Ordered list:

1. Family
2. Health
3. Friendship
4. Wealth
5. Enjoyment

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1. Leadership
2. Loyalty
3. Wisdom
4. Creativity
5. Security
6. Personal Accomplishment
7. Integrity
8. Independence
9. Personal Development
10. Prestige
11. Expertness
12. Community
13. Service
14. Power
15. Location

I put family, health, friendship, wealth, and enjoyment as my top five in my value list. I know lots of people think putting wealth to the fourth position is very worldly, but honestly I think wealth is the basic of many things except family, friends and health in the real world. Take today as an example. Sunday is the last day of this week and I have a lot to do. I have three roommates and we share a two-bedroom apartment because this is much cheaper, and our agreement of sharing room to save money represents that we care about wealth.  We are all international students studying abroad that show our independence, and we became close friends since we lived together that show our friendship.  We also watched a movie called Gravity for enjoyment since we all like movies. I contact with my parents everyday using WeChat, which is an app like Line, and I love to talk about my day with them and I know they love to hear. I ate two times a day and an apple at night to keep healthy, and I believe I am responsible for my own health.

I am the only child in my family, so my parents gave all they can give to me. When I was little, my father kept saying he wishes me noting but three things, be healthy, be happy, and be aspirant. I don’t understand what these mean at first, but I start to understand now. My family was very poor when I was born, and my parents played an exemplary role to show me their positive quality. They are strong, optimistic, and frugal; they respect to each other and they dutiful to their parents. I would keep these positive qualities, but there is one thing I will get rid of. They are told to be a person who their parents want them to be, but I won’t. My parents want me to be a doctor because they think doctor is a very good career, but I don’t like to learn medicine. My goal for myself is to be who I want to be and show my parents my decision is right. They love me so they did not force me to learn medicine in college, and I am finding my way to achieve my goal. Although I haven’t decided my major, I am happy now because I took different courses in different area and this is fun. I will find my interests and I know I will insist it till the end.

One particular subject that I found very interesting in this article was the evaluation of human values, what they are, and where they derive from.  One major component that sets apart human beings from other mammals in the world is our capability of thinking, understanding, and analyzing decisions that range from the smallest day-to-day decisions to critical decisions that affect many parts of our lives and possibly the lives around us.  Each and everyone one of us is different in our ways of understanding things around us, and how those certain things make us feel.  I believe that is a major component to why an alien from a different planet would view us as humans as unpredictable, complex, and quarrelsome.  In my humble opinion, I believe that the author’s examples of human unpredictability and quarrelsome gave our human tendencies a negative outlook.  I believe that the beauty of the human mind is how we are all unpredictable in the ways we  understand certain things in the world.  If a Martian came to a foreign world where humans were predictable and not quarrelsome, where the unique factor be? Would we all just be the same robots that think, look, feel, and act the same way? The essence of our consciousness and how our personal values stem from it is the foundation to our interesting yet unique ways of understanding the world around us.

I believe that the development of personal values is the foundation of the human being conscious.   Without an inner conscious and our ability to understand how it interacts with our mind, values would be nothing more than streaming lines of thought in our heads with no substantial evidence on why it is important to us.  Therefore, since we know that personal values exist, how are they developed throughout our lives?  The article discusses whether or not our values are freely chosen from our own doing, or if they stem from our inheritance or the way we were raised.  This made me think about my own personal values and how they were stemmed.  Through personal experience, I believe that we use our inheritance, the way we were raised, and people we surround ourselves with to understand which values align with our own conscious.  We evaluate the good and the bad with our life experiences and apply them to our own development of personal values.  According to the article, values should “be synonymous with personal evaluations and related beliefs.”  Although it seems like we as human beings do not freely choose our own path of values, I strongly believe that although our beliefs are strongly influenced by our inheritance and by the culture around us, we choose freely what to believe and value and what not to in the end.