Evolving Values
There is only one authentic way to live, and it’s according to your own values.
The more serious considerations are put on hold when you are a child and have not yet developed your superego. As an adult, you will often long for a time when you were not exhausted by the hardships of life, and bewildered by its questions. As a child, nature is your friend. Life is being explored for the first time. You may feel some feelings of anxiety every now and then, but they are short-lived and inconsequential.
When you are less young and enter into the second stage of life (17 to 35 according to Jung), you will focus more on your career, relationships, new experiences, pleasure, and money Your set of values are dynamic – and have developed. You know more about how the world works, and have much to prove. Since you have not accomplished anything yet – you educate yourself and work for the first time. At around the same time, you seek out the advice of older, more experienced people – usually your relatives. And you will tend to listen to them. Life will replace your new tastes and friendships, and you will be left with only a few lasting relationships. Your major accomplishment- in your post-adolescent stage of life – will be to have learned more about the world and yourself. But also to have experienced as much pleasure as possible.
As you get older, your thoughts turn to building a family, being more reliable, and paying attention to your spiritual life. Career goals will stop being as important to you. Instead, you will turn your energy to fostering your relationships, and being a useful member to your community. Your desire for novel experiences wanes away. You ground yourself in values, responsibilities, love, and faith. Ethical considerations that never disturbed you before now dominate your conversations and thoughts. You are interested in developing a relationship with God, and question the meaning of your life. You learn to make time for only what’s important, and become more patient and understanding of yourself and of others. You are less self-critical, but you are calmer, more rational and realistic.
Some people are slow to change their values – while others are not. But in general, the trend is ubiquitous. Time will update the what you care about. This is a natural consequence of the evolving demands of life, and the changes in your own knowledge structures. But not all of your values change, only some do.
Gradually, you will transform into a different human being. And yet, a part of you stays the same – and that is what Jung identified as the Self. Other psychologists such as Freud and Adler believed that your personality develops at a very early stage in your life. They noted that individuals maintained a stable predisposition throughout their lives despite the incessant changes they’ve experienced.
It is important to realize this limitation – that your personality is unlikely to have changed very much. You are capable of transformation, but only to a certain degree – beyond which you will find uncomfortable. The introvert is capable of teaching herself to be a better public speaker, and project a more assertive, and confident image in public – but she will find it impossible to become a salesperson. Similarly, an extrovert can learn to spend more time reading, and researching, but a career as an academic or librarian is unlikely.
Your ideas about the purpose of life may never change. Perhaps you will learn to adjust some details, and develop a more coherent, sophisticated version of your views – but your fundamental opinion about what’s most important often remains stubbornly rooted to the same ideals. Perhaps your concern was and always will be to nurture your relationships, or maybe it was to tend to the urgent need for creative expression. As you get older, the values that change teach you – by keeping your other values the same – about who you are. Your rare, unchanging core define how the people closest to you recognize you.
Your high level of openness feeds your book reading obsession. Similarly, your value (attaining new knowledge) increases your level of openness. Your extroversion pushes you to meet new people. And as you meet new people, and develop more relationships – you become more extroverted. Your traits and values don’t exist in isolation. Instead, a dynamic interplay between them creates a self-reinforcing loop. Your traits inform your behavior, and your behaviors inform your values, and then your values inform your traits.
When the habitual reactions are determined, we can feel fairly certain of having hit the mark, because they govern external behaviour on the one hand, and on the other mould specific experience. A certain kind of behavior brings corresponding results, and the subjective understanding of these results gives rise to the experiences which in turn influence behaviour, and thus close the circle of an individual’s destiny. – (Jung, Modern Man’s Search for a Soul P.86)
Your personality informs you attention, and what you pay attention shapes who you will become.
“Attention is shaped by the self, which in turn is shaped by attention” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
When the Time is Right
You will be unable to recognize certain truths about the nature of reality – and of yourself – until the time is right. Usually, it is a time of crisis. Jordan Peterson talks about the idea of chaos and order. To get a better idea of this framework, see his Maps of Meaning Lectures.
Put simply, order is everything that is known – it is explored territory. Chaos is everything that is unknown – it is unexplored territory. The subjects you have mastered and the people you know well represent order – while alien subjects and unfamiliar people represent chaos. When your expectations meet reality, you’re in a state of order. And when your expectations do not meet reality, you’re thrown into chaos. But differentiating between order and chaos can be challenging – as chaos can sometimes be disguised as order. Your presuppositions, values, and behaviors might be wrong, but if the end result is order, then you will feel content. You will not try to change anything. You are experiencing a period of short-term order before the inevitable chaos.
