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What are your values?
The book Emotional Agility ascribes the following characteristics to values:
- They are freely chosen
- They are not goals - they are ongoing, rather that fixed
- They guide you, rather than constrain you
And suggests reflecting on the following questions to identify what your values are, if you don't know:
- Deep down, what matters to me?
- What relationships do I want to build?
- What do I want my life to be about?
- What kinds of situations make me feel the most alive?
- If you woke up and all your material concerns were taken care of, what would you do?
So - what are your values? Did you know them prior to this post, and if so, when did you figure it out?
Curiosity, creativity, and compassion.
Professionally, the Nolan Principles of Public Life and not just because I have to, but because they're mostly good. I'm in a weird situation where I'm not leading anyone, and I'm not really in public office, but multiple organisations I work with want me to follow these and say that I'm following them which is fine because mostly it's stuff that should be blindingly obvious. Really weird that we needed to tell eg politicians that dishonesty is bad please stop doing it.
I haven't fully-formed my post yet, but the selflessness aspect I feel is better summed up by John Nash ("A Beautiful Mind" is a great movie):
America puts too much emphasis on the self, and not thinking about the group.
I suppose understanding and care are some of my primary values. I strive to understand people, their motivations, and the reasoning for their actions. From there I want to make things better for them.
I was socially stunted in my youth as a child of an abusive parent and a constant target of bullying. We all have a certain persona we embody when it comes to mine it ended up being less of a naturally grown one had to be intentionally built up. While everything is natural to me now, it wasn’t always that way and the journey to get here is a story of me trying to learn how to understand people and to communicate with people the ways they need me to.
Part of the reason why this is important to me is because I value personal growth. If you are not growing, you are dying. For most of my life it has manifested in education, but in recent years it has become an attempt to improve my being, particular in regards to my physical and mental health. Right now I am aspiring to improve my social health regarding my ability to have positive interactions with people, in person. It’s kind of a big thing to conquer for me, though, so this will take years.
You know, you might really enjoy the emotional agility book I mentioned. A big part of it is thinking about how our prior experiences affect how we perceive ourselves and trying to understand whether those models are still useful to us. A brief example would be someone who looks in the mirror and sees "the fat kid" - even though they're now an adult who goes to the gym obsessively.
Also, I like the way you said if you're not growing, you're dying. My wife had a very difficult childhood that left her with a lot of emotional scars. Part of what attracted me to her was that even when we met as young adults, she was intentionally trying to understand, to grow, and to adapt and overcome. Her trauma is part of her, but it doesn't define her.
I was also socially stunted as a child and young adult, due to being homeschooled in an emotionally and religiously abusive family, and I relate so much to what you've said about valuing relationships and always wanting to understand people better.
My early life felt extremely lonely. I had to work so hard to learn how to even make friends or have relationships at all, for a long time I thought I would never understand how to have healthy relationships, and now I consider relationship building as a passion of mine. My life is overflowing with support, love, and companionship. Every time I think my social needs are fulfilled, I meet someone else who surprises me by impacting my life significantly. I love people.
I love putting time and energy into establishing trust and vulnerability with friends and partners, helping people become the best version of themselves, and allowing them to help me and inspire me in similar ways. I definitely put more energy into friendships and relationships than I do in any other aspect of life, partially because it feels effortless to me now (and it's fun,) but also because it has proven to be deeply rewarding to my personal growth and mental health.
hey, fellow homeschooler! I also relate really strongly to wanting to learn how to better communicate with and understand people. Psychology and mental health have been a huge special interest for years. It's still a massive work in progress for me, and definitely doesn't feel natural, but that might be the 'tism, not the homeschooling lol.
I am very fortunate in that if I no longer needed money, I would still do the same thing I do now - I would go to my job every day. It fulfills me. One of my values is to make the world a better place, and I believe that my job helps do that. Another strong value is the love of adventure and doing cool stuff, which I also get to do.
I figured these values out in my mid-twenties or so, when I first took a job in the field (more or less by chance) and realized how much I enjoyed it.
I am the same. I like my job, it's interesting and it keeps the cogs in my brain turning. It's not even the subject I went to school for, I am rather lucky in that regard.
In terms of values, if I have to point to one thing that has guided me since I first grasped the concept of morality, it would have to be this:
己所不欲，勿施於人
What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others - from Confucius teaching.
