What are your values?

Anna is a friend in the "Living a Story" community. Here are some of her questions about values and some of my thoughts.

Anna: Hello.

I will answer your question in two parts, the first part is about my values, and the other part is about how to form my own values.

1. The formation process of my values

I think my values should be gradually established. Whether it will change or not, I don't know for the time being. The premise for ordinary people's thinking to change is that they encounter obstacles and find that what they think can't work, and there is no way to proceed, so there will be myths.

So far, I have not encountered such a situation, at least all the status quo can still be explained by my own theories, so I still maintain my original values for the time being.

My values have a very low-level foundation: survival.

I think that everything starts with solving the needs of survival as the bottom starting point to deal with life.

In order to survive, we need to solve all kinds of problems. Whether it is food, clothing, housing, transportation, food, drink, or entertainment, they are all problems; some problems are visible and pragmatic problems, and some problems are invisible spiritual aspects of retreat. The problem.

So the foundation of my values can be summed up as: "To survive (or to use another word for "exist"), solve more problems."

On this basis, the second question will be involved, what kind of perspective and what time dimension to use to measure "survival"?

It can be a very short-term perspective of a few months, a year, or a few years, or a very long-term perspective of decades or hundreds of years; it can be a personal perspective, for personal survival, or it can be It is the perspective of a group, for the survival of the group.

Because I have done some very short-term and very personal things, such as taking a vacation from school or making a video, there are many, and after having various experiences, I will think: Then what?

Later, I realized that "sustainability" is a very important concept, and something that can "last longer" is more valuable.

So I will also begin to care about human history, the position of my era in history, my own personal position, and the direction of my future personal direction, the direction of the world and history.

All the tangible things may disappear due to the changes of the times. The most vital thing is actually some abstract things, such as a concept, a thought, or a symbol, a kind of idea. They can be very long through different carriers. The existence of time, so this is a derivation of my values: the metaphysical will have more lasting vitality than the physical.

So I have the symbol "Li BOBO" as my personal identity, and the identity symbol "x++" which creates a group.

But the metaphysical thing is illusory, and it needs some specific carrier to be easily seen by people. Combining the above thinking, I will start to think: what kind of metaphysical things can be turned into metaphysical results that can promote the generation of more solutions?

The concept promoted by my own personal identity symbol "Li BOBO" is "living a story"; a concept promoted by x++ is "let everyone be everyone".

The most important element of "story" is "conflict": only by resolving conflicts can problems be solved; in the same way, "letting everyone be everyone" also advocates problem solving in essence, so the direction behind these abstract concepts is to solve more problems.

It was only in my early days that I found that many problems could be solved by myself, so I didn't realize the value of "groups", until I realized the limitations of "individuals", and I began to hope to use "groups" to create bigger problems. Influence, so I gradually came up with related concepts such as "community building", looking forward to solving more problems in a group way.

Finally, a brief summary of my values: to solve more and more valuable problems for a longer "existence".

2. How to form your own values

I think the formation of ideas comes from experience and reflection. Have more ideas, and then put those ideas into practice. If the practice is effective, it will strengthen your ideas. If the practice is ineffective, you need to revise your ideas.

Life will tell you the answer.

Therefore, to form your own values is to do a lot of experiments according to your own ideas, collect a lot of feedback in the interaction with the world, and then improve your own ideas and values in the process.

But one point to note here is that the real society is not ideal, and it is not necessarily that you can achieve results with your efforts. In this process, the whole society also has a lot of invisible effects. Maybe some of your actions work in one environment, but not in another. Because of the existence of this reality, different values will be formed in different environments.

Based on such a situation, my suggestion is that if you have the opportunity, you can put your ideas into practice more in different environments. Gather more and more universal feedback to more fully refine your values.

Of course, there is also a situation where you may only want to live in a certain environment, so you just need to interact a lot with that environment.

Regarding how to form your own values, in my opinion, summed up in one sentence is actually:

Think more, practice more, and life will tell you the answer.

The above are some of my responses, I hope they can be of reference to you, thank you.