To know our values is to know who we are. I’ve argued in a previous essay this very thesis. Since then, I have only become more convinced by the conclusions I reached. This essay, then, is the natural partner to that earlier essay and will explore what my values are. 

At the outset, it is important to note my belief that our values can and should change as we grow, as we meet more of the world, as life takes chunks out of us. As Anaïs Nin once said: Life is a process of becoming. I cannot promise that the values I talk about here will remain the same in six months/years/decades—but, as values ought to be central to who we are, it would be unlikely for them to have changed completely. I am fascinated to create an artefact that I can reflect on to see how my thinking about my values has changed over time. Research shows that thinking, and specifically writing, about our values can be remarkably beneficial to us.

For those who want an executive summary at a high-level my values are: curiosity, ethics, and kindness.

There is much more to each of these, and so below I’ll expand on my thinking behind each one. 

Finding your values

Before I dive into a more detailed exploration of my values, here is a simple way for you to identify your values. 

Step one: find your initial leanings. 

Even if you haven’t yet thought about your values in a structured way, my hunch is that most people have a general sense of what is important to them. This was my case: I knew some general value ideas that were valuable to me, and, equally importantly, some that were not valuable or compelling.

Identify and reflect on what comes to mind when you ask yourself, “what are my values?” 

Step two: the body and mind know 

If you struggle to identify anything in step one, do not fret.¹In general, do not fret! Think about the things in life that give you satisfaction and pleasure—the things in life that grow or expand you is another way of looking at it—and ask yourself what are the potential values underlying these experiences. For instance, if you get a buzz out of surprising a friend with an unexpected gift, that can tell you something about your values. Or perhaps learning a new idea makes the world seem brighter and more interesting. 

Likewise, think about the things that drain or diminish you: these experiences can be just as helpful in identifying our values. An example is if conflict drains you, then that might suggest you have a value on cooperation, harmony or keeping the peace. 

You can also try keeping a journal for a few weeks. At the end of your day, or even when a moment that resonates with you happens, try jotting down what the feeling was and be curious as to the potential underlying value. For instance, I felt fantastic when I helped someone at work figure out pivot tables, so that pointed to a value around learning and sharing knowledge. This approach can be as lightweight as you want it to be: from a note on your phone to a document on your computer to that lovely new notebook you’ve been eying off.²I will endorse the Midori MD cotton notebooks ‘til my dying days. 

Step three: pinning the tail on our value donkey 

Next, I found it helpful to look at a list of values and note down, off the back of your earlier work, what resonates. Here’s one such list, but many are waiting for you via a quick search. Note or highlight the ones that stand out to you: as many (or as few) as you like. This will become our value long list. 

At all stages, do try to be descriptive rather than prescriptive or aspirational: circle in on what you value right now and not what you think you should or want to value. I’m not suggesting these latter considerations are not important, but they require a different process and mindset from identifying one’s values in the first place. 

Step four: Bringing it together 

Now you have a long list, it’s time to think about which of the values you’ve identified are more important to you than others. Or, perhaps, do you have values that can be grouped together as supporting another value? Some values will jump off the page, whereas others might fade into the background.

You’ll emerge from this process with a few values, the exact number of which is up to you. I suspect that less is more in this case, but find what works for you. 

As general guidance to the above, or for any process of deep self-reflection, go slowly and be kind to yourself. Curiosity and compassion are called for here, not judgement. Remember, also, that no set of values—and indeed, no individual value—is better or worse than any other value. Values are not good or bad, they just are. 

Whether you follow this process, or find an approach that works for you, I encourage taking the time to reflect on what your values are. I found it quite comforting to put my finger on the things that make me me. 

Now, onwards to exploring my values in a little more detail. 

Curiosity

If I could only pick one value from life’s character creator, I might be tempted to pick curiosity—even though another value on my list is more important and more fundamental. More on which later. 

Curiosity gets me out of bed in the morning, and what keeps me out of bed late at night. Curiosity drives me more than anything else, and has done me since I was but a wee little lad. 

There is a challenge in talking about why a particular value is so important to one. I suspect this is because our values are so deep and integral to the question of who we are that to explore them requires more than just simple descriptive words: the exploration calls for something deeper, like poetry or other forms of art. The question of what values is as distinct and valuable in its own right as the question of why this value. The Fates informs our values (or more prosaically expressed: the dual impact of nature and nurture), and by the sum of our experiences to date. Who can say what fed the fires of curiosity in me? I can note, though, those fires burn brightly. 