Animal rights.
I've been pescatarian for years but lately I've been on the rapid path toward veganism by phasing out eggs and milk. I'm not a true 'vegan' since I'm willing to eat shellfish and insects because they're mindless even though they're taxonomically "animals".
The facts about the origin of animal products were never unknown to me. But I never felt their moral truth and I never sought it out. It only suddenly wrapped itself around me several years ago and refused to loosen its grip since.
The weird thing about going vegan-ish is that it has made me more tolerant of human moral failure. I'm not at all a tut-tutting vegan/vegetarian at the dinner table: I never try to debate animal rights and shame others for their dietary choices — at least in person with IRL friends and acquaintances. I only mention it here.
Controversial parallel: I find it a bit amusing that so many people like to rag on slaveowners like Thomas Jefferson, who himself had a moral quandary in owning slaves yet thought the institution was incompatible with personal liberty. It's incredibly hard to escape the moral milieu of one's society: we breathe it in like air, unaware. It's really easy for an average person to moralize from the modern era, but were they dropped back in the 1700s, they probably would have accepted it as an unfortunate but unfixable fact of life. I think it's certain that people in the distant future will view us similar to how we view people of the 1700s.
I am generally for people doing whatever they want as long as it doesn't have general negative impact on everyone else. This includes the right to marry who you want, have whatever pronouns you want, aborting a pregnancy and owning firearms. I'm not a fan of when people try and restrict the rights of other people just because that's not the decision that they'd make.
Simply, "treat others the way you'd want to be treated". Basic manners and respect for everyone, remembering that we're all humans with families.
If you want something, then earn it. Everyone needs to chip in to keep society functioning. For most people, this means working a job. It's not always going to be something you love doing. You need to find your own balance between doing something you enjoy, and that thing providing you with the income that you require to live the life that you want. You are not owed anything merely for existing.
There is that, and (proper) socialists understand.
The problem always arises when exploititive forces demand people to work disproportionately hard for less, or spend more on a neccessity than they should.
As someone who identifies more as a hedonist and a nihilist than anything else, this has always been a tough question for me. Ultimately, pleasure is the only thing that seems to matter to me in the midst of the entropy of human existence.
I believe it's how ADHD manifests in my psyche, and my entire life feels like a quest to harness it, because seeking pleasure above all else can easily lead to a vapid, dulled existence. Over time I have learned to use my intrinsic hedonistic motivations to push me towards healthy and fulfilling behaviors whenever possible.
Eating gives pleasure, so I cook amazing, healthy food all the time for myself and my loved ones. Moving around gives pleasure, and so does nature, so I walk around forests and parks whenever I can. Drugs give pleasure, so I microdose many of them, largely avoid any that make me feel worse in the morning, and use them to reveal and navigate uncharted levels of vulnerability with my loved ones. Music gives pleasure, so I sing and dance and go to concerts a lot. Sex gives pleasure, so I have enough that it seems to qualify as exercise, which gives more pleasure! It's also incredibly vulnerable, and I believe human intimacy is the greatest pleasure available.
Pleasure matters to me, and people matter to me.
I want closer relationships with friends than most people seem to want. I want to own property with my friends. I want to live with them and make them coffee and eat breakfast together every day. I want to die with them closely by my side. My friends are my family.
I am most fulfilled, and seem to be the most healthy, happy, and energetic, when I have more than one romantic relationship. Relationships on easy mode are not challenging enough for me. I enjoy being loved and loving someone like that too much to limit it to one person. I'm a better partner in one relationship when I have two.
Supporting someone through a difficult or stressful life event. When someone trusts me enough to tell me some of their most painful thoughts or feelings. When a movie makes me cry. Getting advice from older people who live happy, healthy lives, and feeling more hopeful about my future as a result. When someone notices how much effort I've put into my mental health, and tells me it's working. Planning events where my friends have a lot of fun, especially if they make friends with my other friends, and especially if anyone was lonely and wanted more friends before they met me. Waking up at music festivals on Sunday morning and blasting gospel music so people wake the hell up and pack up their tents. Singing at the top of my lungs while I'm cooking, songs that make me feel happy, or sad, or hopeful. Taking acid and staying up until 7am with my closest people, all of us laughing for so long and so hard that our abs are sore the next day. Having sex on mushrooms. Having sex on acid, ketamine, or MDMA. Having quiet sex on Monday nights. Feeling my 6ft tall partner's hands around my throat and knowing I'm completely safe. Being completely vulnerable, emotionally exposed, yet somehow feeling more relaxed and peaceful than ever.
