Virtues
This is part of a series:
Overview
This post is about how to identify what is relevant to living a fulfilled life. Once you know what is important, it is much easier to use the tools outlined in the rest of this blog series to drive consistent action and behavior toward the important things. It also makes it easy to say no to ideas that seem exciting in the moment, but are not actually serving the intention of your life.
Catalyst
Something that has frequently occurred in my life is a vivid terror as I realized that one of my hobbies had been forgotten and neglected, normally triggered by the rediscovery of some dusty tool from a former pastime. Whether it’s an old camera, a model kit, some guitar pedals, I remember back to a time when I held it hopefully, looking forward to the prospect of doing something with it. That hope was shattered, and I beat myself up for not having the discipline to follow through on things. I realize just how much time I had, what could have been had I been more intentional with the moments of my life. This self defeating cycle lead me to develop my personal system for managing progress towards achieving long term goals, to ensure I’m spending time on things that will fulfill me in a way that eliminates this feeling of loss and hopelessness.
Establishing Pillars
Before I set any goals, I wanted to identify which types of activities and behaviors would satisfy me. Humanity has been working out the ideals towards which we must strive since the dawn of civilization. Throughout the history of humankind codes of conduct have emerged, despite disparities occurring across geographic and cultural lines. These ideas are extremely popular with self help authors and productivity gurus, often offered as a path forward to living a life of fulfillment. The philosophy of Ancient Greece, Plato, the Stoics, etc. are common examples of this phenomenon. Eastern thought is also quite popular with the ideologies of Taoism and Buddhism being taken apart piecemeal by podcasters and bloggers alike, and their ideals reconstructed as instruments to make one a more productive employee, doting spouse, or consistent gym-goer.
To claim that you’re a card carrying member of these traditions after a few podcasts and books is complete lunacy. These are traditions deeply imbued with the cultures and time that produced them; a full understanding would require a lifetime of dedication towards studying at the lowest levels of original texts and source material. I think more often than not people want to belong to something to signal that they have figured it out, that they are more complete due to some secret knowledge, and that makes them feel better about themselves in their day to day life. They fail to realize they already do belong to something worth uniquely cultivating: themselves. Despite this, I do believe that any developed school of thought can be studied more shallowly than what an expert level understanding would require, lessons of it applied to your personal system of life management, and ultimately we can learn from our forebears things that do apply to the modern world with ease.
My point here is that if you don’t know where to start when establishing your own pillars, looking to wisdom of the past is a good starting point. It’s worth looking at the similarities between different traditions to see which priorities transcend geographic and cultural lines. I stumbled across a few of these, and they are reflected in the set of virtues I created. I’ll tackle this in more detail in a subsequent blog post about my thoughts on religion.
Application
To decide on which ideas made it into my bespoke set of virtues, I started with a big list of all the project ideas I had written down, ruminated on during long walks, or had simmering in half done states. It led me to a list of things that looked like this:
- Make music and release it as a solo artist
- Improve my chess skills
- A litany of app ideas
- Build a website and a blog
- Get nice roller skating with quads
- Take some math courses
- Learn to speak, write, and read Bulgarian
- Learn to cook properly
A pattern emerged, as these ideas really boiled down to two categories: creativity and knowledge. I began thinking about which categories could be added to this list so that all the important things in my life that need consistent nurturing would have a clearly defined place. I imagined that if I ensured every task or project scheduled through my system reflected these categories, and that all categories were consistently represented, I’d be doing alright. I thought of a few more things:
- Physical fitness
- Mental health
- Housekeeping tasks
- Developing relationships with friends and family
- Intentionally consuming media (Books/TV/Movies)
Thus emerged 7 categories that I see as the bedrock of my life, the pillars of the good fight pitted against those things I loathe to see in my behavior.
- Creativity - develop ideas and implement them
- Knowledge - expand understanding
- Fitness - have a balanced diet and stay physically active
- Network - nurturing relationships
- Spirit - manage mental health
- Home - build a happy home
- Lore - craft a repository of media that enhances understanding of the human condition
I use this framework to decide what goes into my system of keeping time.