The Desire for Significance
The why and effects of being the hero of our stories
Significance. As human beings, we have a bone-deep desire to have an effect, a change to the environment we’re in, that is noticeable by others. The greater the effect, or significance, the greater the signal is to those around us, even unto future appraisals by still others, that what we have done has merit, that it is important.
Recently, I’ve gotten into an obsessive spiral of reading novels in the genre called “litRPG.” For anyone who has played some form of Role-Playing-Game like Dungeons and Dragons, there is a high likelihood that at some point the mental game of “wouldn’t it be cool if I turned into my character in real life?” has been played in the land of imagination. The litRPG genre runs with that, complete with status charts. One author in particular uses Significance as a part of their magic system, for which its expenditure is done to achieve increasingly ridiculous feats of power that have effects on the world they’re in. As with all literature, there are tropes that come along for the ride, and then there’s the ideas that get explored. The idea of one’s potential impact, or significance, as an expendable force is fascinating to me.
Outside of fantasy novels and historically inaccurate movies (I still love “Gladiator”), significance drives a great deal of our behavior, particularly the stories we tell about ourselves.
“So the brain creates our experience of the world. Next it conjures us, the self at its centre. It is a hero-maker, manufacturing both the illusion of self and its gripping narrative, framing our life as a journey towards a hopeful destination. The story it tells even has a narrator, an inner voice that chirrups away, performing a live improvisation of our autobiography.” -Will Storr, The Status Game
As I’ve written about elsewhere, behavior largely serves two purposes: as a way to actively error-correct our predictions about the world by engaging within and as it, and to signal to others our belonging to a shared reality fueled by declarations of identity and selective verbiage.
Error-correction:
Consider that we live in the world not as separate entities from it, but deeply embedded as material beings through our embodied nature in connection with others. Our brain/body systems operate as predictive-processing machines, attempting to best allocate limited resources for future experiences, which are based on past experiences and the perception of the present. Behavior, our external actions, serve as a way of testing, or error-correcting, the inevitability of our being wrong to some degree.
This is why we get upset when people don’t respond the way we want or expect, because our predictive picture of the world is in error. The degree of disconnect between expectations and what actually happens will result in everything from mild discomfort and judgment if a person doesn’t greet us back, to a deep sense of betrayal when an intimate partner of some form violates a shared agreement. Our emotional reactions, and subsequent further behavior based in part on them, are based on a bodily interpretation of what we believe “should have” happened and the felt sense that the world went awry.
Ongoing behavior in this sense seeks to redress the perceived imbalance created between expectation and actuality, by often either removing the offending experience or seeking to make it “right” by getting the other person or persons to act the way we desire.
Group signaling:
Behavior, in all its forms of emotion/thought/action, also seeks to address social-bonding. This is because we are fundamentally social beings, through which we derive our sense of self and develop/construct meaning and purpose:
“Every relationship makes a demand of you; they demand that you play your part. We all co-construct the reality that constitutes the play of our lives, and in doing so we continually make and remake the selves, including our own, that are the players.” -Brian Lowery, Selfless
As well, we are, within the interconnectivity of our social lives, quite concerned with status. We seek to elevate ourselves in the eyes of those we’ve deemed contemporaries, and by doing so, have a great degree of perceived control over the resources (in all their forms) we have access to. Here we come back to predictive-processing, since by having greater perceived control, we then have a greater sense that our beliefs about the world, our place in it, and how things occur, are increasingly predictable or consistent.
Greater consistency is helped along by connecting with those of like mind and behavior, creating, as we do, a shared enforced reality. That enforcement is done through rituals of all kinds, a shared verbiage, and, quite often, a shared sense in which the aligned group is somehow contrary to or in competition with others. Religious groups are easy examples of this, but they are functionally no different than every other group with a shared purpose, shortened to an easily declared identity. “I’m one of you!” is the underlying shout behind every shared laugh, meeting, and unique verbal or terminology usage.
