Life Values Assessment
Top 5 Values:
1) Family
2) Integrity
3) Friendship
4) Enjoyment
5) Health
Reflecting on the past 24 hours, I think that these five values were definitely top priorities and values that I represented and base my life around. My family is always first, as I would/will drop anything for them, and same goes for friends. The beliefs that I think I inherited from my family would be all of them, because I see both my parents and grandparents putting these same values first in their own lives. Enjoyment is in my top five because my dad drilled into me that working hard and being successful is important, but if you can’t enjoy your success, then what is the point in having it at all if you aren’t having any type of enjoyment along the way?
Besides friends and family which are always a number one priority in my life, I think enjoyment, health and integrity are all things that I can improve on. Eliminating stress and other negative aspects of my life will increase my overall enjoyment, and health! Goals I have for myself that I have not yet fully pursued would definitely be to travel the world. I have gone more places than the average person, but there is an unending list of places I dream and hope to go to someday. Another goal is to someday work in the sports business industry, whether that be for the NBA, NFL or a race company like the Nike Women’s Half Marathon. I wouldn’t say there are things standing in the way of achieving these goals, more like I need to keep pursuing them, and working hard, and never giving up and settling for something less.
The Initial Question
The final paragraph, “Personal values matter a great deal. Without them, we cannot live at all, they are just as essential as air, food and water” (19) is a great summary of what I conclude of this reading. Personal values are such a critical part of being a human, without them we would be cookie cutter and with no unique opinions of beliefs. This article certainly created questions and self reflection on how I have become the person I am with the values that I hold.
The section titled “The Most Basic Ways We Come to “Know” Something”, are categories that I have never considered before, but I definitely agree with. In my life, after contemplating which categories I use most and why, I believe that I use all of them (sense, logic, emotion, intuition) fairly evenly. My values based around religion, for example; I concluded that I used both sense experience and emotion in defining my faith. Sense, because my family has told me countless stories of their faith and how it has changed their lives, as well as hearing sermons and talking with other people of faith throughout my church community. Emotion, because when I attend church or are involved in religious activities, I feel enlightened and connected in a way that just feels right. Regarding the two major synthetic mental modes, I fall into the authority category when regarding religion.
These categories certainly all play a significant role into how I have developed and chosen my personal values. When the reading began questioning if there were other modes of developing values, I began brainstorming of other possible categories, but anything I came up with fell into one of the broader categories that was already listed.
“Not only is the very desire to be objective a “value judgement” or bias, so is the desire to define, categorize, compare, and contrast the different ways that we choose values” (17). This quote ties up the chapter in a nutshell for me. How people feel about values, whether they disagree with one another or feel they base their value off the wrong internal mental mode is pretty irrelevant in my opinion. I can’t imagine a world where everyone’s values are based off the same reasoning (logic, sense, emotion, etc.). This reading certainly exposes and peels away all the layers choosing and developing values, and I agree that this reading can “spark a more meaningful dialogue between opposing viewpoints” (19).