Memento Mori, Memento Vivere
Use an exercise about death to help you live a better life.
A couple of days ago, I was sent a new book to review, a daily diary that’s designed to help people live a more self-aware and values-aligned life. Flicking through its pages, I spotted that the authors, both of them psychologists like me, had included a variety of values-clarification and values-tracking exercises throughout. That’s incredibly helpful, because it can be challenging to summarise our core values — it’s not something that we’re asked to do very often.
But modern life has made awareness of our values even tougher. We know how we’re supposed to appear. We know which of our behaviours people respond to positively, which they punish and which they reward. We know what kind of photos and posts will get the likes and the retweets.
We know all those things. But we often don’t know (or can’t easily contact) what we actually, genuinely care about. Our ability to articulate our values has severely atrophied in these performative, distracting, hectic times. Deprived of the inner bandwidth to connect with what we value, we drop back into mindlessly performing for other people. We confuse true values with societally imposed goals.
About halfway through this diary, I encountered one of my favourite values clarification…