“The dream of the mind projects value onto these symbols – so much value we can be driven to fight and die for them. It tells us a story that says they’re of glorious importance: that our gods are real and our pursuit of them is holy. It makes us feel, not like players of games, but heroes on journeys towards destinations of wonder. We believe this story. It’s woven into our perception of reality. It feels no less real than the planet, air and sky. But the truth of human life is that it’s a set of hallucinatory games organised around symbols. These games are an act of shared imagination. They come into being in the neural realms of those with whom we choose to play – our kin, our tribe, our people. These are the ones who truly understand us, who scratch the same meanings as we do into the walls of the world.” -Will Storr, The Status Game
The Heroes of our Hubris
The competition aspect of the group signaling is what brings us full circle to significance. It is not enough to simply belong; we must also, quite often, not belong. This is where we get into what is often referred to as tribalism, but the lamenting over tribalism often ignores the fundamental reality that, like all cognitive biases, thinking tribally or group-first, is not something we choose to do; it’s simply a basic condition of thinking itself. As with other biases, or cognitive heuristics, the goal of thoughtful reflective ethical practice is not getting rid of tribal influences (since this is impossible), but increasingly determining the degree of the influence and bringing that awareness into reflectively critical decision-making. Just as with confirmation bias, where acknowledging its inevitability should lead to a non-small degree of epistemic humility, so the tribal influence should lead to holding our judgments about an “other” far more loosely.
Alas, such humility is not only a difficult thing to do, it simply doesn’t feel as good as passionately declaring one’s superiority on a particular identity-aligned point. To belong to a group is often only made significant when knowing what the group is standing against. Knowing what a group is fighting for sets up the foundation for the status games to be played, where one’s place in the group is elevated or not based on the degree to which one fights “the true fight.” Thus, to be an “ally” isn’t just to use the term, but to highlight through action what you’re doing to fight the battles associated with being with the group.
Now, taking on what one perceives as being contrary to ethics and the desires of a particular manifestation of a future society is quite reasonable, if frankly just as properly basic to our humanity as the cognitive biases that fuel are intuitive blindness to how the mind works. There are times when criticizing human nature, when the comment inevitably gets made about applying these criticisms to myself. To that I say, absolutely! This is foundational to why I try not to take myself too seriously, though doing so doesn’t mean I don’t seriously consider what matters to me. It’s simply that in selecting what battles to fight, I’m trying, to varying degrees of success, to not elevate what I’m doing to the point of caricature.
You are not fighting “capitalism” by posting poorly informed memes about socialism on the corporate-controlled and mediated internet. You are not fighting “fascism” by mocking those in leadership who supposedly fall into that camp, and certainly not doing so by refusing to vote. Guess what? None of the people on the receiving end of those memes and mockery care even a little about you. They will go about their lives blindly, oblivious to your existence. There’s a scene from “The Circle” by Dave Eggers where well-meaning but socially oblivious activists seek to counter a warlord by sending a million frowny faces. It’s one of the more hilarious things I’ve read, not least because the activist in question honestly believes it matters.
“I showed them!” No, you didn’t, and whoever “them” is will likely live never being held accountable in any way that you’ll find meaningful. In fact, upon reflection, I’m curious if this is why publicly destroying people’s lives through internet-fueled social shaming, as in the case of the tech CEO caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert, is so enticing to people. At some level, we know that most of our actions will not slay the colossal beasts of our mind’s creation, and so we assuage our powerlessness by taking glee at whatever small destruction we can incur.
That over-active dedication to salting the earth of people’s lives for small infractions is only one example of why we should work at acknowledging our biased need for significance. Another is the wasted resources we allocate. There’s the emotional upheaval in our own lives, where the personal castigation and invoked anxiety about not slaying the monster lead to unnecessary suffering for us. Connected to this are the missed opportunities for personal growth and community engagement that have immediate and ripple effects.
Are the quiet conversations with friends, in community events that don’t reach the news, any less profound because they weren’t centered on fighting monsters larger than yourself? Is the person who lives their quiet life taking care of their family even amidst the supposed “machine of capitalism” any less of a hero if nobody knows their name or laughs at a meme they posted? A tree falling in the forest may not make a sound if there’s nobody to hear it, but it will still have fallen.
The echoes of our actions will often not be known to us, not least because they’ll be too small to measure, but that doesn’t make our daily lives any less potentially meaningful. Our significance is not only to be found in connecting our actions to fighting an amorphous and likely, in part, mythical beast, but in the everyday qualities of treating those around us, including ourselves, with respect and a thoughtful appreciation for their shared attempt at meaning-making. To the person whose life was benefited by an encouraging word, a shared smile, a helpful hand, they’ll have considered the time and energy well spent without concern over whether they were part of a larger fight.