Few manage to live by their values day-by-day, moment-by-moment. Which is to say, few live meaning-packed lives. Why's that?

I'll break it down, starting with large-scale, societal trends, but quickly zooming into problems that crop up in individual social spaces—the things which, as social designers, we must be aware of and avoid in our designs. I'll end by mentioning a few sources of inevitable meaninglessness—meaninglessness that can't be removed from life, even in a society with better social systems.

Products mostly live or die within a larger social system we call "the market"; users mostly find products through marketing and word-of-mouth; and other non-market social spaces often live or die within a nest of social systems we call "democracy".

At these large scales, these meta-social systems don't support meaning very well. What thrives under the market or in various democratic systems are not the most meaningful social spaces but those that drive the most purchases, votes, or other engagements, or which serve the people who generate the most purchases, votes, or other engagements. I covered this in detail in

What we would want, ideally, would be systems that help people find the smaller systems that would best support what's meaningful to them—helps them discover new scenes, new practices to try with existing friends, etc. A kind of values-based market and marketing.

In fact, we have a kind of an opposite meta system that works by promising people meaning, promising them adventure and love, and so on. While selling them on things that make things even more meaningless. We promise adventure and sell blue jeans. We promise love, and sell breath mints and Tinder. We promise impact, and sell desk jobs.

Why do we have this bad system, and not the one that'd address meaninglessness? This is a bit of a puzzle. Here are three possibilities:

One deeper explanation that underlies all of these is that a design culture around values and meaning has not yet spread. We still live mainly in a culture designed around goals, preferences, roles, etc. I talk about the evolution of new design cultures over time in my essay Nothing to Be Done.

From a design perspective, that big picture view isn't so helpful. We need to zoom in, and ask why individual social designs end up meaningless. The answer is surprisingly simple.

There are two ways our environments fail to support our values.

I'll define each of these and give examples, then show why these problems cannot be entirely avoided—why improving an environment for one value will often make it worse for another value.

Debbi's locked in a social situation where she can't follow her values. She may have taken her job because of her values, but now that she works there, she don't have much agency.

A situation like Debbi's can happen in many kinds of high stakes environments—whether the threat is one of violence, economic hardship, becoming an outcast, etc.

A situation like Edward's doesn't just occur in work and compulsory schooling environments, but also in social scenes where there are strong norms.

When other, non-value concerns make it hard to live by our values, I call that crowding out. (See

Every person operating a social environment has limited information, limited ability to figure things out on their own, and a limited set of actions available to them, that are acceptable in that environment.

Even if you make sure to protect the values you're designing around from crowding out and missing affordances, some meaninglessness will inevitably slip into the environment you're making. Below are three reasons for this.

Here's a sad fact about crowding out: it occurs even in ideally designed systems. Norms Inevitably Arise, and Crowd Out Values.

Social designers never get to design all of the rules and roles in social environment. You can make some rules, but other rules will emerge as the agents within the system develop expectations for each other, put pressure on each other, and sanction each other to accomplish their own goals within the system.

Often, the designer can predict the norms that will arise, if they give some thought to this possibility during their design process. One job of a social designer is to anticipate norms that will arise, and which values they will interfere with, and to make sure the most important values are safe.

In I wrote:

Unfortunately, there's also a cost to this. These systems are less malleable by the players, and thus less adaptable to different values.

One way people deal with this is by introducing a variety of social games into a scene: if you can get your friends dancing when you want to dance, or talking when you want to talk, you can make room for more of your values than if your friends only do one or the other. But to do this, all your friends must know all these different games and rules, and you need a meta game for deciding when to switch games. This grates against many of the above advantages of formality.

Another approach is to have different scenes—some friends can dance, some friends have intellectual debates. Different systems in different scenes. This has its own drawbacks. One of them, is that even with different scenes, you won’t be able to fit people precisely.

A third approach is to have friends who can discuss values, and invent or modify games on the fly. This, also, has drawbacks in terms of inclusivity.

Any social scene you can set up will have a limited repertoire of games, and this limits values that can be supported well. This means that, to the extent our values are social, they can never be completely expressed.

Some people feel like they're in situations like Debbi's and Edwards's (above) this even when they're not. For instance, those who've been in situations of violence, threat or extreme economic hardship in the past may project those situations into the present, even if they're not there. Some people who are raised to be proper and to follow social scripts don't realize when they actually could deviate from the script.

Whether you're actually in such a situation, or merely think that you are, it becomes difficult to improvise according to your values. Often it feels like there is no choice. Instead of conflicted emotions, the person may feel like things are meaningless, fake, an empty performance, or hopeless.

Despite the inevitable sources of meaninglessness, it's clear we can make much more meaningful social designs. The job of a values-based social designer to do this as well as possible. This is what we'll learn in quest 2 and 3.