The meaning of life, part 2: Your values

If you want to find a meaning in your life, or if you want your life to be more enjoyable, you'll have to go through a few steps. First, you'll have to acknowledge that this is a time-consuming process; it might take you months to feel like you're actually progressing. Second, you'll need to identify your personal values early on. This is important because you'll find out what things you hold dear and what things you enjoy, and thus what you'd base your life around -- and your values might not be what you think they are.

An experiment I did in a psychology class provided some interesting insight into this. I'll go through the experiment for nearly all of this entry, and once you know the experiment you can't un-know it. If you keep on reading this, keep in mind it'd be best to do the experiment yourself. Nothing will stop you from reading on without doing it, or even from doing it after you've read about it, but the effect is best when you don't know how it all works out.


The first thing you do is think about what you did yesterday. Get a piece of paper, WordPad, or whatever you write with and write down everything you can remember doing yesterday, adding in how you felt about it. Be honest with yourself -- don't try to make yourself look really good or seem to be a totally sucky person. The order in which the events occur is irrelevant, and there's no "right" way to write or organize things. Just do it your own way, whatever you're comfortable with. I'll provide an example here.


-1- I woke up early and talked with my wife in the morning. It was quiet and pleasant, and we passed the morning comfortably and lazily.
-2- I got to work being slightly irritated and impatient. The workday was slow, boring, stressful, and emotionally draining. I feel as though I might have been unfriendly with my coworker in the evening, yet what I felt wasn't anger at him, it was simply a desire to be off of work and to have solitude at home.
-3- While working, I chatted on Facebook whenever it was slow and I had nothing to do. I could have done more important things, I suppose, but... I felt drained and wanted to veg, I guess. I took care of what was necessary, at least.
-4- At home, I was slightly absent-minded while talking with my wife. Before long though, she picked up on my poor temper, told me she loved me and wanted me to be happy, and asked me what I wanted. I felt slightly touched at this and before long we were chatting and playing video games, having a pretty good time.
-5- Several times throughout the day, I came across my family at some point. I consciously decided to avoid them, feeling as though they'd make my mood worse. As for why I felt this way, I do not know.
-6- I recall getting home and feeling disappointed that we only had oatmeal cooked for dinner. I grudgingly poured myself a bowl and added brown sugar, then was surprised at how tasty it was. Before long, I had a second bowl. It hit me that I was being shallow and ungrateful for a free, tasty dinner that someone else had prepared for the family.
-7- Before leaving work, I debated grabbing something to eat from Wendy's. I didn't want to spend more money than was necessary though, and after doing a fair amount of mental debate on the cost of the food, what I wanted to eat, and how healthy it was, I decided to not eat at Wendy's that evening.


After you've assembled your list of things you've done the day before, read a list of values or think of your own values, or both even. Here's a list of examples -- feel free to add more to your own list if you think of anything. Go ahead, write down each and every value you hold dear on a separate piece of paper.

Achievement	Friendships	Physical challenge
Advancement and promotion	Growth	Pleasure
Adventure	Having a family	Power and authority
Affection (love and caring)	Helping other people	Privacy
Arts	Helping society	Public service
Challenging problems	Honesty	Purity
Change and variety	Independence	Quality of what I take part in
Close relationships	Influencing others	Quality relationsihps
Community	Inner harmony	Recognition (respect from others, status)
Competence	Integrity	Religion
Competition	Intellectual status	Reputation
Cooperation	Involvement	Responsibility and accountability
Country	Job tranqulity	Security
Creativity	Knowledge	Self-respect
Decisiveness	Leadership	Serenity
Democracy	Location	Sophistication
Ecological awareness	Loyalty	Stability
Economic security	Market position	Status
Effectiveness	Meaningful work	Supervising others
Efficiency	Merit	Time freedom
Ethical practice	Money	Truth
Excellence	Nature	Wealth
Excitement	Being around people who are open and honest	Wisdom
Fame	Order (tranqulity, stability, conformity)	Work under pressure
Fast living	Personal development	Work with others
Financial gain	Freedom	Working alone

Take a look at the list and write down all of the values that strike a chord with you. After you've finished... (dramatic pause for the people that are currently engaged in this activity) ...go ahead and erase all of your values but five of them. Out of all of those values you hold dear, you may only keep five of them. Which five do you hold most dear? Which ones are most important to you?


After you've finished shortening your list... (insert another dramatic pause) ...look back at your list. Look at the five values you've chosen, and remove two more of them. What three are most important to you?


After that, remove another one. You're left with two.


After that, remove one more. You're left with one value to hold -- ideally, this would be your core stated value; the values you chose to write down are all stated values, ones that you say you like, but they aren't necessarily the values you act out. This is where the first exercise comes back in, the one where you wrote down yesterday's activities. Reread the things you did, and beside each one write down the value(s) that apply to it. For example, spending my morning comfortably and lazily with my wife could have the values Peace, Love, and Comfort. Being grumpy all day could be Selfishness and Being Stupid. At any rate, all of these values you're writing out would be your actual values, with the emphasis being on the act. This is the walk you walk, as opposed to the talk you talk. It'll help to let you know how well you act on what you say, and how much you are the kind of person you value.


Compare your list of stated values with your list of actual values, if you haven't already done that. Do you see a difference between the two? Do you think you could improve either of the lists? What could you do differently? What's working out well for you?


This, I believe, is the first step to finding meaning in your life: Labeling the person you want to be, and finding out whether or not it's who you are. If you'd like, you may repeat this activity as much as you want to get a more accurate idea of where your values are. Once you have a good idea as to where you are, you can find out more definitively where you want to go next.


I might make a part 3 of this series, which would be a plan on incorporating better values into your daily life, but I might not be in the mood for it. We'll just have to see. :D