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:

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

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

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).

Now, imagine someone stands before you, with honesty as an attentional policy.

In all three cases, their honesty counts as an attentional policy, so long as they decided to be honest "regularly, or when in a certain context, without doing a cost-benefit analysis each time".

But let's pull them apart:

Here's one way to say what happened:

I'm unsatisfied with this, because I doubt instrumental and intrinsic values can be systematically separated. So, here's a better way to say it:

This category, of diffusely-beneficial, attentional policies (DAPs) is super interesting. As I'll show, it's closely related to what we find meaningful, and also to what we call wisdom.

It's instructive to redo the story above, but with a social vision:

A way to describe this shift, is Andrew went from having a highly theoretical idea about honesty, to having a concrete experience of honesty.

On Monday, honesty is part of Andrew's vision of a good life. It's a theoretical part of the good life—a good life he imagines in the future. By Tuesday, honesty's relocated in his mind. It's now part of a concrete, lived experience of the good life—part of the the good life in practice. It's benefits aren't something imagined, but something known.

On both days, Andrew thinks of honesty as part of the good life. Perhaps that's why both nuggets and visions get called "values".

But for Andrew, there's a shift in justifications for his honesty. On Monday, his honesty has a focused benefit: saving democracy and civil society. His reasoning for being honest

So, it's only on Tuesday that honesty has diffuse, untracked benefits. This shows that, when something is motivated by a social vision, it isn't a DAP: saying something has a pointy justification is the same as saying it has focused, tracked benefits.

In the next two sections, I'll show problems with my theory as presented, and show how I think they can be overcome.

First, I've said that DAPs are closely related to what's meaningful. Yet Andrew would say that his actions on Monday were also meaningful, just in a different way. Where does Andrew's meaning on Monday come from?

I think it doesn't come from his vision-motivated-action, but from "taking action, grappling with the biggest problem he sees in the world" — a DAP that Andrew already has on Monday. To confirm this, we could ask him:

If we get a "yes" to these questions, it suggests his meaning comes from DAPs, not social visions.

Andrew is a hypothetical character, but you can do this research yourself:

Yet, even if you believe the above, it seems DAPs don't perfectly map what's meaningful to people.

Although Brenda sees this is a meaningful and right way to live, she can't make a policy of it. This diffusely-beneficial, attentional meaning nugget won't be a DAP for her, at least until she figures out how to make it one.

Will Carla experience her automatic vulnerability as meaningful? I doubt it. Perhaps it will later become meaningful, if vulnerability is something she must attend to (e.g., because she ceases to really know herself, or changes friend groups).

It appears that some meaningful things aren't DAPs; and some important things aren't meaningful! Shouldn't we abandon the DAP, to map out a larger space—one that includes fleeting experiences like Brenda's, and non-attentive things, like Carla's vulnerability?

First of all, I don't believe we miss too much with DAPs:

But more importantly, it's only in the realm of DAPs that we exercise our judgement, about the trade-offs of adopting a policy. This judgement—about the best way someone's found to live their best life—is what we're really tuned into, when we listen to their DAPs.

DAPs represent more than just their experience of meaning, or our outside-view guess about what's important to them.

DAPs represent the blossoming of a person's human judgement, into a concrete, lived experience of the good life. This isn't just meaning, it also has something to do with wisdom.

Putting Andrew and Carla together, we get my central claim: people experience meaning when living by their DAPs (or adopting new ones). DAPs (and not social visions) are at the center of meaning.

Our current social systems aren't designed around meaning and wisdom. They're mostly about eliciting 'revealed preferences'—measured by engagement metrics like clicks and views, dollars and votes.

One might hope that people's meaning nuggets would be reflected in their clicks and views, dollars and votes. But if engagement was a good way to measure meaning, these systems (which are quite sensitive to what drives more purchases, and more clicks) would deliver ever more meaningful work, and ever more meaningful lives.

They aren't. Instead, politics gets polluted by bogus and attractive social visions. Marketers invent goals, desires, and false promises of meaning. By these mechanisms, and many more, our systems are gamed away from what should be the baseline—a life rich with meaning for every citizen.

My hope is that if, instead, we design social networks, political systems, and economic systems around DAPs—we'll support people in what they find meaningful and right for themselves. We can hew much closer to that baseline.

In modern philosophy, especially meta-ethics, values are often considered as evaluative criteria or attitudes. Here, I treat them as policies, but I think these definitions are interchangeable. An evaluative attitude or criterion can be viewed as something a person does when making an evaluation or choice.

So, DAPs are a mapping of work by other philosophers into the realm of action, including especially work by Charles Taylor (who calls them "strong evaluative terms"), and Ruth Chang (who calls them "values").

My mapping of these attitudes or criteria into the realm of action is probably descended from James J Gibson's theory of affordances. But I doubt it would have occurred to me without the precedent of a similar theory, bridging criteria and action, by J David Velleman, wherein self-understandings (including values) become tools used for choice-making.

Other, closely-related strands of work are those of Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Elizabeth Anderson.