Edition #68: How to Discover Your Values

Plus, can we fall in love without losing ourselves, a fun quiz, and an ode to screaming

Apr 15, 2021

A Note From the Editor

A typical day in the life of a white-collar Millennial in NYC, pre-pandemic, went like this: wake up around 6 am if you wanted to get a pre-work workout in, closer at 7:30 am if not. Get dressed, carefully piecing together an outfit with a reliable mix of high and low pieces, which is code for 85% Zara paired with an expensive necklace. Spend the day in your open floor plan office oscillating between work-work, reading articles on the internet, and mindless small talk with your coworkers, most of whom would be peripheral acquaintances if this wasn't your first job out of college. Maybe you’d have packed lunch, but more likely you’d be doing this. You would not see the light of day once from 9am-6pm. After work, you might have a catch up dinner with friends, distantly noting that $28 is an absurd price to pay for a bowl of pasta (but whatever, you’d order it anyway). You might have a Hinge date, slipping out of your blazer into a quasi sexy top, trying not to judge the stranger before you for picking a dark, ugly dive bar for the occasion. Finally, you’d make it home, rush through your nighttime skincare regime—face wash/toner/serum/Retinol/moisturizer/eye cream— and collapse into bed, hoping you’d be able to wake up for 6:30 am alarm the following morning to avoid getting charged the $20 no show fee for your scheduled barre class.

There was joy mixed in, too. The occasional Euro-trip, an unplanned park day that bled into night, a visit home to family, an hour or so of a hobby that made you feel alive. But mostly, it was a passive existence. The structure of life didn’t allow for much else. Most of us experiencing that version of life had vague, foggy plans for things we wanted to do *at some point*—go back to school or write a novel, move to France for a summer, buy a home—but we had no real plans on how to get there. These fantasies were mere escapism; the thing that allowed us to justify our menial meaninglessness, that gave our lives the context and color that was so clearly lacking. We didn’t experience depths of empathy because we only saw what was in front of us. Coworkers who dressed as we did, Instagram feeds of vacations to the same four places, overpriced salads. Stepping back now to inspect that life, to realize what little agency I felt I had while living it, feels like a minor devastation. There are far worse fates, I know, but I can’t help but feel for that girl. She was frighteningly numb.

There are versions of this life for every demographic in every part of the country. The grind of suburban family life immediately comes to mind, as does the aspiring artist working so many hours as a bartender/barista/nanny that they are unable to focus on their craft, or the lawyer/doctor/techie who works such long hours they are alienated from their families. Though these groups of people have varying experiences, the throughline is the grind. Not enough hours in the day to consider how you got here, coupled with the impossibility of breaking out of the cycle because how could you?

The feelings of depletion, discontentedness, and isolation that follow are merely consequences of the apparatus of modern-day society. Read that again and let it sink in. You did not choose to be born during this time period; you probably chose far less about your current life than you realize. You also didn’t have a say in designing the empty virtues of our capitalist society: productivity, a curated social media presence, more and more and more money. You were tossed into a game, thrown a jersey, and haphazardly explained the rules with no time to process whether you wanted to be playing. And the whistle was blown.

At some point during the past few decades, shared values have shifted. Infrastructures that were meant to cradle us became less and less important. Funding was cut, norms were recalibrated. People used to live near their families and their children were raised by the village it takes. Now, we move away to chase big jobs in big cities and see our families but once or twice a year. People used to rely on faith; on the communities that existed within their places of worship and on the idea of surrendering to a higher power to give their lives meaning. Now, we are skeptical of organized religion because of the exclusionary rigidity of most religious institutions and we have lost touch with spirituality as a result. People used to lean on their elders for guidance and wisdom. Now, we laugh at how out of touch older folks are, then we stick them in nursing homes.

I was considering this, the slow hollowing of the very structures that used to give life meaning, when I came across a podcast episode about the importance of defining your values. According to storyteller extraordinaire Jay Shetty, it is all too easy to find yourself living a life that you don’t want (as David Byrne put it, “You may ask yourself, well...how did I get here?). The first step towards eclipsing the default mode of a passive existence is getting an understanding of what you do want—starting with discovering what you value. There is often a dissonance between what we think we value and what we actually value, and Shetty says there is a super simple way to discover your current values. Simply conduct a self-audit with the following two questions:

How you spend your money? (outside of fixed bills)
How you spend your time? (outside of work)

While the results of your first audit may be jarring, the point of the exercise is to get a feel for when you're at right now. Once you understand that, you can begin to consciously make adjustments to the ways in which you spend your two most precious commodities, your time and money. I did a self-audit a few weeks back, reviewing the first three months of the year, and found the exercise to be illuminating. It felt like waking up.

Cheers, my dears, and as always thanks for reading. If you complete a self-value audit, I’d love to hear what you discover. Here’s how to support Daunte Wright’s family, and here’s how to contribute to his memorial fund. May we not become desensitized to the senseless killing of Black people at the hands of the police. May we stay angry and maintain a sense of urgency in demanding both justice and reform.

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

Can We Fall In Love Without Completely Losing Ourselves? Crushes and liking and loving and all of the tender space in between. This essay is beautifully constructed, distant and close at the same time. Exploring the suspended moment in time where a prospective lover or partner is merely a crush; unreachable. mysterious. A thing you can project yourself onto and a thing that can sweep you away like a tsunami's wave. The author grapples with opening herself up to something real, with the idea of her crush fully seeing her. This one gave me lots of feelings.
“When I say I have a crush on you, what I’m saying is that I’m in love with the distance between us.”
Turns Out It’s Pretty Good: Reading First Thing in the Morning. I think I've given up the idea of mastering a morning routine in this odd, percolating season of life. Some mornings I wake up itching to get out of my apartment. On those mornings I stroll through Washington Square Park and watch the dogs prancing around the dog run. Other mornings I wake up itching to write before work and that is what I do. A few weeks ago, I tried reading a novel for 30 minutes before doing anything else. It felt indulgent, like eating sugar cubes for breakfast as a child.
What If Age is Nothing But a Mindset? Have you heard of the reverse aging experiment? A group of men in their 70's, none of whom are in great physical condition, spent a week in a house designed to emulate the 50's, the period when the men would've been in their 20's. For a week they were encouraged to act like they were younger, discussing "current events" of the '50s, watching movies, staying up late, and they were treated like younger men, too. They had to do things for themselves, carry their own bags inside, etc. The results were profound: after just one week, most of the men's health, dexterity, and moods showed vast improvements. This fascinating piece explores psychologist Ellen Yanger's work on the mind/wellness connection, which has been tested and proved through wold experiments that show that perhaps our mind and our bodies aren't on such different tracks.

Perhaps You Should…
Check Your Biases with a Fun Quiz

We all have implicit biases, and this interactive 20 quesiton quiz from the New York Times is a genius way to reveal that fact. drops you into a neighborhood in the US. By photo only, you are to guess whether the neighborhood voted Trump of Biden. I bombed this quiz.

Bonus Content (SCREAMING!)

This article made me laugh so hard, though I’m sure that wasn’t the intention. Much to the dismay of my loved ones, I am a total happy screamer. Now I’m wondering whether my neighbors think I’m constantly in danger.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“Whoever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”

-Educated by Tara Westover

This newsletter is best served with a side of conversation, so drop your opinions, reflections, and thoughts in the comments below and let’s get to talking.

that's so interesting

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