Every moment of every day, whether you realize it or not, you are making a decision on how to spend your time, on what to pay attention to, on where to direct your energy.
Right now, you are choosing to read this article. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing, but right now, you are choosing to be here. Maybe in a minute, you decide you need to pee. Or maybe someone texts you and you stop reading. When those things happen, you are making a simple, value-laden decision: your phone (or your toilet) is more valuable to you than this article. And your behavior follows that valuation accordingly.
Our values are constantly reflected in the way we choose to behave.
This is critically important—because we all have a few things that we think we value, but we never back them up with our actions. I can tell people (and myself) until I’m blue in the face that I care about climate change or the dangers of social media, but if I spend my days driving around in a gas-guzzling SUV, constantly refreshing my newsfeeds, then my behaviors tell a different story.
Actions reflect our values because actions don’t lie. We believe we want to get that job, but when push comes to shove, we’re always kind of relieved that no one called us back so we can retreat to our video games again. We tell our girlfriend we really want to see her, but the minute our guy friends call, our schedule magically seems to open up like fucking Moses parting the Red Sea.
Many of us state values we wish we had as a way to cover up the values we actually have. In this way, aspiration can often become another form of avoidance. Instead of facing who we really are, we lose ourselves in who we wish to become.
Put another way: we lie to ourselves because we don’t like some of our own values, and we therefore don’t like a part of ourselves. We don’t want to admit we have certain values and that we wish we had other values, and it’s this discrepancy between self-perception and reality that usually gets us into all sorts of trouble.
That’s because our values are extensions of ourselves. They are what define us. When something good happens to something or someone you value, you feel good. When your mom gets a new car or your husband gets a raise or your favorite sports team wins a championship, you feel good—as though these things happened to yourself. The opposite is true as well. If you don’t value something, you will feel good when something bad happens to it. People took to the streets cheering when Osama Bin Laden was killed. People threw a party outside the prison where the serial killer Ted Bundy was executed. The destruction of someone perceived as evil felt like some great moral victory in the hearts of millions.
So, when we are disconnected from our own values—we value playing video games all day yet believe we value ambition and hard work—our beliefs and ideas get disconnected from our actions and emotions. And to bridge that disconnect, we must become delusional, about both ourselves and about the world.