What Would You Be Willing To Die For? We're Too Old to Scrap Our True Love Language

Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Joey Nicotra on Unsplash

It’s always in the cards, these cards, anyway

Dear Reader: This is a treatise that may be best taken in bites. Big topic, deep subject, and lots of ramifications. Hope it’s worthwhile.

The test was hard. Damned hard. Hard enough so that I made myself do it several times over to make sure I was being brutally honest.

The test was about values. Do you know yours? I thought I did, but having to dig more deeply to answer that question was pretty revealing.

What are the values that you’d fight for? Die for? Which values define you?

Some of us are clear, some aren’t. Some think that Trump is worth dying for, or at least debasing themselves publicly for, so there’s that. I didn’t say we all had to agree on any particular value set but in this piece, let’s talk about values worth our time, attention, even our lives.

To get started, here’s some recommended reading:

Archbishop Chaput writes for right now:

“Humans have a habit of making the same mistakes again and again, in new forms, with new costs and excuses. We do it in each new generation. Our vanity in the present makes us blind to lessons of the past. It also ensures that we make the same blunders in the future. The only reliable brake on this cycle of stupidity and pride is a culture’s moral character. And that character depends on a shared belief in the goodness, the sacred quality, of something or someone greater than human reason, worthy enough to live and die for. When that’s lost, things unravel. And as we’re now learning, the results of that unraveling can get ugly.” (author bolded)

Things have gotten ugly. I believe they’ve gotten ugly because we are, as a nation in many ways, morally corrupt. All I have to do is look at too many of our leaders (such as they are) and people who push themselves forward as our religious and moral examples. Like this godawful charlatan:

But that’s just me.

We lost two great moral leaders: Jimmy Carter and Pope Francis. Thank god for such examples. We need more to fill the vacuum. And we need to show up individually with plenty of our own. After all, we lead our own lives, so do we lead from values?

Let’s define values:

a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life.

Values are one reason I signed up to serve my country. I was on active duty under Carter. I’d have laid down my life for that man for good reason. More than any other President, Carter personified morals, principles and values. Not now.

Values are why I moved to Oregon, for a very different environment.

Values are also why I may well move overseas.

You get my drift. What’s important enough for you to show up at the front of the line where the guns, knives and gas canisters are? To stand on the side of what you believe is right, not just what’s convenient right now? To risk- and even lose- your life for a cause you know damned good and well is historical and undeniably the right one?

I won’t debase the discussion by bringing up the equally-committed January 6th lugnuts here, but you get my meaning.

What about more recent women, ordinary women, who did the right thing for ALL other women?

How brave are you and I? You might find out if your home is on fire and your toddler’s inside. You might find out if your next-door neighbor is attacked by a mob. You might find out if you see someone brutalizing their pet on the sidewalk.

Yet we also learn about our values in our everyday interactions, what we allow, what we tolerate, what we let slip day by day until our sense of self is long gone.

For example, how about when we consistently break promises? If we fail to show up for those who need us and count on us? If we let ourselves down repeatedly? If we don’t stand up against racism when a Black or Brown or Asian coworker is publicly maligned?

That’s one way we suffer: when we claim allegiance to values we don’t live when a test is in front of us and we look or walk away.

You and I don’t have to be heroic to find out what our values are. We simply need to find ourselves hollowed out by poor choices, a lousy career, or too many compromises to our sense of self. If it gets bad enough, perhaps then we start asking much bigger questions.

My buddy Melissa was listening to an Easter speaker at her church who was addressing courage. Here’s the quote that riveted me:

Boundaries are our love language. Our values determine our boundaries.

Read that several times and tell me that it doesn’t resonate right down to your marrow.

Melissa told me that she ultimately had to end her relationship with her beloved partner because they didn’t share the same values. The speech helped her see that.

That insight helped me realize that this was precisely why my ex is my ex. He had terrible integrity and honesty issues. He cheated, lied, and broke every important promise he ever made.

When we sell ourselves down the river for sex, money, fame, comfort and convenience, when we forfeit our values in order to get attention or make a living, when we denigrate what we know in our hearts is most important to us, we suffer. Our souls are on fire.

How does this affect our work here on Substack, on social media, as writers and wanna-be influencers?

Gurwinder

wrote this:

The Perils of Audience Capture

Since the temptation to please people is part of my personality, this is a trap I get to watch as I explore more social media. But I’ve gotten much better at boundaries. The values exercise I’ve been working on these last few weeks as I slowly but surely heal from foot surgery and dislocated ribs has been a revelation.

So values, big deal, right?

Well, if values determine our boundaries, and too many of us have sold our souls for some kind of currency, no wonder we’re suffering.

What are YOU willing to die for? What are your bedrock values?

Isn’t that worth knowing, given that we are so riled and roiled up right now? Precisely what is so important to us that we’d be willing to risk to stand up for something?

Ask Black folks that question, why don’t you? They’ve been fighting for their values- as in the right to be allowed to live without constant fear, for example- for four centuries. Women have been fighting for all kinds of rights, such as the right to NOT be raped, forever. But this isn’t that article.

This is about all of us, right here, right now.

