Written By Valerie Tiberius
I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when I was two years old and almost died, a story which became central to my young life. As my mom recorded in her diary when I was just four years old, my response to death was, “I have an idea! Let’s do a lot of living before we die!” Was I onto something? My current self should know: I grew up to be a philosopher who studies happiness and what it means for life to go well.
But now that Covid-19 has entered our world, I find myself thinking a lot more about what it is for life to go badly. Wellbeing might be a fashionable topic, but ill-being is certainly handy for investigation right now. Do my philosophical ideas about happiness have any bearing on our new reality? I wrote a book about how to achieve well-being by fulfilling our values over time, but can we use them during the pandemic?
To achieve well-being, we need to do two things: we need to find the right values for us, and we need to pursue them successfully. The right values are ones that fit together without too much conflict, and are suited to our personalities and circumstances. Given my diabetes, for example, it would have been a shame if I had valued a career as an astronaut.
But now our values are challenged by the pandemic, pursuing them sometimes next to impossible. Our valued relationships are threatened, people we love are threatened, our jobs are in danger, all sorts of valued activities have been curtailed: team sports, live music, traveling, gathering with friends, and more. – all of this has a domino effect on value fulfillment. Opportunities to pursue our values are limited, which makes us fearful. So what can we do? One thing we can do in this strange moment is to attend to the first part of value fulfillment: the part about finding the right values for us. For those of us not on the frontline, the pandemic has created a moment of pause during which we might be able to think about what our values are, what it means to fulfill them, and whether we are living our lives in ways that uphold them. Here are three ideas about how to do that:
First, it’s a good thing to identify some broad and flexible “anchor” values that can be pursued in different ways while they provide us with purpose and security. Friendship; family; meaningful work; mental, physical and spiritual health, moral decency – these are things most of us value and they can be fulfilled by various activities, including some that comply with stay-at-home orders.
Second, if we’re not immediately sure about our values, we can learn something about what’s important to us by observing our reactions as if we were observing a friend. Last week I actually saw some friends –six feet away – and that evening I felt more relaxed than I have in weeks. Seeing their flesh and blood faces soothed my soul and taught me something: those people are important to me and I need to make them a priority in my life. We can also learn what isn’t working for us by attending to what disrupts our sleep, puts us in a bad mood, or provokes more anxiety. Our values might be on hold, but we can pay attention to what we miss – and what we don’t.
Third, we can ask how well we are doing at upholding our values. How much time do we spend on the things we care about, and does that correspond to our actual day-to-day priorities? There might even be some values that we aren’t upholding at all - like justice. Watching how the pandemic disproportionately affects certain groups during this crisis, because of poverty, or lack of adequate healthcare, impresses upon us the importance of our social safety net. Now’s a good time to think about how to stand up for this value.
When I was four, “let’s do a lot of living before we die” meant that we should play, eat banana splits, and get a puppy. These things are still good, but we should also acknowledge that doing a lot of living for adults includes some prep work. At this moment, it is worth taking some time to think about our deepest, most abiding values, especially the people we love and with whom we share a community. It’s hard to doubt their importance, even when everything else is uncertain.
Valerie Tiberius is the Paul W. Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Well-Being as Value Fulfillment, and The Reflective Life.