Imagine being at university when you don’t know why things haven’t spiraled out of control yet. Like a toddler who depends on his parents to rescue him from his irresponsible (and incompetent) behavior, you are protected by the structure imposed on you by your university – in the form of rules, deadlines, irritable professors, and semi-articulated, inaccurate, comforting ideas about the future. In university, you are given a reality check when you act undesirably. You only adjust your behavior to silence the authority and go back to living half-consciously, semi-autonomously, and responsibility free – until the next time reality slaps you in the face. You are not at all interested in any major systematic overhauls – because there is nothing in the system to fix.
But you’re not acting irrational. For the most part, your life is predictable. The rules are clearly stated, and you understand roughly what needs to be done in order to meet your own (and the university’s) expectations. If you are not performing well enough in your courses – you know you need to spend more time studying to compensate. But when you do what you think you ought to be doing, and the end result is not what you expected – you enter into that dreaded state of chaos – where things no longer make sense.
The structure of reality is called into question. Suddenly, you find yourself expecting fair compensation for your efforts. But when no such thing happens, the ground crumbles underneath your feet. You start to doubt even your most basic assumptions. You do not know who to trust – least of all yourself. You have led yourself into a hellish maze, and have no idea how to get out.
So you clutch at whatever sense of order you can find – as tyrannical as it may be. You go back to a previous state of existence where things were more stable. The chaos is confronted, but only temporarily. The ground is still crumbling and your past foundations can only serve you for so long. You realize that you can’t find the right answers anywhere obvious. Eventually, after wallowing in self-pity and nihilism – you determine to valiantly confront the chaos and re-establish your value system. But this time – you promise yourself that you will be more deliberate and thoughtful in doing so. You will be reluctant to listen to passing, half-ass advice, socially accepted slogans, and lazy, poorly informed, and badly articulated theories about how to operate in the world by the numerous unthinking, predatory charlatans – who excitedly grasp for your attention – when you’re down.
The time is now right for you to wake up, and see things differently. But you didn’t ask for it. The truth imposed itself on you by revealing the inefficiencies of your previous ideas. You are now ready to stop lying to yourself, and you become intolerant of anyone who tries to lie to you. You are on high alert, and instead of relishing a more serene existence – you are a relentless investigator – and defender – of the truth. Not because you are more nobly inclined than most people – but because living in self-deceit and illusion is intolerable.
Playing By the Rules
A peculiar thing about ideas is that the extent to which they capture your attention depends on your previous experiences. In other words, your past affects the nature of new information that is presented. When you first encounter a profound quote, for example, you might be intrigued, and think about it for a little while. You may tell some friends about it. But sooner or later, it will fade away almost completely from memory.
But at some point – you will see that same quote again – or get exposed to the same idea that you did years ago, and will get a different kind of feeling. Something grips you this time. It is as if the idea itself comes to life. It imposes upon you a divine truth that you finally earned the right to understand. It’s when the idea perfectly matches your own reality that you can see the truth in it.
When I used to hear the overused, cliched prescription that you’re likely to find in movies, books, commercials, and songs of ‘finding your passion’, I would cringe. And I would pity whoever fell for such unintelligible fluff. When an idea is exhausted, I reasoned, it must lack truth.
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain
What’s the point in following your passion when the market doesn’t care about your passion? What’s the use in living according to your values, when no one seems to have any? It’s hard to believe that your individual, arbitrary predispositions to certain activities and not others should have any bearing on your future – or more pressingly, on your present reality. Who but the most naive and ignorant among us believes that the world runs on the fuel of principles?
After-all, you don’t build a successful business on the back of your values – ethical or otherwise – but on how well the market receives your product. Authors write best sellers because other people accept their ideas, politicians get elected to office because people relate to their slogans, employees get promoted because their superiors recognize their competence, academics gain recognition because other academics cite their work, athletes are recruited because scouts spot their potential
You are as valuable as other people’s opinions of you. The rule holds for every profession. It’s not a hallmark of capitalism or of the human species. Hierarchies of competence exist across species, cultures, historical time periods, economic systems. Like all universal laws, this too would be