Most of the supporting values speak for themselves, I’d imagine, but I wanted to touch upon what the joy, novelty, playfulness triad (or the JoNoPlaT to save time). I recognise at first blush it might seem distinct from curiosity, and even something that could (should?) standalone. First, my list, my choices! Less facetiously, I see it as an interrelated chain of values, with inputs—curiosity, learning, exploration—resulting in outputs—our lovely JoNoPlaT…I’m sorry, I’ll never use that again. Of course, it is not that mechanical or unidirectional (that is, joy can be an input that results in more curiosity).

This value expresses itself in a myriad of ways: from driving the media I consume, to these essays, to the people I enjoy spending time with. It compels me to try new things, to add to the cosmology of my mind, to create seeds (to borrow a line from Rick Rubin’s incredible book on creativity) that will become something with time. 

As I touched on above at step two is that our responses to things tell us so much about what our values are: for instance, I find it difficult to relate to people who appear to be incurious about things or seem to be immune to the infinite wonder of our existence. For instance, how do you feel when you learn a single grain of salt contains somewhere in the order of magnitude of 1200 million billion atoms? There is not an immediate practical application of this fact for my daily life, but it fills me with wonder at the sheer scale of the universe. And next time I sprinkled salt on my dinner, I thought of the billions of million billion atoms that were making my meal even tastier.³To further be amazed by impossibly large numbers, one estimate is that there are one hundred thousand billion billions atoms in the observable universe. Give or take.

Curiosity is not solely positive or negative; my excitement should not be misconstrued as propaganda. Curiosity, like anything else in this life, has downsides in practice. I can become bored or annoyed when my sense of curiosity either doesn’t get stimulated sufficiently or if someone else’s incuriosity thwarts my curiosity. As a trite example, I struggle to eat the same thing for dinner multiple nights in a row, no matter how delicious it was on the first night.

This leads to another element of the case for learning our values in the first place: to be conscious of both their strengths and also their weaknesses, and how to take steps when things threaten to get out of kilter. I know if I am not exposed to new ideas or experiences, I become, frankly, an irritated git. When I drift towards this sorry state, I can take steps to bring myself back in balance. Knowing oneself is never a bad thing.

Ethics

You may think ethics is a nebulous value—I can see an argument that saying ethics is a value is almost like saying values are my values—I hope to show you my meaning of ethics is a little more precise than that. 

Was I drawn to study law at university because I had this value or did this value grow during my studies? Again, I am curious about where our values come from, and how they both drive our life choices, but are affected by those very choices. I remember as a kid having a genuine sense of right and wrong and, in particular, feeling the deep injustice of the things in life that were unfair. Admittedly, as a kid the things that were unfair to me at the time were that I could not have more ice cream or go on fancy holidays like other kids, but from that starting point came a value that forms an integral part of identity. 

I have a fundamental belief that each human is unique, valuable, and irreplaceable—and therefore we should provide every person with every opportunity to flourish and find meaning, joy, and peace in their life. We are, sadly and to our enduring shame as a species, a long, long, long way from that aspirational target.⁴How long? Long¹⁰. We know the world is characterised by systemic oppression and exclusion of a frightening portion of the world’s population. Violence takes and threatens far too many—both at an individual level and at a state level. As my essay against the continued existence of billionaires argues: far too many have too little, while a few have far too much. People judge others based on the colour of their skin or their biophysical configuration. I could go on, and in some respect our ability to elide over the affronts to our shared humanity is part of the problem: just as we sometimes do not truly see a homeless person on the street, we allow our attention to not dwell on the near endless injustices of our world. An injustice against one, no matter what its form, is an injustice against us all—a bastardisation of the power and enduring words of Martin Luther King, Jr. And yet we must force ourselves to remain alive and not become numb. It is only then that we can care enough to work for a better world.

Ethics grapples with these questions and many others. In my interpretation of the question of what it means to live an ethical life, I include a strong sense and appreciation of logic and rationality. By this I mean I both aspire to act in a way that is consistent with underlying rules and also to see the world as also being subject to rules and order. For instance, I hold close to the scientific method of using evidence and observation to make decisions, as opposed to relying on fickle, mutable things like belief and gut feelings. 

