may prove much less interesting and meaningful than you expected.
Let's tie some of these threads together. The themes of our first three chapters—that how a smart person construes meaning matters, that a smart person's smartness is often disparaged, and that a smart person comes into the world with an original personality that then collides with that world—come together in the following report. Jack, a lawyer-turned-actor, explained:
In my own case, I must admit that I was blessed with two very intelligent parents. My mother chose to remain at home while my father was the sole breadwinner. I have four older brothers who are considerably older than me (I think I was an “oops” baby). My parents were younger and I believe more hands-on with my older brothers, and with that attention came great expectations. By the time I reached school age, my parents were either too tired to care or perhaps they had mellowed as far as expectations went.
Consequently, my oldest brother had to bring home straight-A report cards, but when I brought my own report cards home, my parents would ask me, “Are you happy with this result?” I'd shrug and they'd reply, “Well, as long as you're happy.” Oddly enough, this reaction didn't make me happy. Actually, it left me rather confused and uncertain since I knew my grades didn't come close to what my older brothers achieved, but it gave me permission to do what I wanted to do, which was to complete all my schoolwork during school hours and then spend all of my free time playing outside or watching television.
My brothers were all encouraged to develop their own musical