Shortly before her federal job was eliminated by DOGE, Melissa went through the Values Edge System, a program intended for organizations which have trainers to facilitate it.

She shared her copy so that I could play with it. While you can buy this program here, you and I could replicate this more easily and cheaply at home. More on that in a sec.

Here are the basics from the set Melissa sent me:

You get 56 cards. They’re broken out into widely-accepted intrinsic and extrinsic values that humans. You might add or subtract a few based on your background, culture, stage of life, etc.

You organize your cards according to three categories: Always, Sometimes and Never.

Then you remove anything that isn’t Always.

So here you are, removing all kinds of values that you say are important. Now you start digging and asking yourself whether Competence is more important to you than Achievement, that kind of thing.

I still ended up with something like 27 values in the Always category.

Trim those to fifteen, is the next step.

It gets gritty and organic each time you trim. This demands naked honesty.

You start choosing among a whole bunch of standards and principles that you like to think are important, that you like to think you try to live by.

Here’s my layout:

And it may change in a few years, but for now…

This is where we start telling the absolute truth about whether or not we’re actually living what we say moves us the most.

You start putting certain cards like Family and Belonging next to each other and ask which one resonates more deeply.

Many values may resonate. But is that how we’re living?

How we show up each day speaks more honestly to our value set than what we talk about.

When people run their mouths about faith, all I care about is what those folks actually do with their lives. The truth is often pretty nasty.

Can I just share one example, please, since I have a huge issue with the lies and secret lives of too many of the religious, the extreme religious right, politicians, pastors, priests and some police?

I’ve researched this before, so here’s what I found when I asked who were the customers of sex-trafficked girls and women:

Comparing men arrested for buying sex with a nationally representative sample of men, one study found that men who purchased sex were more likely to be educated. They were also slightly more likely not to be married.

More specifically, my team conducted a study of 115 women in Ohio that had previously been child sex trafficking victims and 43 who were current adult sex trafficking victims.

We identified their customers as being male drug dealers, members of law enforcement, lawyers, construction workers, truckers, businessmen, social workers, pastors, city employees and more.

That research really opened my eyes.

In other words, many of the people who were happy to rape vulnerable women and children are those who had taken an oath, people who professed to be pious leaders for God, people who claimed to stand up for the law, people who studied to be helpers for those in trouble. People who were fathers. Community leaders. Husbands. And Ohio isn’t an isolated case. In Florida, K-12 kids are taught how to identify sexual predators when sadly some of them are the very people society tells us to trust.

I was raped repeatedly by an Army psychiatrist to whom I was sent for help after having been raped by other senior officers. You understand my fury about this. Don’t underestimate it.

This is the country I swore to protect. Right now in particular, I have an integrity problem with my country. Not that I haven’t often over the years, but right now? A profound one. Bet lots of you are dealing with the same thing.

Our stance on war, our stance on gun rights over life, our stance on women’s bodies, our stance on guns over kids’ safety, our stance on profit above all other priorities, especially the environment and basic needs, all these things cause me great distress. These to me are attacks on values: life, body agency, kids’ right to a safe life and education, a non-polluted world for us and our kids.

To a degree, what’s going on right now in America might be difficult but it is healthy as hell. Because we get to ask what we’re willing to stand up for and what we are willing to fight against.

Maybe even die for.

Even if you’re not exactly ready to take this discussion to that level, at least consider doing an exercise which will allow you to discover what’s most important to you personally.

Have your values changed as you’ve aged? Is Family now more important than Freedom? Is Inner Harmony now more important than Beauty? Have your values evolved?

You can do much the same thing I did with the cards by using this list from James Clear or this list from Brene Brown.

Brown challenges you to take your values list down to two.

That’ll put some grey in your hair. But that’s why she calls it “Dare to Lead.”

You can make your own card set from the above lists, then create your Always, Sometimes and Never columns. Or do it on your computer.

My top two values are Integrity and Fairness. Everything else tends to support those.

Talk about clarity.

Our boundaries are our love languages. Values inform our boundaries.

If ever you were curious about why you do what you do, this exercise is worthwhile.

But wait, there’s more. When I showed this to my buddy JC, the first thing he said was “Do this for your business.”

I’m starting a new line of work as an elder influencer, taking it to a whole new level, in a world filled with fakers and scammers and airbrushed lives. Lots of challenges therein.

As content creators, are we focused too much on chasing money than delivering value? Slipping into the scam of selling programs on how to make money on Substack or wherever rather than writing/working from the heart?

Is the work you’re doing, the parenting you’ve committed to, the life you’re leading in alignment with your most closely-held values?

I had to ask all those questions while I did this exercise. I didn’t like some of the answers but I sure was grateful for the clarity. I knew why I was suffering. And I know what to do about it.

The answers to this don’t make us bad people, if we aren’t living in accordance to what we most fervently believe is important. But it does give us a roadmap to help us return to the bedrock we believe in.

When you can stand on that bedrock and know you can count on yourself, you stop suffering. If you fall down, you know how to get back up.

It’s a worthy journey. And it will allow us to play.

Photo by Shaojie on Unsplash

This was a challenging piece to write, and it was important enough to make public. Thank you to all who support my work and who cause me to think hard about the quality of what I do. Please consider