Of course, this is all to a point: my recent consideration of consciousness, prompted by Philip Goff’s book on panpsychism, as well as considering how the development of quantum physics changed our understanding of reality, has made me appreciate that science is always an evolving process, and one that may not answer every one of life’s questions at that. And so I strive to acknowledge that the things I believe must be consciously reaffirmed in the face of our changing understanding. Of course, there are some things that I believe in a way that is more akin to faith: that is, I would not change my view that all humans are special and deserving of human rights even if some scientific theory purported otherwise. I am advocating for a way of engaging with the world that involves having strong opinions, but also being open to change.

I am inclined to reject things that cannot be proven and must be taken as points of faith. As such, I view much organised religion with deep and abiding suspicion. I cannot escape the conclusion that religion fits various political and socio-economic needs (the need of those who seek to accumulate and wield power, be they states or empires or despots) as for it to be rather unlikely it wasn’t created for this purpose. I also believe there is something in our pro-social and narrative-loving brains that means it is likely that we would create something like organised religion, especially when our understanding of the universe was far less advanced than it is now. Religion feels far too human a concept for it to have been created by anything other than humans.

It is undeniable and deeply troubling that organised religion bears the responsibility for countless deaths and ongoing discrimination. To put this all another way, I find the evidence for the non-existence of the gods to be more likely than the evidence for their existence. Given the sheer time humans have practised some form of organised religion, likely at least 6,000 years, I would expect some evidence to prove that gods were real to have emerged by now. Given this has not happened, or at least not happened in a way that I find compelling—sorry Jesus toast—I must conclude there are no supernatural beings who have the same relationship to us that I have with the ‘people’ I create in The Sims.⁵I want to mention another limb of my non-belief in the gods, albeit in a footnote, lest I derail my entire essay. Let me quote Stephen Fry: “Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault…Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?” I cannot get my head around believing in a force that is ultimately so cruel and so antithetical to the humanistic values I hold.  

Even as a god-dismissing sort, I nonetheless find the evidence for humans being ethical and good creatures more compelling than the evidence for the Hobbesian view humans are just nasty brutes. We are far from perfect, both at an individual and a group level, yet we have an inner ethical light that continues to shine brightly. This knowledge keeps me going and gives me hope that a better tomorrow is always possible. 

The roughness of our habits can be smooth out through the rule of law: both as codified and as natural law. I find enduring comfort and utility in Kant’s categorical imperative: that is act in a way that if everyone acted in that way, things would be fine; and do not act in a way that if everyone else also acted that way, the world would become worse. 

For instance, when I dream of becoming a sourdough thief, stealing loaves from nearby bakeries, I ask myself what would happen if everyone stole sourdough loaves? What world would this create? Would I rather live in this world, or live in a world where people didn’t steal, thus allowing excellent bakeries to continue to exist? And this helps me decide not to steal sourdough, and instead buy a loaf. I hasten to add that the Kantian framework is not the only reason I do, or do not do, certain actions, but is a useful lens for thinking about problems.   

Again, I want to highlight this point: one’s values are never absolutes and are not contingent on some sort of ideological purity. I can still lie, steal, cheat, covert my neighbour’s oxen, and possess irrational beliefs and still hold ethics as a central and core value. The value of values is that they are a guiding star for us.⁶I’m proud I restrained myself for almost three thousand words before using the phrase the value of values. We experience uplifting feelings when we act in accordance with our values and we feel, often deep in our core, lesser when we transgress our values. It follows, then, that one source of deep unhappiness is when we have not identified our values and, therefore, act unintentionally against them. A side effect of capitalism is that it forces us to act against our values to survive.  

Kindness

The last value is the first amongst equals—without kindness, I could not be curious or ethical; kindness is a foundation upon which all else is made possible. 

What do I mean by kindness? For me, kindness arises from recognising two immutable factors of our lives:

Kindness, then, is a natural and beautiful response to these two facts of our existence. To be kind to others, and just as importantly, ourselves, is to allow the recognition of these truths to influence our behaviour. 

