what do we value?

What is it that we value? As a society at large, I’ve heard a lot of suggestions. That we value our environment. That we value our children. Education. Progress. Peace. Health. Knowledge. Kindness. All kinds of stuff. I never really thought long and hard about this question, and now that I’m thinking about it, these kind of contrivances are what come to mind. “Contrivances?” That’s harsh, no? Well…

We show what we value in how we act. Regardless of whether you view “the market” as an efficient decision maker, we all, at our simplest, make our decisions based on what we value. I value the glorious feeling my stomach gets after eating a mcgriddles more than I value $1.99. I value my time more than cutting out coupons from the newspaper every sunday. (OK, that might be a lie since I don’t grocery shop.) It’s clear though, what we choose, we value.

So I look at the world. I see luxury cars everywhere. Lexus, Acura, Porsche, BMW, Cadillac (OK, not many of those, but that’s why GM is effectively bankrupt, right?). I look to my left in traffic and I see the Chanel sunglasses, Prada purses, Armani suits. Diamond rings, Rolexes, etc, etc. I listen to my friends talk about buying 50″ TV’s. to go with their Playstation 8, Xbox, and new Blu-Ray player (who the hell decided DVD’s weren’t clear enough, anyway?) I won’t balance this with the diatribe about the present (crappy) state of schools, (in-)access to higher education, (lack of quality and access to) health care, (in-attention to) the environment or any of those things. (I assume it’s implied, right?) But I’ll ask again. What do we value?

What do you value? How do you spend your time? How do you spend your money? How do you spend your attention? Seriously. Ask yourself.

My mind has been focused on this value question. But it forces others. Who we want to be. What we’re grateful for. What we’re still willing to sacrifice for. What we think is broken. What we think is perfect.

In the serendipitous way that is life, I came across this clip for the second time today. The gist is in the headline:

“Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy.”

I’ve been in one of those moods, so this really stuck. He focuses on the marvels of technology– cell phones that work everywhere and allow us to send photos at the speed of sound. We sit in a chair in the sky and get transported around the world. We get updates about our friends and family automatically pushed to us while we sleep and they get sorted by how important these people are to us. Are you kidding? Then there are the health advances, the knowledge advances, etc. Yet, we’re still not happy. We’re not grateful. Naturally, the mood balancing thought here is that this is the way it’s always been. Minus a few hiccups, civilization has been a pretty sweet uptrend. Things get progressively better and we progressively raise our expectations and levels of complaints. Essentially, my takeaway from the video(which, if you didn’t click, will make you spit up laughing, it’s from Conan and *freaking* hilarious) was that we don’t value any of this progress. We take it for granted. We instead accept these things as owed to us.

Values are often spoken of as something instilled early and ingrained. “He was raised with good values.” Etc, etc. But, truly, we form values every day. Every decision we make determines what we value (and our values). Look around at the world. At the state of the financial markets, at businesses, at those in governments, and across society. It’s clearly not a pretty picture. Think about what that says that we value. Then let’s think about the things that we *should* value and what a world like that would look like. How about tomorrow though? What would a day where you spent your time on things that you truly valued look like? Or how about instead, tonight, you spent an hour and asked yourself what it is that you value.

It’s a question I’ve never really thought about. Yet, now that I’ve started, I can’t stop.