Someone wiser than myself once said that you define yourself by what you do. Now that I look it up, that person appears to have been Batman. I guess that means that Batman is a brooding rich guy who likes to invent cool gadgets and kick criminal ass in his spare time. Clearly, I don’t know much about Batman, but I suspect that he would list justice near the top of his list of values. As I recall, he is even part of some league to that effect.
I’m not so clear as to what that aphorism might say about me. Yesterday, I kicked the ass of some dishes, so I guess that makes me a dishwasher. Just a few minutes ago, I took the dog for a walk, so maybe I’m a dog walker. Given the amount of time that Wendy and I spend playing gin rummy every morning, you’d think I was a professional card shark, but my win/loss ratio doesn’t support that. Every day, I do many of the things that mammals do, so I must be a mammal. I guess I’m good with that. Beats being a reptile. (No offense to the reptiles among us.)
The sad truth is that if you were to take a wider view of my life, you’d find me spending a lot of time staring off into space, accomplishing nothing. That would seem to make me nothing, but I’m not buying that. I’d like to pretty that image up a little by pointing out that when you see me in those reveries, I am thinking. So I’m a thinker. That half of the time I’m thinking about doughnuts is beside the point.
The fact is, I do value these meditations. I’m kind of a slow thinker, which is to say that I like to mull things over for a while before I come to any conclusions. Like most of us, I am subject to distractions, and my mind is liable to wander more than a little, but that’s not bad either, as it allows thoughts that aren’t really connected to come together into new insights. Often, they come to no satisfactory end, but that’s okay too, as many of the thoughts I have aren’t worthy of the synapses they’re buzzing around in. Also, I think I need a lot of quiet time, as the world is apt to overwhelm me if I pay too much attention to it.
The problem that I’m constantly having is that there are a number of things that matter to me that are getting short shrift in my daily life. Creative expression is important to me, but I seldom create. Rather, I have historically failed to create nearly as much as I feel I ought to have; I am trying to alleviate that with my current efforts.
I care a great deal about the natural world. Yet I spend the vast majority of my day in air-conditioned comfort, and while I know that I am wasting resources, or that I could be recycling, or that I should be advocating for the environment, I sit here and I do very little.
Similarly, I want to help my fellow humans in any way I can. But I fall woefully short in this department too. Sure, I do my best to be kind to those closest to me, but this mostly involves cooking dinner (which I enjoy doing, so maybe it doesn’t count,) or giving Wendy the occasional foot rub. I do the simplest things, I try to be courteous, I empathize with others, and I send little hug emojis to people in my social media feed. But these are all things that require minimal effort on my part, and I’m not sure that having a kind heart counts for anything in a world so in need.
If who we are- and the values that we hold- are revealed by what we do, our day-to-day lives might bear some examination. Looking at my own life, I see it receding in a succession of card games spent with Wendy, a few hours spent each day attempting to advance this project that I’m on, often succumbing to distraction, cooking dinner, and whiling away my evenings watching “our programs,” occasionally punctuated by a trip to the store, or, when Wendy is off, a trip to a local brewery, or a drive in the country. It’s a pretty good life, really. At the least, nothing in my life requires me to spend much time doing things that are anathema to my inner values. I’m lucky in that (I’m lucky in many ways, really,) but I realize that not everyone is so fortunate.
For some of us, our lives are not in accordance with our values at all. Or, more often, one set of values end up taking precedence to the detriment of the others. Take, for example, the person whose need for financial security has overrun their time, leaving their love of family by the wayside. Or the person whose need for companionship has led to conformity and the suppression of their individual expression. Or the person whose love of pleasure has led them to addiction and the loss of higher-minded ideals that can go along with that. There are many ways for our lives to lose accord with our values.
Here I mean our values, and our lives, not the images that others see when they look at us. When someone judges us, they do so through the lens of their own lives, and their judgments more reflect them than you. And no one values being judgmental, though you might think the opposite was true given the way many people behave.
