Comment from Rebecca Goldstein
As you say, Colin, “so many things to choose from, so many traits to cultivate and exploit!” What we want, in identifying our human essence, is something broad enough to take in the multiplicity of the radically different forms of human life—something that covers the “manual workers, artists, scientists, priests, musicians, entrepreneurs,” not to speak of the autocrats, saints, body builders, and pickup artists. What is the thing we have in common that motivates the “too-many” forms of human life? I suggest that it’s the human longing to justify, for ourselves, the self-mattering that Spinoza called conatus and that’s the organizing principle of all the instincts, baked into all of of life, biology’s answer to the entropy of physics, as Schrodinger taught us. Because we’re the creatures who can’t passively accept biology’s answer, at least in our own case—which is the only case we’re typically exercised over—we produce a cascade of behaviors that can’t be explained using the usual Darwinian mechanisms.
Not sure whether this is related. But this brought to mind something I jotted down years ago while listening to a Freakonomics episode (How to Manage Your Goal Hierarchy / Ep. 458). Twenty-nine minutes in, it was stated that psychologist Tim Beck, at age 100 (now deceased), was working on his magnum opus, and it was loosely described this way: The fundamental drive of what all people want and what gets us far in life but also gets us into trouble, is the need for self esteem.
It sounds like the same idea.