What Do You Want Out of Life?

1. Life is full of conflict; managing it is key to flourishing.

Chances are that, if things aren’t going well, you can find some conflict at the bottom of it.

Life isn't easy. Contrary to youthful expectations, life doesn't automatically sort itself out as you age; it requires continuous effort to navigate choices, goals, and values amidst constant change. Serious conflicts between our goals, or between our goals and the world, are inevitable and stand in the way of living well. These conflicts manifest as stress, frustration, and unhappiness, prompting us to question our path.

Humans are complex. Unlike simpler creatures driven by basic needs, humans possess sophisticated brains and diverse, multifaceted, interrelated goals, many of which operate below conscious awareness. This complexity creates numerous possibilities for conflict, from work-life balance struggles to clashes between personal desires and cultural expectations. Unresolved conflicts make it harder to achieve what we want and can lead to uncertainty about what truly matters.

Conflict management matters. Our lives go better when we can effectively manage these serious conflicts. Good management requires a deep understanding of what we care about most, which allows us to prioritize and make sensible choices. This book offers a philosophical guide to thinking about our values and goals, providing tools to deal with conflicting desires, limited information, and an often uncooperative world.

2. Your well-being depends on fulfilling what truly matters: your values.

My own view about well-being is that it is best understood as the fulfillment of the values that fit our personalities and our circumstances.

Goals drive us. Humans are goal-directed, self-regulating systems, constantly pursuing desired states of affairs. Goals range from basic needs like food and shelter to complex aspirations like career success or learning a new skill, forming a rough hierarchy where some things are wanted for their own sake, and others instrumentally.

Values are special goals. Values are the most important, ultimate goals that are well-integrated into our psychology, harmonizing our desires, emotions, and thoughts. They are relatively stable, organize how we live, give us a sense of identity, and serve as standards for assessing how our life is going. Examples include family, friendship, health, meaningful work, and happiness.

Fulfillment is key. Living a good life, or flourishing, means fulfilling these important, psychologically fitting values. Serious conflict prevents this fulfillment, hindering our well-being. While there's no single objective list of "right" values for everyone, the best values for us are those that suit who we are and can realistically be achieved together over time.

3. Discover your values through introspection, observation, and exploration.

We can’t figure out what matters just by thinking about it. We need to do things, to feel, to react, to learn from experience.

Knowing yourself is hard. Despite feeling confident, we often don't know our values as well as we think, sometimes only realizing what matters when it's gone. This is partly due to hidden goals operating non-consciously and self-protective habits that distort our self-perception.

Multiple discovery methods:

• Introspection: Asking yourself what you value, using thought experiments (e.g., what would you save from a fire, where would you move?). Limited by hidden goals and biases.
• Lab Rat Strategy: Observing your own behavior and emotional reactions (stress, burnout, boredom, flow) from an outside perspective, informed by basic human needs (affiliation, autonomy, competence, security, exploration).
• Guided Reflection: Using imagination exercises prompted by questions about ideal futures or admired qualities to access hidden motivations.
• Learning from Others: Paying attention to how others react to you and what they value, while being mindful of their biases and ulterior motives.
• Exploration: Trying new activities and experiencing the world to discover what resonates and expands your understanding of potential values.

Ongoing process. Understanding your values is a continuous process, not a one-time discovery. Values change as circumstances change (e.g., aging, new relationships), and the act of trying to understand them often leads to their refinement. This process of understanding and improvement is intertwined.

4. Tackle goal conflicts by prioritizing, adjusting, or letting go.

When two goals conflict, it means that achieving one of them comes at the cost of achieving another.

Conflict types. Serious conflicts that cause trouble fall into three categories:

• Within-goal conflict: Different attitudes (desires, emotions, beliefs) about a single goal don't align (e.g., wanting to dance but thinking it's wrong).
• Intergoal conflict: Different goals compete with each other (e.g., career vs. family time).
• Goal-environment conflict: Goals are incompatible with physical or social circumstances (e.g., valuing astronaut career with severe myopia).

Basic responses. Once conflicts are identified, three basic strategies can be employed:

• Prioritize and adjust means to ends: Identify which goals are ultimate values and which are instrumental. Find alternative, less conflicting ways to achieve instrumental goals.
• Give up one of the conflicting goals: Eliminate goals that are harmful (e.g., addiction, self-destructive desires) or known duds (e.g., valuing wealth/fame as ultimate ends).
• Reinterpret our values: Change how we understand what it means to fulfill a value.

