Ideas
For more than forty years, I’ve been thinking and writing about a handful of questions that seem to me central to the human experience.
How do we make life feel meaningful when meaning isn’t simply given to us?
How do we decide what matters and then actually live according to those decisions?
How do creative people keep creating in the face of anxiety, rejection, self-doubt, and the demands of everyday life?
How should we understand emotional distress without too quickly turning human difficulties into mental disorders?
How do we help another person wisely and humanely?
And how do we navigate a world in which many of the old certainties about identity, purpose, career, community, and belonging have disappeared?
Across more than sixty books, thousands of articles, decades of coaching, teaching, and training, and my work in critical psychology and critical psychiatry, I’ve returned to these questions again and again. A few central ideas have emerged.
Meaning is feeling. When it is gone, we can invite it to return
We are accustomed to talking about “finding meaning,” as though meaning were hidden somewhere and our job were to discover it. I see things differently.
Meaning is a psychological experience. Certain activities, relationships, commitments, ideas, and ways of being produce in us the experience that life matters. Because meaning is an experience, we can influence it. We can learn what produces meaning for us, identify our personal meaning opportunities, and become more skillful at investing meaning in what we do.
This changes the existential question from Where can I find meaning? to the much more active question: How shall I make meaning today?
We have life purposes, not a single life purpose.
The familiar question What is my purpose in life? may itself be part of the problem.
There is no reason to suppose that we have been assigned one purpose that we must somehow discover. Instead, we can identify and choose multiple life purposes: creating, loving, serving, learning, advocating, building, relating, experiencing, repairing, teaching, adventuring, and countless others.
Different purposes may matter at different times. Some may last a lifetime; others may belong to a particular chapter of life.
The task is not to discover the purpose of your life. It is to decide what matters to you, choose your life purposes, and live them.
Each of us needs a philosophy for living.
Whether we know it or not, we live according to ideas about what matters, what is right, what we owe ourselves and others, what constitutes a worthwhile life, and how we ought to behave when life becomes difficult.
Too often, however, those ideas have simply been inherited. They come from parents, religion, culture, schooling, professional authorities, or the assumptions of the society around us. We may spend decades living according to principles we have never actually examined.
I believe that each of us has the responsibility to develop a personal philosophy of life: not an abstract philosophical system, but a considered understanding of how we intend to live.
What do I believe matters? What are my values? What do I owe other people? What am I willing to stand for? How do I intend to deal with uncertainty, disappointment, aging, loss, ambition, love, freedom, and death?
We cannot answer such questions once and for all. But we can take them seriously. A thoughtful life requires more than reacting to whatever happens next. It requires developing—and continuing to revise—our own philosophy for living.
Our common humanity should come before religion.
I am an atheist, but my atheism is less about arguing over whether God exists than about asking how we ought to live if we take full responsibility for our lives and for one another.
In The Atheist’s Way, I argued for a positive, affirmative atheism grounded in meaning-making, ethical choice, and the possibility of living a rich and purposeful life without religious belief. We do not need a supernatural guarantee that life matters. We can decide what matters and live accordingly.
I have also come to believe that religion represents a profound betrayal of our common humanity when it divides human beings into believers and unbelievers, the saved and the unsaved, the chosen and the unchosen, our people and their people. Whatever comfort, community, or moral guidance religions may provide, the insistence that one group possesses a special truth about existence too easily separates us from one another.
Before we are Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, or anything else, we are human beings sharing the same difficult existential circumstance. We are born without having asked to be born, we struggle to understand how to live, we love, suffer, hope, create, lose, and die.
Our deepest allegiance ought to be to that common humanity.
Creating is difficult—and worth doing anyway.
Creative people face challenges that are not incidental to creating but intrinsic to it: anxiety, self-doubt, perfectionism, rejection, isolation, marketplace pressures, motivational problems, and the difficulty of sustaining belief in work whose value may never be confirmed by the world.
These challenges are remarkably predictable. Writers, visual artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers, and other creative people may work in very different forms, but they repeatedly encounter many of the same difficulties: getting started, keeping going, handling rejection, navigating the marketplace, maintaining confidence, balancing art and livelihood, surviving isolation, and sustaining a creative life over decades.
