Pretty much all studies on what brings happiness point to living in harmony with one’s core values. Being bored and distractible today, I went to basically every “how do you know what your core values are” site on the internet. Mostly because, if pressed to define my core values, I’d shrug and say something like “I dunno, don’t be an asshole and keep trying things?”

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the results, I do find the exercise a bit…frustrating. Because the reality is that any value can be defined in hundreds of different ways, so to say that I value “freedom” (one of my results) isn’t all that different from saying I value “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.

I value autonomy, yes. I generally dislike being told what to do. Most people do, IME. However, I also recognise that sometimes limiting freedom is necessary for a functional society. Just because I want to punch that bigot with the sign in the face doesn’t mean I think I should be allowed to.

There are many, many people who would list “freedom” as their core value while wildly disagreeing with the above condition. Our values are largely in opposition to each other, but the same word is used to describe both mindsets.

The same is true of many (if not all) of the possible values a person could have. Another of mine was “tolerance”. Anyone who has ever studied basic political philosophy is aware of “the paradox of intolerance”. A tolerant society requires being intolerant of the intolerant, something the intolerant insist on pointing out as though they’ve somehow made a groundbreaking discovery.

Yet there are many people who value tolerance up to and including tolerance for the extremely, even violently, bigoted. In some cases I’m even one of them. I don’t believe, for instance, in murdering people for making racist statements, as some of the more extreme members of the far left do. Regardless, we all consider ourselves “tolerant”, but with often opposing definitions of what the word means.

Yes, it is good for emotional and psychological well-being to live in accordance with one’s values. There’s fairly clear scientific evidence of that. However, I don’t think trying to define those values in concrete terms is really all that effective or helpful. At best, you end up with an amorphous pile of words that has to be further refined and qualified into something that’s unlikely to actually cover the majority of circumstances in which they might be tested.

General self-awareness seems more helpful. Taking stock of that internal sense of what feels “right” vs “wrong”. Paying attention to actions that result in pride vs shame. It’s not perfect, those things are always influenced by society, but neither is the “stack of ill-defined words” method.

Or, y’know, maybe I’m just too neurodivergent for this exercise.

Edit: Actually, while we’re at it, there’s a very real social problem with conflating “values” and “morals”. Things like “tolerance” or “integrity” or “respect” shouldn’t even be part of the equation because those are ethics required for a functioning society. An individual does not get to decide they don’t “value” something like basic human dignity. Rather, they can, but it then makes them an asshole. It is contrary to the needs of the community. Yet every single exercise in “defining your values” includes large lists of morals and ethics.

I can appreciate the desire to centre one’s life around beauty, achievement, and wealth. But if that person then, say, enslaves people to prop up their wealth because they decided wealth was more important than compassion, they are a bad person. I don’t care how happy they are. They’re a dick.