Today we are lost. I think this applies especially to my generation. People born since around the year 1990. When I say lost, I mean lost in the sense that it feels increasingly hard to decide what is worth doing, especially when it is connected to longer term commitments. Here is one of the reasons why we feel lost today.

As society we normalize to value certain things like love or wealth or health. These norms are hat gives us guidance when deciding what is worth doing. Not all norms are equally strong, so some things are more strongly or more commonly valued than others. Almost everyone strongly values health but only very few people value postage stamps. The reason why not all norms are equally strong is because they are constructed. Norms exist because they are constantly endorsed, sanctioned or reproduced. Therefore, norms are a social product, not an individual one. This is the core of constructivism, which argues that social norms are not just the product of introspection and logical insight, or simply the product of natural factors influencing the human mind and body, but primarily a build through the interaction between people. In the past decades we have witnessed that norm setting is increasingly put on the individual. This is bound to cause uncertainty, because it asks the individual to determine meaning. A task that it cannot do alone. This is why we feel lost. We attempt to decide what is worth doing by ourselves, but do know what is worth doing we must interact with others.

I want to be clear that I do not think social construction has stopped. It is very much taking place, and it is working. One of the strongest norms we currently construct is the norm that people should construct their own norms. That is not a contradiction. A norm can be about who should do the norm setting rather than about what to value. On everything else, for example what to want, what a good life looks like, what to work towards, we are told to decide for ourselves. But on the question of who should engage in norm setting, there are strong norms that tell us we should determine what to value alone. So, the problem is not an absence of norms. The problem is that the norm we have built together instructs each of us to do by ourselves something that only works between people.

How Norms Are Constructed
There are various ways of conceiving what a social construct is and how it comes about, but the most convincing in my opinion combines introspection, realism (that is the notion that norms are somehow determined by the environment), and then finally and most importantly the interaction between people. The reason why most people nowadays see a fork and think it to be useful to eat with is the result of normalizing the understanding that forks are for eating certain food. If you were to go to medieval Europe people might associate the fork with the devil, rather than eating, or if you go back even further to Poseidon. Similarly, a carpet may for some be a convenient place to take off boots, for others it’s a place to sit on, and for children who just read “One Thousand and One Nights” it is something to fly around on. By repeatedly using a fork as something to eat, a carpet as something to fly and a car as something to have standing around doing nothing (because I have a flying carpet now), we normalize a certain social construction. In this case of a thing. If someone were to pee on my carpet, I would sanction them, for example by kindly asking them to stop peeing on my flying carpet. If a group of people repeatedly endorses a behaviour, then this behaviour becomes normalized. This is how we construct norms.

From Things to Values
It is worth pausing on how little distance there is between constructing a thing and constructing a behaviour. When we construct what a fork is, we are not only fixing a meaning, but we are also fixing a behaviour and a small prescription along with it. A fork is not merely an object that happens to be used for eating. It is the thing you should eat with, and someone who uses it to pick their nose at the table has not misunderstood the object, they have done something wrong. The meaning and the rule arrive together.

So when I say that norms extend from things to values, I am not jumping from one kind of thing to another. I am following the same process a little further along. The carpet tells you what to do with the carpet. What you do with the carpet tells you something about how to treat the people standing on it. And how we treat people develops, with enough repetition and enough sanction, into a sense of what is worth caring about at all. Each step is the same mechanism: endorsement, reproduction, sanction.

Norms, then, are not only rules of interaction. They extend to values. If lots of people repeatedly tell us to value our health and generally act in ways that protect their health, then we start valuing health as well. Now health might be an obvious one, but we can also think of the value attached to generosity, hospitality, care, love and so on. These are values that may be part of human existence, but how much people around us endorse and reproduce these values matters, because through their endorsement and reproduction they become important to us. That is how ethical norms are constructed. People tell you not to kill someone else over peeing on your flying carpet and will sanction you if you do so. Also, you see that everyone tries to avoid killing each other over flying carpets. So, you start believing that it is good, or the right thing to do, not to kill each other over peeing on flying carpets.