Identifying helps. Recognizing within-goal conflicts as often disguised intergoal conflicts (e.g., dancing vs. pleasing God) can make them easier to resolve by applying these strategies. However, giving up ultimate values like family or work is usually not possible or desirable.

5. Reinterpret your values to create harmony in your life.

When our goals conflict with each other, or with the world, in ways that don’t allow us to fulfill them as we have always done, we can look for what is really at stake—what we really value—that we can fulfill in a different, more harmonious way.

Values are flexible. Many ultimate values, like being a "good parent" or a "good friend," are open to interpretation. What counts as fulfilling these values can vary greatly between individuals and cultures.

Reinterpretation is key. When conflicts arise that can't be solved by adjusting means or giving up goals, reinterpreting the conflicting values is a powerful strategy. This involves identifying the core essence of what you truly value within that domain and finding new ways to express or achieve it that fit better with your current life.

Examples of reinterpretation:

• Changing from power yoga to gentle stretching after injury, reinterpreting "yoga" as "maintaining flexibility" or "staying healthy."
• Reframing career success from "reinventing the wheel" to "contributing to a cooperative venture."
• Rethinking "being a nice person" from "never causing discomfort" to "asserting yourself when needed."

Stability through change. Reinterpreting values provides more stability than abandoning them entirely. It allows you to feel you are adapting and continuing on your path, rather than quitting or failing. This strategy is particularly useful when circumstances change, such as aging or shifts in personal priorities.

6. Recognize and challenge conflicts imposed by unfair culture.

Unfair social norms are like insects prowling around in your web of values. They need to be strangled in silk, not given a throne to sit on.

Culture shapes values. Our values are significantly shaped by the communities and cultures we grow up in. While some cultural influences are benign, others, like sexism, racism, or rigid social expectations, can create unfair barriers and internal conflicts.

Unjust barriers differ. Unlike natural limitations (like mountain height) or personal fears, unjust social barriers are things we believe should change. They can be external (discrimination) or internal (internalized oppression, harmful stereotypes).

Special scrutiny needed. Values encouraged by unfair cultures (e.g., women valuing excessive deference, men valuing emotional stoicism) require special scrutiny. We must question how we interpret these values and who benefits from that interpretation, as they can conflict with other important goals like career success or mental health.

Valuing social change. Recognizing that conflicts stem from unjust social norms can motivate adopting the value of social change. This helps frame personal struggles within a larger context, affirms the validity of one's desires, and can reduce the conflict between personal goals and the need for social approval by focusing on the approval of those who support justice.

7. When strategies fail, make peace or embrace radical change.

Making peace doesn’t mean just living with goals you reject and letting them take up a lot of space in your life.

Perpetual conflicts. Sometimes, despite efforts to prioritize, adjust, give up bad goals, or reinterpret values, persistent conflicts remain, often due to deeply ingrained personality traits or external constraints.

Making peace. A second-best strategy is to "make peace" with undesirable but unmovable aspects of yourself or your situation. This involves acknowledging these limitations without fully endorsing them, perhaps using humor or compassion, effectively demoting them from values to quirks or facts of life. This reduces their power to unsettle your core values.

Radical change. When core values themselves are harmful or fundamentally misaligned with who you are (e.g., values inherited from an abusive family or oppressive culture), a complete overhaul or "value system transplant" might be necessary. This is a dramatic step that challenges the very foundation of your identity and goals.

Difficult but possible. Radical change is incredibly challenging because it requires letting go of something central to your sense of self, often held in place by integrated emotions, desires, and judgments. It's like disturbing the ground you walk on, causing disorientation and loss, but it may be the only path to greater fulfillment.

8. Anchor radical change in basic human needs and feelings.

When our basic values are harmful to us, we can change them by appealing to even more basic features of our goal-seeking nature.

What to hold onto? When questioning core values, you need anchors. These aren't external absolutes, but fundamental aspects of your human nature and psychology that are more stable than the values being challenged.

Basic psychological needs. Humans share fundamental needs that have evolved over time. These provide a stable platform:

• Comfort and security
• Novelty and excitement
• Autonomy (control over life)
• Competence (skills to do what you want)
• Affiliation (connection with others)

Feelings as guides. Feelings are essential to valuing anything; they are the building blocks. When considering radical change, pay attention to what genuinely resonates emotionally, what brings positive feelings like curiosity, joy, or relief, as these indicate potential new anchors for your value system.

