Discover what is valuable to you
It's hard to define what we value
Put yourself in the shoes of a child whose parents have just told them that they are taking you to an amusement park you’ve wanted to visit for months. The travel plans are set. You can hardly wait. But when you arrive things don’t go quite as planned. There are so many different rides and attractions it hard to understand which will be the most fun for you. You are overwhelmed with choices all of which seem pretty good. How to pick between a dragon themed roller coaster or a show a wizards doing magic? You feel the pressure to make the most of your time so you look at the ratings. After an hour of searching you’ve picked 5 of the top rated attractions. You start waiting in line for the highest rated attraction and it takes forever! As you wait you notice, maybe wizard magic is not all it’s chalked up to me.
Finally, you see the show, it was fun, but maybe not your favorite thing ever. Maybe Dragons really are cooler after all.
The problem here is that the child doesn’t have a grasp of what is most important or valuable to themselves. Instead of jumping in a figuring out which parts of the park are most interesting and intriguing to them, they spend precious hours reviewing the reviews of others. Sure now they know that they like wizard magic less than dragons, but they may have found that out just by jumping onto the first ride that attracted them.
When we don’t know what we value, we risk wasting time or chasing things based on our perceptions of what other’s find valuable. Often what is needed instead is to find what truly excites us independent of the preferences of others. This chapter is about avoiding that trap and learning to recognize what matters to you as an individual. The analogies and writing prompts in the rest of this chapter have helped me come to a better understanding of myself and I hope they will be helpful for others.
Understanding what you value is hard
Feeling confident about your choices requires a deep level of self-understanding, but defining your personal values is not as straightforward as it seems. Have you ever bought an outfit you loved in the store, only for it to sit in your closet unworn? It looks super cool in the context of the store but now you can’t figure out how to pair it with clothing you already own or the color is not quite right. Sure you’d wear it before going naked into the world, but the initial spark that made you want to buy it has faded and never returned. This is but one example pointing to how fickle our preferences, priorities, and values can be. Over time, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes drastically, our whole being changes and so too does our understanding of our value system. This fluidity can make it feel like nailing down what truly matters is impossible.
In light of this, I don’t think it is particularly helpful to nail down a rigid set of rules which exactly define what is valuable to you. You don’t need to have a Moses moment and carry down the stone etched commandments from the mountain which will stand the test of generations, instead you need a working framework to thing about what you value that is flexible to change overtime as you yourself change. There is no guarantee we’ll ever “completely” understand our values no matter how much time or effort we expend in introspection. But what if we start by finding the next step or action toward a future you are hopeful for? When choosing between pretty good alternatives, the worst case is palatable. We may discover that we like dragons more than wizards at amusements parks.
Proposition: Favor your creative inner voice to define “value”
Like so many other concepts, the word “value” is incredibly overloaded. Name an academic discipline or arena of human interaction and you’ll find a concept of value which has it’s own distinct flavor. In many of these arenas, in particular economic and political arenas, pragmatism hangs over the definition of value. But when defining what kinds of things are valuable for ourselves, it is useful or maybe even necessarily to suspend our inner pragmatist and favor creativity. One great way to start is to imagine you ideal scenario. Resist the whispers from pragmatism about “that’s not how the world works,” as we want to enable the full power of creativity.
In the next two paragraphs, I outline scenarios to generate questions which can help you articulate your vision of value by considering what an ideal world might look like. After spending about 10 minutes writing answers to the questions, reread what you have written about your perfect world. I can almost guarantee that part of you will cringe at the writing and perhaps another part will begin a critique showing why many aspects of your perfect world cannot work and cannot come to pass. Yes, some ideas may seem naive but that is okay. This exercise isn’t about practicality. It’s about identifying what you hope for, which is an expression of your value system.
Within all of us is a vision of how things ought to be. We get glimpses of this vision when we observe something happening and think “this isn’t right.” We can use these observations and our reactions to help us understand our own vision of a world which just feels right. Think about recent events in your life which left you noticing the gap between your ideals and reality. Using these answer the following questions. What does a righteous world look like? What would it definitely not look like (sometimes this is easier)?
For me at least, much of what comes to mind when I observe the gap of ideal and reality is when I notice apparent unfair or unjust phenomena. This leads to another set of questions. If you were all powerful, how would the resources of the world be distributed? Given a particular answer to the previous question, would you like to live as a random sampled human from this new world you have generated? In this world how would people interact with each other? What do interpersonal relationships look like?
Reflecting on your answers and thoughts based on this question will start to reveal your value system without you having to explicit state things like “I value fairness.” There is nothing wrong with stating things like that, but the tricky part is what does fairness mean in all situations? Or what does fairness mean in some truly awful situations. We take measurements of our own value system by thinking and writing about realizations of our hope for the best world. Some may find these measurements are more helpful for making choices that align with our value than statements like “I value {input some good thing}.”