Much of my work in creativity coaching has been devoted to understanding those challenges and developing practical ways of meeting them. But I have also become increasingly struck by the fact that creative people have no real world home—no international place devoted to the whole experience of living and working as a creative person. That is why I created the International Association of Creative and Performing Artists (IACPA), still in its infancy, as an effort to build such a home: a worldwide community where the shared challenges, needs, rights, aspirations, and realities of creative people can be addressed.
But creativity is larger than art-making. It is also a stance toward existence. We are continually called upon to imagine, invent, experiment, choose, and make something where nothing existed before. In that sense, creativity belongs at the center of the human experience.
Intelligence Is not an uncomplicated gift
We routinely speak of intelligence as an advantage, and of course it can be. But intelligence also brings characteristic challenges that receive far too little attention.
A powerful mind can generate more possibilities, more questions, more doubts, more awareness of contradiction, and more ability to imagine everything that might go wrong. Intelligent people may become bored by what does not engage them, impatient with simplistic explanations, troubled by injustice and absurdity, perfectionistic about their own efforts, or caught in cycles of overthinking and rumination.
They may also discover that seeing more clearly does not necessarily make living easier.
In Why Smart People Hurt, Why Smart Teens Hurt, and elsewhere, I have argued for taking these challenges seriously. Intelligence does not doom anyone to suffering, but neither should we pretend that it is simply an advantage measured by test scores, academic achievement, or professional success. A powerful mind must itself be understood, managed, challenged, and cared for.
We must learn how to use our own minds.
We possess minds, but that does not mean that we automatically know how to use them well.
Our minds generate thoughts, interpretations, fears, fantasies, judgments, memories, predictions, obsessions, and stories. Some help us. Some confuse us. Some frighten us. Some repeat themselves endlessly. Some become so familiar that we mistake them for truths.
One of our central human tasks is therefore learning how to relate to our own thinking.
We can notice what our minds are doing. We can challenge ideas that do not serve us. We can interrupt repetitive thinking, replace unhelpful mental habits, ask better questions, shift our attention, and deliberately generate thoughts more suited to the life we are trying to live.
This does not mean pretending that everything is positive or that thinking can solve every problem. It means recognizing that our own mind is one of the principal environments in which we live.
We ought to learn how to inhabit it more intelligently. I’ve looked at such ways in Redesign Your Mind, Brave New Mind, and elsewhere.
We should be careful about turning human suffering, human difficulty, and human differences into things called “mental disorders.”
For decades, I have argued for a more humane and intellectually honest way of understanding emotional distress.
Human beings become sad, anxious, agitated, confused, despairing, obsessed, traumatized, alienated, and overwhelmed for reasons. Sometimes those reasons are biological. But they may also involve relationships, circumstances, meaning crises, social conditions, identity conflicts, loss, trauma, temperament, economic realities, or the sheer difficulty of being human.
A diagnostic label may well obscure the actual person and the actual problem.
This conviction lies behind my work in critical psychology and critical psychiatry and my efforts to advance alternatives to the dominant medical model of mental distress.
We can work on our personality.
We often speak about personality as though it were a finished thing: This is simply who I am.
But personality is not merely something we have. It is also something we can examine and work on.
We may be temperamentally anxious, stubborn, passive, controlling, impulsive, pessimistic, approval-seeking, perfectionistic, avoidant, or self-critical. We may have acquired ways of behaving that once protected us but now limit us. We may repeatedly create difficulties for ourselves and others without quite understanding why.
None of this means that we can simply decide to become somebody else. Temperament is real. History is real. Habit is powerful. Some aspects of ourselves are remarkably resistant to change. But personality need not be destiny.
We can become more aware of our characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, reacting, defending, relating, and choosing. We can decide which aspects of ourselves we want to strengthen, which we want to moderate, and which we are no longer willing to excuse with the phrase That’s just who I am.
Part of becoming a person is participating in the ongoing creation of our own personality.
What we practice, we become.
Insight matters. Decisions matter. Intentions matter. But none of them by themselves create a life.
What we repeatedly do does.
A writer becomes a writer by writing. A person who wants to become more courageous must practice courage. Someone who wants greater calm must practice ways of meeting agitation. Someone who values learning must make learning part of ordinary life. Someone who wants stronger relationships must repeatedly practice attention, generosity, honesty, and repair.