And for me, kindness goes a little further into being kind about the prospects for the future—be it ten minutes or ten years (or ten billion billion million years) away. And so I believe things will be okay. I know that there will be suffering, and even that I will cause and contribute to that suffering, but even so, it will be okay. Yes, we’ll die. And yes, one day, in as little as say 100 trillion years, protons will begin to decay, and a short time later, say in 10 tredecillion years, nucleons will also start to decay. ⁷A mere 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, give or take, to you and me. Entropy is coming for us and the universe will one day die.

And yet, and yet: life still has rich meaning and immense beauty. That something will end, at some stage, does not mean we cannot find meaning in our lives and in our days. Making a conscious decision to be kind is the most appealing way, to me at least, of dealing with the inevitability of bad things happening.  

In fact, it is the inevitability of suffering and of bad things happening—forget the death of the universe, your own death will occur much sooner…hooray?—that gives kindness its incredible power. Have you ever been suffering in life, only for someone’s act of kindness (or even an act of self-kindness, like giving yourself the space and permission to suffer) has, at that moment, transformed your day and how you saw the world? These moments might be rare for you, or they might be common, but I hope you’ve had at least one of these transcendent experiences. For me, one such moment was the kindness of friends, family, and strangers (and actually, it was the kindness of strangers that was the most significant contribution to this feeling) when my greyhound was battling cancer. These moments remind one about the wonders of being alive, and the duty we have to others to live with kindness, love and compassion.

It follows, then, that humility is an essential aspect of kindness, as it builds on the two truths I discuss at the start of this section. We must recognise that the random processes that have shaped our life are unique to our own life; every other life, even our (identical) siblings are product of different rolls of life’s dice. We must always keep this in mind, and battle against our natural egocentric tendencies to attribute our successes (and indeed, our failures, and I mean that in a very broad sense) as being dependent on our own agency. I strongly object to the whole misguided notion of meritocracy, at least in the simplistic way that it is applied by many today. The reason this is important is that we cannot be kind to someone—and yes, kind to ourselves—if we are judging them, or thinking that we’d never end up in their position. To be empathetic requires understanding the contingency of our lives, and how random it all is. 

Kindness is essential, and a value that is not emphasised enough in the world we find ourselves in. I am quite certain if we explicitly valued kindness we would find ourselves in a fairer, better world, and a world where we were not confronting with such frequency such atrocities as the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Russia’s senseless and bloody invasion of Ukraine, mass starvation in parts of Africa, to name but three of many potential examples where we have failed to respect our common humanity. 

And this is why it is so important to know our own personal values. Because to know our values is to act both in smaller and bigger ways in a manner compatible with those values. 

Values make the world go round

I admit my definitions for the above are all rather nebulous. Values are always interconnected, with lines sprouting out from one concept to the other, in a way not dissimilar to the structure of neurons in our squishy, moist, and hot brains. To put our values in words is like trying to catch the wind in our hands when we’re riding in a car: a task that is impossible, yet is nonetheless satisfying to attempt. 

The values I’ve tried to sketch out in this essay are the values that make me me. Having a sense of what those values are gives me a viable framework for how I want to live my life. It also gives me a sense of I can contribute towards a better world. 

Often we think a better world requires something very grand and organised; a treaty to be signed, a declaration of world powers, or perhaps a divine proclamation heralded by fat cheeked angels. I don’t buy that. A better world is the simple aggregate of people trying to do their best day in, day out. The human brain struggles, or at least this human brain struggles, with the compounding effect, because it isn’t linear—and just as we can only see time as an arrow flying forwards—we struggle to appreciate just how powerful living a good life can be for creating a better world.

And it all begins with knowing and living our values. 

Notes

• 1
  In general, do not fret!
• 2
  I will endorse the Midori MD cotton notebooks ‘til my dying days.
• 3
  To further be amazed by impossibly large numbers, one estimate is that there are one hundred thousand billion billions atoms in the observable universe. Give or take.
• 4
  How long? Long¹⁰.
• 5
  I want to mention another limb of my non-belief in the gods, albeit in a footnote, lest I derail my entire essay. Let me quote Stephen Fry: “Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault…Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?” I cannot get my head around believing in a force that is ultimately so cruel and so antithetical to the humanistic values I hold.
• 6
  I’m proud I restrained myself for almost three thousand words before using the phrase the value of values.
• 7
  A mere 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, give or take, to you and me.