It certainly appears that intensity, trust, novelty, introspection, growth, and vulnerability make me feel alive.
I am incredibly grateful to have been financially able to take the past 1.5 years or so away from my career, so while I haven't been able to do things like lavish vacations, I have had more of an opportunity to live out this fantasy than most people get. My primary concern right now is how much of it I can retain, now that I'm looking for a job again.
I would spend every day cooking food for my loved ones, spending time with them, and doing everything I can to increase their quality of life, because they always pour back into me in return, and we all greatly benefit from it.
I would spend more time outside. I would travel more. I would buy nice anchovies more often.
EDIT: After writing this comment, I was wondering if my statement about simultaneously being a hedonist and a nihilist was contradictory. Looking it up sent me down a rabbit hole of the various ways the two philosophies intersect, and eventually I found that my choices and behaviors are apparently rooted in Epicureanism, a type of hedonistic egoism. Everything from how I view healthy vs. unhealthy pleasure, how I value friendships, and even how I'm anti-natalist despite having a life that I'm scared to lose because it is overflowing with joy.
When I said "I believe human intimacy is the greatest pleasure available," apparently I was just agreeing with Epicurus.
So, that's interesting. My entire life and all my major choices are based on a philosophy that I didn't know existed up until this moment. And apparently I have some reading to do, because now I'm not sure Epicurus would recommend buying nicer anchovies more often.
:)
If it makes you feel better, later roman philosophers - heavily influenced by Epictetus - expanded on this. Where Epictetus counselled avoiding some unnecessary desires in order to avoid growing dependent on them and thus suffering, the Romans tended to take the view "enjoy it while you have it, as long as you don't grow attached."
The stoic philosopher seneca, for instance, was extremely wealthy. So every night he would just practice imagining that he'd been in a shipwreck and was now poor. That way, if he ever ended up poor, he wouldn't mind - and when he woke up every morning rich, he was happy all over again.
Point being, you're such a natural philosopher that you leapfrogged 300 years of philosophical development!
I'm currently dating someone in a non-monogamous context, and he anticipates wanting a monogamous relationship of his own within the next 3+ years, which would render the current version of our relationship impossible, so this certainly resonates with me.
I guess we're playing with fire when it comes to the part about getting attached. We're incredibly fond of each other. But I was happy before I had him in this context, and I'll be happy afterwards too. Generally I'm non-monogamous because I don't feel entitled to either of my partners, now or in the future, and I know I could lose them at any time. And I'm okay with that.
Ha, you flatter me. I was surprised when I made the connection, because I've never studied or read about philosophy in any formal way. But now that think of it, my dad was always challenging me with philosophical questions from a very early age, and he never went to college or read much either. He didn't have any time for those things, working overtime as a mechanic and a janitor. His brain just naturally worked like that.
As a hilarious side note, one of the philosophical questions my dad always grilled my sister and I with (starting at the absurd age of 6 years old): "If we were climbing a mountain and fell off the side of it, and you were holding onto the cliff with one hand, with me hanging below you holding your other hand, would you drop me so you could save your own life?"
Looking back, this is such a ridiculous and inappropriately intense question to ask a young child, but ultimately it did no damage and I guess it primed me to consider the deeper questions in life. Every time, my sister and I would whine and protest and say we would rather die than let go of his hand in such a predicament. "Stop asking that question, we love you Daddy! We would never drop you!"
He would ask us this question repeatedly over the years, insisting each time that we must let go of his hand if this were to ever happen, until finally we were old enough to agree that, yes, it would be logical to release him into the abyss below in order to save ourselves. Eventually I started throwing it back at him, asking if he would drop me, should I be the one hanging at the bottom. He says he could never drop me because he would rather die along with me than to lose me like that. Come on, Dad, consistency!
I'm cracking up thinking about this whole thing now. My dad is such a weird guy.