This is why I have placed so much emphasis on daily practice.
A practice is a way of translating an idea about who we want to be into something we actually do. It takes our values, purposes, aspirations, and intentions out of the realm of thought and gives them a place in everyday life.
We do not transform ourselves through one grand decision. More often, we change through hundreds of small acts repeated until they begin to constitute a way of being.
The question is therefore not only Who do I want to become? It is also: What must I practice if I intend to become that person?
Authoritarianism is a family matter
We have devoted considerable attention to authoritarian leaders, authoritarian governments, and authoritarian movements. But much less attention has been paid to authoritarianism where millions of people first encounter it: in the family.
An authoritarian parent, sibling, or partner can create a family world organized around control, fear, obedience, humiliation, punishment, intimidation, and the suppression of another person’s autonomy. The wounds created in such an environment can persist long after childhood or long after the relationship itself has ended.
I came to believe that this form of authoritarianism needed to be named, examined, and understood. That conviction led to my books Parents Who Bully and Helping Survivors of Authoritarian Parents, Siblings, and Partners: A Guide for Professionals. Both are part of my larger concern with the ways power operates in intimate human relationships—and with helping people reclaim agency after that agency has been diminished or denied.
Helping requires wisdom, not merely expertise.
We have created increasingly specialized helping professions. Specialists learn theories, techniques, diagnostic systems, protocols, and methods appropriate to their fields.
All of that may be useful. But specialization can also cause us to lose sight of the person sitting in front of us.
Helping another human being requires something larger than technical expertise. It requires wisdom.
A wise helper needs to understand something about human nature, personality, relationships, meaning, purpose, identity, creativity, circumstance, suffering, choice, habit, ambition, disappointment, aging, loss, and change. A wise helper must be able to tolerate uncertainty, because human problems rarely arrive with obvious explanations or guaranteed solutions.
Wisdom does not mean possessing all the answers. Indeed, part of wisdom is knowing how much we do not know.
It means being able to think broadly, listen deeply, ask useful questions, recognize complexity, resist premature conclusions, and help another person consider what might actually serve them.
We need helpers who know techniques. But we also need helpers who know something about life.
Helping should begin with the whole person.
If human difficulties are complicated, helping must be broad enough to meet that complexity.
A person may arrive with a relationship problem that is also a meaning problem, an identity problem, a practical problem, a confidence problem, and a problem of deciding what to do next. Real human difficulties rarely remain obediently inside professional categories.
This has led me increasingly toward the idea of the Human Experience Specialist: a new kind of helper whose stock-in-trade is wisdom rather than diagnosis and whose subject is the whole landscape of human experience.
Such a helper does not need to pretend to possess all the answers. But he or she does need to know how to listen, question, think, accompany, strategize, and help another person meet life more effectively.
We are increasingly existential nomads.
For much of human history, identity was largely assigned. Where you lived, what you believed, what work you did, whom you married, and who you understood yourself to be were powerfully determined by family, religion, class, community, gender, geography, and tradition.
Many of those structures have weakened.
That brings freedom—but also a tremendous burden. Increasingly, we must decide for ourselves who we are, what matters, where we belong, what we believe, and what sort of life we intend to construct.
I call us existential nomads: people obliged to navigate without permanent existential coordinates and to repeatedly invent and reinvent ourselves.
The challenge is not necessarily to find our way back to certainty. It is to become more skillful at living without it.
We are obliged to participate in our own becoming.
Running through all of these ideas is one larger proposition.
We are not merely the recipients of our personalities, circumstances, identities, meanings, and lives. We participate in creating them.
We can decide what matters. We can choose purposes. We can make meaning. We can create. We can examine the stories we tell ourselves. We can refuse identities that no longer fit. We can change direction. We can help one another. We can stand for our values. We can invent practices that support the lives we want to live.
None of this makes life easy. Circumstances are real. Loss is real. Biology is real. Other people are real. History is real. Chance is real. We do not control everything that happens to us.
But neither are we merely what happens to us.
That territory between what is given and what we can create has been the subject of my life’s work.
This website is an invitation to explore that territory: through my books, my work on creativity and meaning, my writing on mental health and human difficulty, my ideas about helping, my trainings, and the various ways we might work together.