I am feeling very called-out by this Joseph Heath essay on the Culture novels.
Given all these options, how do you choose? More fundamentally, who are you? What is it that creates your identity, or that makes you distinctive? If we reflect upon our own lives, the significant choices we have made were all in important ways informed by the constraints we are subject to, the hand that we were dealt: our natural talents, our gender, the country that we were born in. Once the constraints are gone, what basis is there for choosing one path over another?
This is the problem that existentialist writers, like Albert Camus, grappled with. The paradox of freedom is that it deprives choice of all meaningfulness. The answer that Camus recommended was absurdism – simply embracing the paradox. Few have followed him on this path. Sociologically, there are generally two ways in which citizens of modern societies resolve the crisis of meaning. The first is by choosing to embrace a traditional identity – call this “neotraditionalism” – celebrating the supposed authenticity of an ascriptive category. Most religious fundamentalism has this structure, but it also takes more benign forms, such as the suburban American who rediscovers his Celtic heritage, names his child Cahal or Aidan, and takes up residence at the local Irish pub. The other option is moral affirmation of freedom itself, as the sole meaningful value. This is often accompanied by a proselytizing desire to bring freedom to others.17
Because of this, there is a very powerful tendency within liberal societies for the development of precisely the type of “secular evangelism” that Banks described. It acquires a peculiar urgency, because it serves to resolve a powerful tension, indeed to resolve an identity crisis, within modern cultures. It often becomes strident, in part due to a lingering suspicion that it is not strong enough to support the weight that it is being forced to bear.
There’s already a well-known identity for people who seek struggle for the sake of struggle: gamer.
My usual serious position on this is that the need for “purpose” is filled by picking goals and then working to achieve them. Which is basically gaming.
I may be overestimating other people’s ability to gain fulfillment from picking arbitrary goals and then achieving them, though. I may also be overestimating people’s ability to achieve arbitrary goals.
Actually arbitrary goals? Yeah, that’s so rare as to be not-worth-considering. Even a very bored, aimless person isn’t going to be happy if you dump a bucket of sand on his desk and tell him to count the grains.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, the “picking the goals” part matters too. The Buridan’s Ass problem is the real issue here. Under most circumstances, it’s pretty damn hard to go for an arbitrary goal if you yourself feel that it’s arbitrary.)
That said: it’s not that hard to make actually-pretty-damn-arbitrary goals seem compelling and appealing if you dress them up right. Flavor matters, narrative matters, bells and whistles matter, identity hooks matter. This is the engine that makes grindy video games run. And, frankly, a lot of my social agenda boils down to “get a good content team to create the right flavor and skinning for useful goals and also for arbitrary goals.”