Giving people who come after me an easier time learning things than I had is my single biggest motivator. I like building (programming) cool things and making things that people enjoy, but the thing I care about above all others is facilitating other people doing cool things. For me that usually looks like improving documentation, writing blog posts summarizing the results of me taking a long time to track down information, answering questions on the internet (not so much reddit anymore but discord a lot), creating tools that make retrieval of video game information easier, etc.
When you spend effort providing information, how is your sense of satisfaction affected by the longevity, searchability, and readership of the medium? Does attribution matter?
I have mixed feelings personally about giving help on discord, on the one hand it's a nice personal connection, but on the other the information tends to go dark very quickly. People tend not to search on discord, servers eventually shut down, etc.
On the other end of the spectrum, LLMs seem like the ultimate force multiplier for any info I manage to contribute, but all attribution and personal connection is lost.
Where do you land on it?
That's a good question. TBH, it doesn't matter to me that much. If someone has a question and I answer it and then they can do something as a result, I'm happy. But, I definitely also have motivation to write publicly-accessible documentation & blog posts. I don't think I'd be content doing either personalized help or general help in isolation, they feel valuable to me in different ways.
I consider myself a secular humanist and Richard Dawkins helped me realize I was actually an atheist so I guess the best way to describe my beliefs would be the Adam Lee list quoted in Dawkins God Delusion.
Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
In all things, strive to cause no harm.
Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
Always seek to be learning something new.
Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
Question everything.
My guiding value is that all things deserve respect and consideration, and that nothing that is here is just for us.
I like this one. Can you expand on what you mean by "nothing that is here is just for us?"
Two that came to mind:
The first one is basically the golden rule. Easy to say, but hard to do all the time. Just being able to have awareness is a tough one. I fail all the time at this one, but I like to think I try, most of the time.
The second one is hard because it's hard to know things. I frequently make up my mind based on gut feeling, but I prefer to have those feelings based on assumptions that I'm reasonably confident are true. This one definitely has a big influence on how I live my life. I'm a scientist who generates a lot of quantitative data to support anything that I say at work. It's not a coincidence that I'm in this profession. I spend a lot of my free time looking up stats and articles based on news headlines or comments I read online where I'm uncertain about the claims or just want to know more of the background.
I am struggling to write something, because, to me, trying to define yourself in this way is by definition limiting yourself. Curiosity has a lot of place in my life, but I also sometimes don't want to be curious and just go with it. If I had based myself around this, I would've felt bad for doing this. Overcoming is also important to me, in the sense of growing and going past your limitations. But if I was to define myself by it, I would feel like a failure and unme every time I couldn't overcome something. Every definition limits a person's freedom to be something else, because you look at that definition and decide only that is you, and think that you can't be something opposite. Maybe other people don't think this way, but this is my emotional truth.
Life is an ongoing series of acts, emotions, thoughts—it is extremely complex, dynamic, and defies being defined. For this reason, I don't want to risk reducing my lived and to-be-lived experiences to static concepts.
You value openness / openness to experiences. :)
I also value it, but I am particularly prone to accidentally accepting some of my negative qualities as being permanent, which, as you've mentioned, is terrible for personal development.
Currently I am trying to get rid of the perception that I am a person who hates exercise, something I have believed since being a very unpopular, sad child in middle school gym class. Surely, that version of myself should no longer be relevant, but if I don't have openness to the idea that I can be a healthy, active person, I'm mentally stuck back there in gym class. Realizing things like this is often essential to personal development.
Haha, maybe you are right :) I'm bit of a too binary in thinking at times. I tend to think in terms of absolutes regarding values, so maybe that's why I'm hesitant to attribute a definition for myself. Despite that, though, I think leaving a mental door open for change (and not changing also) is important. Maybe other people do it while defining themselves, but that's not the case for me, at least for the moment.
Also, hell yeah, resculpting oneself is very rewarding, and introspection is definitely a very important part of it. Wish you the best, fellow struggler!
I guess if i had to summarize my values, i'd say i value equity and compassion, and i try to extend those things to other people as much as i can. I don't always succeed, actually, i fuck up a lot, but i can always try to be better the next day, yknow? I think that people deserve second and maybe even third chances in most situations, and that everyone is capable of changing for the better. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and not assume malice or ill intent. i think that the needs of the many do indeed outweigh the needs of the few, even when i'm the few and am being inconvenienced.
I've written my values down with my other writing.
I think writing them down is a very good idea.