What are the four most important values for you?
Written as an answer to question to Quora
(1) A practical definition of ‘good’ behaviour
Good and bad are things are roots of all debates. What is good for you, is bad for someone else. You can disagree with me on this view. That’s the difference between a liberal and an orthodox. Things are not black and white. There’s a large swathe of grey area. In this grey area, most of the world operates. So, how do you decide between the good and the bad? By reading an ancient book? By listening to a spiritual leader?
For me, the most important value is this thumb rule — do morally imperative things. What is moral? The things which you’d expect to be done to you, do them to others.
(2) Living in the moment and not for the moment
I’d be a hypocrite if I say that I live in the moment. Every thought I have, is a concoction of events that have happened in the past. I’m perhaps among the most temporally backward people in the planet.
There’s a subtle difference between saving for a rainy day and losing out on life because you intend to create a financial cushion, just because you have to (because everyone else does that). Would you rather save 80% of your income to buy a property, which you’d live in when you are sixty years old, or would you save 40% of your income and spend the rest in buying experiences? I would go for the latter option, any day in my life.
Living for the moment, is doing things with no foresight at all. Living in the moment, means accepting the fact that your life is about the five seconds of past and five seconds of future. Not beating yourself up for past mistakes, and not worrying yourself to death for a future that most probably will not happen.
(3) Happiness is what you feel, before you need more happiness
My life-changing book is “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera. There’s a quote, “That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.” The fundamental problem of human life — it is a straight line and not a circle. Happiness is what you feel before you need more happiness, more of what you already experienced. Nothing repeats itself, and hence, you cannot be happy. Accepting that fact, makes one comfortable with unhappiness (which is the natural state of human existence). Yes, I can hear people saying that being ‘content’ is the key to happiness. It’s a skill I am yet to learn. And until I learn it, I’ll be of the opinion of the circle-and-line philosophy is the way of life.
(4) Fueling your passion
Passion doesn’t pay bills. You maybe in a shitty job, or maybe studying something that doesn’t stimulate your mind. At the end of the month you’d need that cheque and at the end of four years you need that degree. So, what do you do to get by? You find one thing that you like to do, and do it to the point of madness. There are easy things to do and then are hard things. Easy things are passive. Bing watching on Netflix — you’d like that, won’t you? But it’s entirely passive. Now, trying to make a short film, that’s active. Reading one pulp fiction after another, is easy and passive (though less so than consuming video content), but trying to write a 500-word piece everyday, is an active work.
Fuel your passion to get by every day. Without passion people wither. They become carriers of blood, and nothing else. Be a soul, rather than a body. And? What makes a soul is passion.