Raft in the storm. These basic motivations and feelings act as a "raft" when you're "at sea," questioning your core values. They are the most stable platform available, providing direction and something to build upon when dismantling harmful value systems inherited from difficult circumstances.

9. Other people are fundamental to your values and well-being.

However much other people are impediments to fulfilling our goals, we couldn’t live without them.

Social creatures. Humans are profoundly social, evolved to cooperate and depend on each other for survival and flourishing. This social nature means other people are deeply intertwined with our values.

Others in our values:

• Valued for themselves: We care about friends, family, and loved ones for their own sake, wanting them to flourish.
• Needed for activities: Many valued activities (sports, music, hobbies, even solitary ones like writing) depend on the participation, support, or approval of others.
• Shape our identity: Values about being a good friend, parent, or colleague depend on how others perceive and interact with us.

Mutual dependence. Our ability to fulfill many values relies on what other people do, say, and think. This dependence is not a weakness but a fundamental aspect of human nature that we tend to embrace.

Humility in judging others. Given that values are best when they fit an individual's unique psychology and circumstances, and we can't fully know another person's inner world, we should approach judging others' values with humility. While we can offer support and share observations, we often don't know what's truly best for them.

10. Moral values are deeply connected to personal fulfillment.

There’s not even a neat line between our moral goals and our “self-interested” goals.

Beyond self-interest. While some philosophical traditions see morality and self-interest as fundamentally opposed, for most people, moral values are not external constraints but integrated parts of their value system. Values like justice, kindness, respect, and honesty are often intertwined with personal goals.

Harmony with personal goals:

• Enabling personal pursuits: Living in a community with basic moral standards (truth-telling, keeping agreements, not harming others) is necessary for individuals to pursue their own goals effectively.
• Professional ethics: Many career goals are constrained or defined by moral imperatives (e.g., doctors doing no harm, teachers helping students).
• Combating injustice: For those affected by oppression, fighting injustice is both a moral project and a personal one that can affirm self-worth and capability.
• Psychological benefits: Helping others and acting morally often increases personal happiness, life satisfaction, and confidence.

Not just suckers. The existence of immoral people doesn't invalidate our own moral values. We care about justice, kindness, and respect not primarily out of fear of punishment, but because we sympathize with others and recognize the importance of community. Our reasons for valuing morality are internal and robust.

11. Navigate moral conflicts by doing your fair share.

If we think of our moral values this way, instead of thinking that our contributions are only important if they are big, we can think that we’re doing pretty well, morally speaking, as long as we do our part.

Positive obligations conflict. Moral values that require us to actively help others and improve the world (positive obligations) can conflict with our other goals, as the needs of the world are vast and demanding. Sacrificing everything for morality is often incompatible with other core values.

"Do your fair share". A strategy to manage this conflict is to reinterpret the value of "making the world a better place" in terms of doing your fair share as part of a team or moral community. This approach, rooted in traditions like social contract theory, suggests identifying and following reasonable rules for contribution that assume mutual effort.

Teamwork and improvement. While not everyone does their part, thinking of morality as teamwork is more realistic and sustainable than aiming for moral superstardom. Being part of a team motivates us not to let others down and encourages continuous improvement, pushing us to do better than before without demanding impossible sacrifices.

Practical moral action:

• Do something: Take action, however small.
• Do something that fits you: Align moral contributions with your personality, skills, and other goals.
• Do something that fits long term: Find sustainable ways to contribute that can adapt as your life changes.

12. Negative moral rules set boundaries for your pursuits.

These “thou shalt not” moral rules are the limits on what we should do in pursuit of our goals and values.

Constraints, not goals. Unlike positive moral obligations (helping others), negative moral obligations (not lying, stealing, killing) are typically seen as strict duties that must always be performed. They are not goals to be balanced or reinterpreted for convenience.

Boundaries for action. These "thou shalt not" rules function as fundamental constraints on our pursuit of all other goals and values. They define the acceptable boundaries within which we must operate, regardless of how much they might conflict with achieving a particular personal aim.

Not up for negotiation. While there might be minor disagreements (e.g., white lies), the core negative moral rules are widely accepted as non-negotiable limits on behavior. You don't "do your fair share" of not killing; you simply don't kill.

Beyond Glaucon. The conflict between "doing the right thing" (especially negative duties) and "doing what we want" is not the central conflict of most people's lives. For most, the challenge is integrating multiple values, not deciding whether to abandon morality for selfish gain. Moral values are compelling because of our human nature, not external force or radical choice, and they provide essential structure for a life well-lived.

Last updated: May 18, 2025