The Values Sort

This is a short one. Maybe that’s appropriate. The less we say about our “Image,” the better? Our faces are soft and gentle. They are vulnerable to attack. Punches to the nose. Smacks across the cheek. Biologically, we are wired to protect this part of ourselves. But the “Face” this card talks about isn’t biological. It’s social. Having a public persona is part of being human. Having that “face” b...

When I guide people through this values exercise, they often get stuck on the fine print. They get hung up on the categories (like “Self-Direction” or “Hedonism”). Or they flip the card over and get distracted by the “Aware-Affirm-Apply” prompts on the back. But usually, if people are going to get derailed, it is by the definitions on the bottom of the cards. * Authority: The right to lead or comm...

Money, honey. I grew up without very much of it. It was the 1980s, and that was really an excellent era to grow up broke. We had nothing and we didn’t know it. We had a dam on the Calapoolia River nearby, see, and we could go swimming there. And we didn’t have the internet. It really was a different time. I was young. I didn’t know what kind of need for money was coming for me. I didn’t know that...

Card #2 is Authority. The caption reads: “The right to lead or command.” Authority is slightly more palatable to me than Social Power, but only just. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I have clear examples of abuse of authority in my life—early on, and consistently throughout. Maybe you’ve experienced that, too. I am suspicious of people who stand up and wave their own flags and try...

Card number one is Social Power. People hardly ever choose it because it feels like a villain’s card. The caption on the bottom says: “Control over others, dominance.” Yeesh. It’s not a card that made it to my top five. To be honest, it feels like the closest thing to a “negative value” in the deck. My instinct is to flick it off the table. But that would be dishonest. Because Social Power has aff...

I do have a very high value for fitting into nature. It’s why I’m an avowed “environmentalist” now. To me, that means maintaining a value for our natural environment, as the name would suggest, but it feeds and bleeds—as these values tend to do—into other things. Like Conservation and Frugality . My love for the natural world informs my desire to not buy new things that require extractive and expl...

This podcast will be a companion to my series of essays on basic human values. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickfromoregon.substack.com

It’s time to talk about the Values thing. A while back, I found a tool called The Values Deck. It’s simple: fifty-seven cards. Each card has a basic human value printed on it, like “A World at Peace” or “True Friendship” or “Health” or “Family Security.” You sort the cards. There’s a method to it. You sort and you sort until you get down to the five cards that represent the values affecting your a...