The only person who can know whether your life aligns with your ideals is you. But before you can know that, you have to know what those values are, and knowing one’s self doesn’t seem to be a very popular pastime. I‘ve noticed that when I tell people about “What Matters,” I get a lot of blank stares. It seems strange to me that a person wouldn’t have given this any thought, given that your values ought by all rights to be the guideposts that lead you through life. But I realize that self-knowledge isn’t right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic in our school’s curriculum, and there’s really no one who is teaching it, unless you accidentally stumble into a philosophy class in college, or, like me, take one too many blows to the head. But they say that there’s no time like the present (is there any other time but the present?) so now seems like a good time to start.
So what are your values?
I’m waiting…
Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. We don’t often go poking around in the recesses of our inner being, perhaps because we’re afraid of what might be crawling around down there. Or it could be that it’s just not something that we’re used to doing. If you find that when you look inside, all you see is a disco ball and a roomful of mirrors, there are tools out there that might help. Anticipating this possibility, I’ve taken it upon myself to give a couple of them a little test drive.
When I looked up “personal values inventory” on Google, the first thing that came up was something called the “Personal Values Assessment,” from the Barrett Values Centre. If you want to take their assessment, it’ll cost you something, but I don’t see them using your information for any nefarious purposes. It only takes a few minutes (maybe 15?) but you have to wait for them to email you the results. Here are a few of the “insights” they came up with:
“Your values show
A gift for thinking imaginatively and using your skills to produce new ideas help you to make positive change in the lives of others.
Having meaningful close relationships with others is important in your life and is central in the decisions you make.
You seek to expand your knowledge and insights and are willing to reflect on your inner development.
You show a strong sense of caring and feel empathy for others.
Strong moral standards guide your life and your decisions.
You have a fun-loving approach to life and enjoy sharing good times.
You seek holistic balance by striving to maintain harmony in all aspects of your life.”
Which to my mind flatters me, but your mileage may vary.
Next on the list is https://personalvalu.es/, but whereas the Barrett Values Centre is an organization with clear business goals, this one has the advantage of being free. It’s pretty easy to take, only wastes another 20 minutes of your time, and gives your results immediately after you finish. It’s a little different than the others in that rather than answering questions, you rate one potential value over another. I thought it a little confusing, as sometimes one potential choice seemed almost like the other, and when you’re done, they do try to sell you something, but I ignored that and I wasn’t mad at the results here either.
Perhaps the most comprehensive of these online assessments is the life values inventory at https://www.lifevaluesinventory.org/ This site exists to facilitate research in the field, and as such has more of a scientific kind of feel. It takes longer to complete than the others, but it also offers more information when you’re done. They even go so far as to provide relevant educational materials to help you integrate your values into your life.
Now, having taken up this investigation on your behalf, I will say that, like your daily horoscope or the reading of tea leaves, I think that there’s some thaumaturgy at play any time you attempt to take a little information and make broad statements on its basis. Mind you, I don’t think that serious social science research is on the same plane of necromancy as the other things I just mentioned. And, as I was suggesting in the first place, these assessments are there to help stimulate your own thought process. I’m just saying that they are only useful to the extent that you make them so through self-contemplation. If that isn’t enough, serious soul-searching might require a professional.
What I’d really like you to do, and that I have to do from time to time, is ask yourself, What Matters? What are the things I think are the most important in my life? Write them down. Maybe write a lot of things down, and then go through and choose your favorites. Now, having weighed them one against the other, see how your day-to-day life jibes with them.
This may not be a completely comfortable exercise. As for me, it’s pretty easy to see some of the areas where I’m not really living up to my own ideals. I may, for example, have “A gift for thinking imaginatively and using your skills to produce new ideas help you to make positive change in the lives of others,” but I’m not finding much evidence of this in my actual life. And I might have “a strong sense of caring and feel empathy for others,” but how am I showing this? As I said before, I don’t think that sending the occasional hug emoji counts for much.
I could go on and find fault in every area of my life- this is something I’m good at- but in doing that, I am still not living up to my own values. Heck, love and compassion and all of that begin at home, don’t they? So why not start being nice to myself? Expanding out from there, maybe I could extend it toward the people around me more (I’m always trying to do that, though of course I could do better,) and, if I were to really be the person I feel I ought to be, I guess I’d have to extend it all the way out to that a$$*##^ who cut me off in traffic. It’s something to shoot for.