Analysing My Values
Are my existing values even important enough for me?
I’ve been thinking about values for quite a while as you can from my recent article (4 Values That Guide Me). Today, I asked myself these successive questions — “What else do you value?”, “Are all of them good values to have?”, “Which ones are the bad ones?”. Although I have talked about the 4 values that guide me, they aren’t the only values I carry but they are much higher on the priority list than the rest of values. I want to dig into the other values that also make up my personality.
Before we dive into it, there’s a fundamental question we need to ask…
What exactly is a value?
In simple words, according to my interpretation, values are a set of behaviors and patterns of responses to certain events around us/inside our heads.
Values can also be described as the things we literally ‘value’. Which ultimately leads to us behaving and responding to events around us/inside our heads.
What exactly qualifies a value as a ‘good’ value?
We usually ‘value’ things when we think they add to our long-term happiness or sense of meaning. Why do we always come up with an excuse every time one of our values is being questioned to justify the value? Why don’t we just change the status of the set of behaviors and response patterns from ‘good value’ to ‘bad value’. I realized that we actually just trick ourselves into valuing many of these things.
Why is it so difficult?
Even if we come across enough evidence that a particular value doesn’t add to our long-term happiness or sense of meaning, we cling on to it because it’s difficult to change.
It is really difficult to turn that switch off on any current values. It fundamentally questions our self-identity. “If I am not my values, my memory, my body, who exactly am I?”. The questions about our body or our memories being our identity are easily swept off. Because if we’re asked “Will you still be the same person if you lost your body?”, most of us would say yes to that, “I’ll be the same Nilay even if I didn’t have my limbs”. This is because we’ll act the same way and aim for similar things and like the same things without our limbs.
The answers to the same question about your memories will likely be the same. But the answers will be surprisingly different if we ask ourselves if we would be the same person with different values.
This is because memories are a record of our actions and our actions are a result of our values. We’ll most probably create similar memories if our values are the same. But if the values are changed, you lose your ‘me-ness’. If you respond to situations differently than ‘you’ would do, it means it (kind of) wasn’t you, right?
I think we can thus conclude that the things we really think are ‘us’ are our values.
In that case, why would you change the very fundamental aspects of your personality? A part of your brain is certain to resist this change. You would have to become a slightly different person, which is scary. It’s like the ‘old you’, so to say, will fade away. And this to-be ‘old you’ is what you are right now! Why would you threaten your own existence by changing your values?
As a result, we end up convincing ourselves to the common things our culture has taught us to value, like money. I think we metaphorically dawn these ‘change resisting blinders’ to keep ourselves from changing our values.
The Favorites list of Values
Let’s consider that all the values we follow are put in a list.This list doesn’t have a fixed order though, the rankings of our values change over time. For example,we start prioritizing selfishness over honesty after a terrible punishment for being honest. We changed the importance/ranking of the values — honesty, selfishness.
However, if a value is very low on our ranks, we start excluding it slowly. Meaning, it won’t significantly impact our actions/behavior anymore. Let’s say that our favorites list is the list of all values that do have a visible effect on our actions.
Here’s an equation to explain the relationship between our list of perceived good values and the effect of their rank in the Personal Value Set. Score is a variable dependent on the rank. The higher a value is on your favorites list, the higher its score is.
Value*Score = Action
The Score is the multiplier of a value. A high enough score ensures the translation of value into action, but a relatively lower score will decrease the likeliness of the value being translated into action.
For example, a person may choose to give a higher mental score to honesty than respect. This will result in them speaking the truth even if it means disrespecting someone. This does not mean that the person has excluded the value from her favorites list. It just means that because of a lower score as compared to honesty, respect had a lesser likeliness of being translated into actions. This switch is possible between values that aren’t far apart on the rankings. If, however, one of the values is too low on the list the switch becomes more difficult.
So which values should I include in my favorites?
We can hold a limited number of values strongly enough that they manifest into actual behavior. And we’re looking for the ‘good ones’ (The ones that give us a stronger sense of meaning and happiness). I’d sure like to go on such a self-exploration thought-journey.
I’ll be covering different values that are candidates for being my values including money, romantic love, kindness, etc. in the coming weeks. Consider it a ‘Review Series for Values’ if you wish. I may or may not answer the question “is it a good value to have?” by the end of each article. This series is not an advice of any kind, it’s a personal exploration that I’m putting in words. The answers can of course be different for you.
Additional Reading and Watching
Why did I keep saying ‘long-term happiness and sense of meaning’? Why didn’t I just say long-term happiness? This TED talk explains why — There’s more to life than being happy.