Proposition: use your own building blocks
When talking with others about our visions we often use commonly shared building blocks that we pick up from the shared world around us or the shared media that we’ve both consumed. It is often quite satisfying to meet new people which use the same kind of references as ourselves when describing things important to us. But we need to be careful about the ways in which using these references can steer our articulation of what is valuable in ways that aren’t true to ourselves. Suppose you want to espouse some virtue like courage and you refer to some figure heroically going to into battle. But is the subtext of war what you want to be the foundation for your vision of courage? Maybe there is some other context perhaps even unique to you with which you want to convey the notion of courage.
If symbolism from popular media can steer us away from an authentic expression then why does media appear so often in statements about value? That’s likely a topic I’m not at all qualified to talk about but I’ll try to unravel it a bit and what I have to say is not particularly original (which is somewhat ironic given that this section is about not using the symbols of others) or ground breaking. At it’s core we use images and shared symbols to better relate to one another. Consider the situation when a question like “What are you going to do with your life?” is asked. The questioner is usually fishing for a short answer. They may even expect an answer like of expect you to say, “oh you know I’m becoming a scientist” or “I’m in an entrepreneur I’m going to start a business” They may not really be ready for you to dive head long into a philosophical consideration of what you want to do next. The symbols of engineer, scientist and entrepreneur are potent in our culture but they come rebuilt with a set of understandings which may not align with what you value. Scientists discover new things. You may enjoy the experience of learning, but do you value the pursuit of novel findings over the pursuit of learning in general? Similar situations arise when we think about the stereotypes for engineer and entrepreneur.
As we already discussed, it’s a hard problem to know what you authentically value. When I started to try to articulate these issues for myself, I began to realize that I had not intentionally expressed by value system to myself in my own words. Even in my internal monologue I often referenced the lives of people who came before or media I was interested in. Since I wanted to become a mathematician at the time, my mind held images of mathematicians I respected at my university as well as those from films and from the internet I had seen. It’s not that I valued and desired the life of these people so much that their life was my goal and represented my value system. I did not aim to recreate their configuration of life. What I mean is that these are people and images and symbols with which I formed my own vision. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this but I think it behooves one to add their own raw ingredients to their conception of the desired life. For me since I wasn’t writing things or doing creative art at the time, I didn’t really have a hand rolled lexicon or set of symbols or images that could help me add my own twist to the way that my desired life was constructed.
There are many ways to start to build up unique construction blocks for expressing your ideal life. Try to phrase your value system without using historical figures, bits of media, or tropes to define your value system.
Thought experiment: Medieval Village Isekai
I was really fortunate to attend graduate school along side some really interesting and intelligent folks. Because we got along quite well we often engaged in what I viewed as very intriguing conversations. Many of my conversations from that time stayed with me. One that I have returned to when thinking about ways to find what I value is about being spontaneously transported to a medieval village and having to use our current understanding of math to either prove valuable to the king or avoid being accused of witchcraft. I’ve adjusted my telling of the situation a bit to facilitate our current aim.
Suppose that for whatever reason you are transported back in time to a medieval village. This village is special (and also decidedly non-historical) in the sense that the ruler of the village values men and women equally, doesn’t discriminate on the basis or race, and values above all certain knowledge. What kind of knowledge? That’s the amazing part, the ruler values exactly that knowledge related to your desired domain that you want to pursue as a career. Historically, the traveling prophets and potion sellers steer very clean of this village since this village operates on a strict principle: Anyone claiming expertise in a field must prove it or face execution.
What kind of domain would you be willing to put your life on the line in this kind of way? What kinds of strategies would you employ to convince the villagers, their council and their ruler to let you live? Finally, assuming you have a plan to convince them that you are what you say you are (and I think this is the most important part) how do you feel about yourself? I don’t think it is the wrong reaction to say, “Oh you know I’m not really that interested to put my life on the life to pursue knowledge of this discipline.” This situation is extreme. I hope that no one ever has to explain their value while having the threat of violence brought upon them. However, I think feeling confident enough about your direction to commit to it in this silly hypothetical gives interesting signal. This is one way to tell if you are primarily intrinsically or extrinsically motivated by the pursuit of knowledge in this discipline. If you hesitate a little before committing to something in this hypothetical it might mean you are more extrinsically motivated. If this is the case, another question arises. Are there other domains for which you are intrinsically motivated? Sometimes taking an idea to the extreme can uncover more about how you feel authentically.
Writing Prompts
For each of the prompts below consider writing for 15 minutes continuously to answer them. The next day, read and reflect on what you wrote. Ideas may stick out on your second reading as not worthwhile. Throw those out. Other ideas may need more refinement, consider writing about them instead. Other words you wrote may bring up questions. Call a friend and ask to talk about it.
Using a single sentence describe what value means to you?
Without using media or historical references describe a person who lives a life you would value.
In the context of the Medieval Village Isekai, write an outline of a plan to convince the village you are a true expert in a field you are interested in.