… Back to Values?
Maybe you read my previous post on general life advice. You may have done all the values, inner, and outer work, but feel some worry that some of it was built on shaky foundations of fuzzy values. I definitely felt that way myself (still kind of do).
In my experience, after thinking about values for long enough, I reached a standstill. All I had left to do was trivial tinkering. I had exhausted all the accessible “raw life experience” I had from which to build up my value system. I needed new material.
Here’s how I would recommend acquiring new material: inhabit unfamiliar environments, as much as you somewhat comfortably can. Do some outer work.
What Do I Mean
Environments can differ in many ways (e.g. physical, social, cultural, etc.), and can take a million different forms, depending on what is “familiar” and “comfortable” for you:
- Try an unfamiliar hobby
- Make different friends
- Use different forms of transportation
- Get a new job
- Move to a new city
- Try different living arrangements (solo, roommates, house, van, boat, camping, Coliving, etc.)
- Move to new cities periodically (e.g digital nomads)
- Try living with less money
- Travel full time
- Volunteer
- Live in a monastery
- Do a silent meditation retreat
- Foster a puppy
- ???
- Any combination of the above
I’ve found that the more you put yourself in different environments (more in terms of level of immersion, unfamiliarity of number of environments), the more raw material you’ll have for better understanding your values and yourself. I want to emphasize the importance of unfamiliarity — I’m reminded of the quote “Some people say they have 20 years experience, when in reality, they have 1 year’s experience repeated 20 times”.
My partner reminded me of the importance of duration spent in a given environment. I think my implicit model has always been that your rate of learning has diminishing returns the more time you spend there. But I think a strong argument can be made that a lot of initial learning is noise (e.g. not relevant due to novelty effects), and that deeper connection to an environment affords more meaningful insights. So I’ve leaned towards “shortest viable experiment”, she’s preferred longer ones — YMMV.
On the other hand, it’s important to understand where your comfort zone ends and your boundaries are. While those lines differ per person, the more time you can spend between them, the more you’ll learn/grow. And of course this all depends on constraints like health, finances, etc.
How to Choose Environments
Given your constraints and what you’re familiar/comfortable with, there’s probably still a huge space of possibilities. Here’s 2 high level approaches for paring down that space into something manageable:
You could integrate the approaches by making a list of all the shit you’ve always wanted to try/do, and rate each of them by feasibility and unfamiliarity, and order them accordingly.
Why This Works
Disclaimer: I mostly just have my own experience and observation of others to draw on, so YMMV.
In my experience, one major mechanism for this is that we tend to blend ourselves with our environment, from the mundane (“my favorite cup”) to the abstract/invisible/systemic (“American Dream”, status games, etc.). I imagine myself as a black box, that takes my environment as input and spits out interior state and behavior as output. When I see how I react to new environments (input), I learn both what inputs lead to desirable outcomes (what do I like/dislike), as well as what things are actually enduringly part of the black box (me) and what things aren’t.
Conclusion
The journey of self discovery takes a lot of work, a lot of energy, a lot of risk taking. You may not think it’s worth it. That’s totally fair.
For myself, I’ve come to appreciate the journey as being deeply exhilarating, fascinating, and meaningful. I’ve learned countless lessons and feel like I’ve become a better person in pretty much every sense. And I think it’s the only way to move “forward”, because it’s the only way to figure out what “forward” even is.
I hope advice will help lead you to a new and improved Version 2, 3, N of your values (and inner and outer world). For myself, I hope to be updating my values continuously for the rest of my life, whether on paper or lived out in an embodied way.
