Your values aren't the ones you'd list
Most of what people call their values — being active, a big social circle, a good career — are really social idealisms: the life they think they should want. A short take on the distinction John DeMartini draws in The Values Factor, and the test for telling the two apart.
Ask most people what they value and you get a tidy, creditable list: being active, a big social circle, a successful career. It’s a good list. It’s also, more often than not, a portrait of someone they think they’re supposed to be rather than someone they are.
John DeMartini has a name for the items on that list. In The Values Factor he calls them social idealisms, and he spends the book prising them apart from your actual values — a line most of us smudge for years without noticing. A social idealism is how you think you should, ought to, or have to live. It’s socially acceptable, it photographs well, and it usually belongs to a parent, a peer group, or the general culture rather than to you.
The tell is in the verb
The quickest way to catch one is to listen to how you talk about it. “I should get to the gym.” “I need to network more.” “I really must read more.” Anything in that register — should, need, ought, must — is a social idealism in the costume of a value. You’re reporting a standard you’ve absorbed, not a desire you have.
Genuine values sound different. “I choose to.” “I love to.” “I always end up.” Nobody has to be talked into the things they truly value; they organise their life around them and complain when something gets in the way. If you have to flog yourself toward something with a running tally of shoulds, that’s the giveaway. A value you can only sustain under threat of guilt was never yours — it’s a rented one, and the rent is the guilt.
Your life already answered
DeMartini’s fix is almost rude in its simplicity: stop asking what you value and look at what you already do. Your time, your energy, your money and your space are all allocated, and they were allocated honestly while you weren’t paying attention. Whatever genuinely sits at the top of your hierarchy, you find time for it, you have energy for it, and you spend money on it without being nagged. Whatever you have to nag yourself toward is sitting further down, regardless of what the list claims.
Run the test and the result is usually a little deflating. Your real values tend to be less impressive than the ones you’d recite, and far more specific — not “health” but tinkering with a particular thing at 11pm; not “community” but two people you’d drop anything for. They don’t make a good poster. That’s exactly how you know they’re yours and not borrowed.
The cost of mixing the two up is a quiet one. You spend years chasing a life assembled from other people’s values, feeling vaguely like a failure for not wanting it badly enough, when the problem was never your discipline. You were just climbing someone else’s ladder, surprised it didn’t feel like yours.