Realism and Introspection
Ok, but what does this have to do with being lost? If we accept that norms are socially constructed, then the same applies to what we value and what we value for the future. To know what we should do with our lives we must interact with other people. We need to see certain lifestyles endorsed and reproduced and others sanctioned. This way, and in combination with some introspection and some realism, we build an understanding of what is good in the future.

I say that realism and introspection are important for two reasons. First, realism is important to realize that constructing the fork as a useful tool to eat broth just does not work. We can imagine it as a sign of the devil or of Poseidon, but reality places some limits on what constructions are feasible, and a fork for soup is just not one of them. Second, introspection is important because although as humans we are more similar than we would like to admit, there are still differences. Blindly following social norms of the happy heteronormative family when you are gay makes little sense. Norms are good orientation, but we should still see how they work for us. The example I just gave also highlights the issue with socially constructed norms. They can sustain homophobia by presenting same-sex couples as unnatural, or support unequal and exploitative relations like patriarchy by constructing the female gender as weaker and less rational. Not any construction is a good one, and they must be subject to change. This is however a related but not necessary to discuss here. For now, it is enough to accept that norm give us orientation.

I want to stress the realism and introspection are not just to evaluate norms but do have some force in norm-setting. They do real work. Realism does not just rule things out, it suggests things: bodies get tired, children need looking after, winters are cold. A great deal of what people have ever valued is a sensible response to facts like these. Introspection also does more than detect a mismatch between social norms and individual inclinations. It can produce material. It is how you notice that you are happiest around other people, or that you cannot stand being told what to do, or that the thing everyone around you is chasing has no appeal to you.

Still there is a difference between knowing what makes you happy or unhappy, and knowing whether it is worth doing. There are many things we may find enjoyable but still do not do them because they are not worth doing. Likewise, there may be things that make us unhappy, but we do them despite that because they are worth doing. Introspection can tell us what works for us but social construction is necessary whether something is worth doing, whether it is valuable enough to do despite making us unhappy or so bad that we should not do it even if it makes us happy. To summarize this asymmetry, it can be said that alone you can work out what you want, and you can rule out a great deal of nonsense, but you cannot make any of it matter.

Why We Feel Lost
Bein able to determine what matters is what we lack today. We have constructed who should do the norm setting in a way that places the responsibility to determine what we should value on the individual. People are asked to come up for themselves with what they think is good for their future.

On the surface this sounds lovely. Everyone can decide for themselves what they value in the now or for the future to be like and work towards it. But what if we are now task with deciding why we value one thing over another. We are left with introspection and realism. I value happiness because I decided for myself to be healthy is good. But we if constructivists are correct then this is not how we build strong understandings of what to value. Only introspection will leave us with weak norms that we constantly question, revise or abandon. We are lost and faced with uncertainty.

Putting Everything Together
So, the reason we feel lost is not that norms have disappeared. It is that the one norm we have built about who sets norms hands each of us a task that cannot be done in the way it tells us to do it. We have decided on a mechanism for setting the norms which, applied alone, cannot really produce any norms. You cannot decide what you should value for yourself. You need the interaction with others. Denying that is what makes us lost.

I believe this is a strong explanation why people struggle so much with making long term commitments these days. I have no clue whether I should value finding a long-term partner or be single. I have no clue whether I should find a high paying job, a meaningful job, or maybe even no job or a bad job that leaves enough free time to do other things. I don’t know whether I should stay in one place that I know well or if I should move around and see and live in new places. The reason why we are so uncertain is because we try to define for ourselves which of these, we should value. But that is not how we arrive at value. We value things because people tell us to value them and reproduce what they say. The consequence of not following this mechanism is uncertainty, the constant questioning of whether decisions made were the right once leaving us lost and anxious.