<aside> 👉 Please read the new version: Values, Preferences, & Meaning

</aside>

People use the term "values" to mean different things. Sometimes it's visions of what's right for everyone, or for a group—what a family should be like, how a father should behave, etc. Other times, it's things that feel right and meaningful when you do them—such as being vulnerable, taking stage, being creative, etc.

Imagine we could clearly separate them:

• People argue a lot about social visions ("Make America Great Again" vs "Defund the Police"). But when I say "Make America Great Again", I take sides on an ideological battleground. Imagine, instead, I say "there's something meaningful for me about small town community, and it's disappearing". People would argue less, in a politics of meaning nuggets.
• Beyond politics, a common cause of current crises (in ecosystems, global economics, media, etc) is systems designed around metrics (dollars, clicks, views, votes) that have little to do with life meaning. These systems neglect our meaning nuggets, leading to depression, isolation of the elderly, soul crushing workplaces. Systems that support meaning nuggets could solve these problems.

I believe these are real possibilities. Here I'll show: (a) that social visions and meaning nuggets aren't two sides of the same coin—we often have one without the other; (b) that the nuggets are more central to our experience of meaning; (c) that our sense of meaning has regularity to it—that our meaning nuggets are listable* , collectable, and can be used for design.

To do this, I build on work by various philosophers and psychologists, credited at the end.

New Skeleton

1. Attentional Policies

Before getting to meaning nuggets, I must set the stage with a larger category—what I'll call attentional policies. Only some attentional policies will turn out to be meaningful.

By policy I mean an action (like "taking out the trash on Tuesdays", "calling mom on Sundays", or "running new contracts past the lawyer") done regularly, or when in a certain context, without doing a cost-benefit analysis each time. *

Attentional policies, then, are policies about how to think about a thing, what to pay attention to in a context, or what to look for in selecting an action. "Taking out the trash on Tuesdays" is a normal policy, but "experiencing every step and breath while doing my chores" or "looking for kind words when giving feedback"—these are attentional policies.

Attentional policies can be about how to treat people (honestly, openly, generously, without mercy); how to approach things (with reverence, with levity, with skepticism); how to keep things (simple, sensual, rocking, full of surprise); or how to act more generally (boldly, thoughtfully, carefully); etc.

If I had a galaxy brain, I'd have a million attentional policies, all at once. Talking to colleagues at work, I might craft my words to be kind, honest, tactful, humble, and inspiring—and try to be precise in my speech, aware of how each word lands, aware of my own feelings, and transparent with them. And calm and centered, but also passionate. And physically graceful, like a dancer.

I'd find this impossible. These policies all compete for my attention. So, I make decisions—often intuitively, unconsciously—about what to attend to, in each context. Adopting one policy (say, humility) means downgrading some other thing I could have paid attention to (like being funny).

2. Diffusely-Beneficial Attentional Policies