Personal Values

1. Kindness and being kind
2. Honesty and being honest
3. Humor and being good-humored
4. Truth and the rigorous pursuit of truth
5. Composure and being composed

These are the five values that matter most to me personally, the ones I most want to embody in my character and daily conduct. I don't mean them prescriptively: they don't need to be your values, and there's nothing wrong with valuing different things or valuing them in a different order. I think of each value in two forms: the quality itself, and the way I hope to practice it. This isn't a comprehensive list of every quality that matters to me. There are other qualities I care about deeply — like humility, discipline, and beauty — but I have limited this list to five.

Before describing what these values mean, how I arrived at these particular ones, or why I value them, I'd like to first explain why one should have values at all — why think about them, why write them down, why refine them over time.

I believe we are not mostly the product of a few careful, conscious decisions. We are much more the product of the hundreds of quick decisions we make each day. These are instincts, habits, or reactions that occur before you have time to contemplate how you'd like to act as your best self.

Your values are those qualities which, the more faithfully you act on them, the more at home you feel in your own life. Defining them for yourself gives you a rubric by which to evaluate and reflect on your actions, and a clear standard to appeal to when confronting new and difficult decisions — the right choice for you is the one that best aligns with your values.

To influence the hundreds of small decisions that don't afford you the time to pull out pen and paper and explicitly reason through your values, you need to make them instinctive. The start of any such practice is defining them.

One way to go about defining your values is to ask yourself, If I could guarantee only one quality about how I behaved, what would I want it to be? The answer to that question is what you value most. Then, keeping that quality fixed, ask the question again, and repeat. I chose to stop when I reached five because it was the largest number of values that felt easy to remember without much trouble, and not so few that it would lack the expressiveness needed to resolve conflicts between a range of potential decisions.

The values above are written in what seems a redundant manner. Kindness and being kind. The reason for this dual form is to remind myself of the distinction between valuing a quality for what it represents and valuing a quality in how one acts. For example, one can encourage kindness in the world without acting kindly — through behaviors you incentivize, the people you surround yourself with, or the environments you create. That there is any distinction at all between the two forms of values is more obvious for some than others: it's clear how valuing beauty can be very different than being or acting beautiful. There also is not one obvious choice for the way of acting that should correspond with a given abstract quality. If you value humor, you might value being humorous or you might value being good-humored. Writing it out in this seemingly redundant way forced me to make a choice about what I really meant.

Now, for these five particular values of mine.

1. Kindness and being kind

Being kind is intentionally prioritizing the well-being and experience of others for its own sake. Kindness is the quality of being kind.

Kindness is related to helping people in need, not out of self-interest or expectation of reward, but out of compassion for the individual, a sense of duty toward others, and the recognition of inherent human dignity.

An obligation to care for the well-being of other people has been the driving source of meaning for me since childhood, when I struggled with whether I wanted to live and found, in caring for others, one reason to stay. If I could choose nothing else about my character or what I contribute to this world, it is clear to me that kindness is the legacy that matters most.

2. Honesty and being honest

Being honest is expressing oneself in a way that would not reasonably mislead someone who came to know the whole truth. Honesty is the quality of being honest.

Honesty is related to truth, candor, integrity, trust, fairness, and accountability. The absence of any of those qualities likely indicates the presence of something dishonest. Being honest is certainly not the same as merely being factually truthful.

Honesty is foundational to being and acting in alignment with one's values. If I cannot be honest with others, I cannot truly care for them; if I cannot be honest with myself, I cannot identify where I stray, or even what I care about to begin with, and I will have little means of self-correcting. Being honest gives others the ability to see you as you are, and without it, some part of you will remain an outsider — to your relationships, your community, and your own mind. Honesty does not guarantee comfort, but it is a precondition for freedom.

3. Humor and being good-humored

Humor is the quality of being amusing, comical, or absurd, and the release that comes from recognizing what makes something funny.¹ Being good-humored is acting in ways that remain open to humor: not taking oneself too seriously to recognize it and being disposed to receive it.

Some human experiences need no further justification. Laughter is one of them. To be made to laugh and smile is simply a positive state of being. Humor is also a tool in coping with the great tragedy and uncertainty of our lives. It relieves tension, it brings people together, it puts things in perspective.

Being good-humored allows you to maintain your perspective. When you get too caught up in the seriousness of a situation, or of yourself, it can be easy to forget your values and what really matters to you.

4. Truth and the rigorous pursuit of truth

Truth is alignment with facts and reality. The rigorous pursuit of truth is the act of seeking greater alignment with reality in an uncompromising and courageous manner.

For those who know me, including myself, it is surprising that truth is not higher than fourth in my list of values. I suspect I often appear more truth-seeking than kind, and more serious than lighthearted. Honesty and truth are related in a way that, perhaps, softens that conflict (they are distinct: honesty being how you represent what you know, and truth being whether what you know is actually real). Indeed, I often believe truth is kind in the long run, and that it's easier to be honest about a well-explored truth than a deeply felt misconception, which allows these values to work together more than they disagree.

Pursuing and valuing the truth is, similar to honesty, a crucial foundation. It is the mechanism by which we discover where we are wrong and fix our mistakes. It is a safe assumption that we are and will be wrong constantly, and so this mechanism is essential. As individuals and as a civilization, the areas where we do not seek truth are areas where we are vulnerable, to the consequences of reality and to exploitation by our fellow man.

The desire to learn how our universe works, how we work, and who we are is quintessential to being human. In that way, the pursuit of truth is an inspiring undertaking. I believe truth is also a source of our creativity, and ends up describing and creating things more sublime than we can conjure alone. In particular, truth can be so beautiful because the truth contains endless detail. No matter how you poke and prod, disassemble, or transform it, the truth will not dissolve or collapse the way fiction will.

5. Composure and being composed

Composure is steadiness and self-control, in emotion and appearance, especially under stress or pressure. Being composed is therefore acting in ways that exhibit this quality.

I thought of composure when considering which qualities, if lacking, could lead me to fail to act in accordance with my values. Just as lacking honesty might prevent me from discovering the right values in the first place, lacking composure might lead me to behave in ways that run counter to my better judgment.

Composure is also necessary to help and be there for others. It allows them to depend on you, physically and emotionally, and allows you to make the best decisions you can in the face of chaos and uncertainty. Being composed keeps you in control, and helps you remain someone you recognize.

1. I acknowledge the irony of defining humor in the most dry, clinical manner imaginable. I don't like it any more than you do. ↩