Here you should understand the term “social situation” very broadly to mean anything that deals with the presence, real or imagined, of other people.10 By this definition, a social situation is everything from sitting next to a stranger to voting for a politician to paying someone for a service or looking at pictures of friends, family, or strangers.

 

Among people who define their selves by inclusion in these groups, to protect the integrity of the group boundary is to protect the self.43

 

From my perspective, Rachel’s identity is a function of her relationships. Rachel was born White, became Black, and then became a “not-Black” woman who wanted to be Black. She is Black if, and only if, she believes she is and she lives in a community of Black people who accept her as such. Assuming she honestly saw herself as Black, while Black people accepted her as Black, she was Black. The moment that other people who were defining her as Black rescinded her membership, she was no longer Black in that community. At the same time, I don’t think she was White because she refused to accept this identity. She occupied a liminal space, a kind of racial purgatory suspended between unreconcilable relationships.

 

Given these benefits, it might be surprising to hear that the National Association of the Deaf did not see this medical device as a miracle. In 1991, the organization wrote an official statement that derided the research and the device. The statement raised a number of concerns, but most relevant for us is this: There is now abundant scientific evidence that, as the deaf community has long contended, it comprises a linguistic and cultural minority. Many Americans, perhaps most, would agree that as a society we should not seek the scientific tools nor use them, if available, to change a child biologically so he or she will belong to the majority rather than the minority—even if we believe that this biological engineering might reduce the burdens the child will bear as a member of a minority.45

 

Some deaf people view themselves as connected to other deaf people through the shared experience of the absence of hearing and the way they navigate the world as a result. The hearing impairment creates relationships that in turn give way to a sense of community, and this community provides social identity.

 

WHAT SHOULD BE CLEAR NOW is that lone individuals can’t define social identities as they see fit. Communities give social identities their power. But these communities can also create pain because individual freedom is, by definition, constrained by social identity. Being left out of—or, maybe worse, being cast out by—a community is an incredibly painful experience. But the need for structure, to exist in relation to other people, requires limits. Without inclusion and exclusion there is no social structure. To be a woman or man, White, Asian American, or Black, German, or Swiss or any other social identity requires acceptance of a shared view of these identities, not a freely chosen construction of self.

 

The first weekly newspaper was printed in Germany in 1609. By the 1620s, newspapers were a regular feature of the daily life of many literate people.

 

The ability to imagine others sharing the same information and political circumstance, an ability made possible by the printing press, moved us from parochial local identities to identities tied to massive social groups over expansive territories.

 

It might sound strange to suggest that nations exert more influence on the self than, say, life partners or family. Your immediate family is typically the first direct influence on your existence and long-term partners might be the most consistently present, while the “nation” can feel far away. Many of us only engage with the nation when we read the news or vote, but today nations provide the context in which social groups like political parties, families, and professional and educational identities exist. Nation-states exert incredible influence over the context that shapes the operation of more intimate relationships and communities. They set the rules for the way we exchange goods and labor, the support new parents can expect to receive, the way we educate our kids, how much time we are allowed to spend away from work, and countless other aspects of our lives that affect our relationships. Nation-states provide the background

 

against which relationships are created and play out.

 

The State’s ability to use force is so core to its existence that social theorist Max Weber defined the State as a community that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.

 

First, the goal was to extend the definition of marriage to include a legal connection between two people of the same sex, not to push the State out of the business of validating familial relationships. People recognize the power of the State and wanted access to the social benefits that such legal acceptance of their relationships provided.

 

First, meaning is associated with connections. The second theme is time. Both definitions explicitly note the importance of something beyond the present moment, something more than the mere sum of our time on earth. These two themes, connections and time, tie meaning to the ideas of self and freedom. Connections provide coherence. You know who and what you are in the context of social connections. The connections that create self also tie us to people in ways that can transcend place and time. For instance, to be a citizen of a nation is to move beyond the trivial or momentary. You become part of the nation’s history and help construct its future; it’s a part of you and you are a part of it. There is a promise of a kind of immortality in the connections that create self.

 

We enter life not at a beginning, but midstream. The currents and eddies that swirl around us—the stories about our physical place, groups we belong to, rights we enjoy, and responsibilities we must shoulder—don’t fully determine who and what we are, but they do nudge us as we make our way. These stories shape the relationships that define us.

 

Think of it as asking the question, “Why am I doing this?” If the answer is because it needs to be done, the behavior is less likely to contribute to the experience of meaning in life than if you have a future-focused goal.

 

My life is worth living in a cosmic sense. I am a part of something universal and my life contributes to this whole. This question of whether our life is meaningful might just boil down to whether we believe we are connected to something bigger, the sense that we have an important role to play, in some grand drama, or whether we believe that what we are experiencing right this second is all there is.