Chapter 11: Values, Beliefs, and Meaning-Making — What You Stand For

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." — Friedrich Nietzsche

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." — Viktor Frankl

Opening: The Meeting That Didn't Need to Happen

Dev brought it up carefully. They had been sitting at the kitchen table after dinner, and the conversation had moved, as it sometimes did, into the kind of territory that required care.

"There's this opportunity at the design agency," Dev said. "Full-time. More money. Less alignment with what I care about."

Jordan listened.

"I'm trying to figure out how to even decide," Dev said. "Like, the practical stuff is fine — I can list pros and cons. But I keep running into something underneath the practical stuff that I don't have words for."

Jordan thought he understood. He had been there himself, more than once. The feeling that the answer was not going to come from the spreadsheet.

"What do you care about?" he asked. "Not what would be good for your career. What do you actually care about?"

Dev was quiet for a moment. "I care that the work I do makes something better for someone. Not all the time — I know that's not how it works. But as a pattern. That there's a person at the end of something I designed."

"So the agency job..."

"The agency job is mostly for corporations. There are people at the end, technically, but not in the way that's in my line of sight. I'd be one step further away from... whatever it is."

Jordan said, "It sounds like you know."

Dev looked at the table. "I know. But I want the money, and I can't tell if that's okay to want."

The conversation that followed was, Jordan thought later, one of the most useful they had ever had about something that mattered — because it was not about the job. It was about what made life feel like something rather than just what it produced.

11.1 What Values Are — and Are Not

Values are deeply held beliefs about what is fundamentally important, good, and worth pursuing. They are not goals (specific desired outcomes), not preferences (what you would enjoy), not moral rules (what you should do), and not habits (what you actually do). They are the underlying principles that give direction to a life — the criteria by which you implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, evaluate what matters.

The philosopher Charles Taylor describes values as "strong evaluations" — the rare judgments that concern not just what we want or prefer but what is worth wanting. You might prefer coffee to tea without that preference being a value. But caring deeply about honesty, or about doing work that serves others, or about being genuinely present with the people you love — these are values. They concern what kind of person to be, not just what to have or experience.

Three key features of values:

1. They are motivational: Values energize behavior in a way that preferences and goals do not. A person who values integrity will pass up opportunities for gain in situations where most people would not, because the integrity is not merely preferable — it is non-negotiable.

2. They are hierarchical: Not all values are equally important to any given person. A person might value both security and adventure — but when they conflict, the response reveals which is higher. Values conflicts are the most revealing test of what someone actually values.

3. They are both discovered and constructed: Some values feel like they were always there, recognized rather than chosen. Others emerge from deliberate reflection, from examining what a meaningful life would look like. Both experiences are real — and the question of whether values are found or made does not need to be resolved to use them as guides.

11.2 The Major Frameworks for Understanding Values

Several influential frameworks have attempted to map the structure of human values.

Schwartz's Basic Human Values (1992)

The most extensively validated framework in social psychology is Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values, derived from research across 64 countries.

Schwartz identified ten basic value types organized along two bipolar axes:

Axis 1: Self-Enhancement vs. Self-Transcendence - Power (social status, dominance, control) - Achievement (personal success through demonstrated competence) - vs. - Universalism (understanding, appreciation, tolerance, welfare of all) - Benevolence (preservation and enhancement of the welfare of close others)

Axis 2: Openness to Change vs. Conservation - Stimulation (excitement, novelty, challenge) - Self-direction (independent thought and action) - vs. - Security (safety, harmony, stability) - Conformity (restraint of actions that might upset others) - Tradition (respect for and commitment to cultural customs)

Hedonism (pleasure, sensuous gratification) sits at the intersection.

The Schwartz framework is descriptive — it maps the terrain of values, not what values you should have. Its utility is in revealing trade-offs: values on opposite ends of the axes tend to conflict. A person with high power values and high universalism values will experience chronic tension; those values pull in opposite directions in most practical decisions.

Rokeach's Terminal and Instrumental Values

Milton Rokeach's earlier framework distinguished between: - Terminal values: Desired end-states — what you ultimately want your life to be or have (freedom, equality, happiness, family security, wisdom) - Instrumental values: Modes of conduct that help achieve terminal values (honest, ambitious, broadminded, capable, forgiving)

The distinction is practically useful: it separates the destination (what you're ultimately trying to achieve or be) from the vehicle (the qualities and behaviors that get you there).

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Values Framework

The psychotherapy framework most explicitly built around values is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes and colleagues. In ACT, values serve as the foundation of what the therapy calls "committed action" — behavior chosen and sustained because it expresses what matters to the person.

ACT distinguishes values from goals in a specific way: - Goals are achievable and completable — "write a book," "run a marathon," "have a family" - Values are directional and inexhaustible — "creative expression," "physical vitality," "loving and being loved"

A value is not something you can check off. It is a direction you can keep moving in indefinitely. Goals are milestones along the path that a value defines.

This distinction has practical implications: a person can fail to achieve a goal while still living their values fully, or can achieve all their goals while having drifted from their values entirely.

11.3 Values vs. Lived Values: The Crucial Gap

One of the most important findings in values research is the consistent gap between espoused values (what people say they value) and enacted values (what their behavior reveals they actually value).

This is not primarily about hypocrisy. It is about the complexity of motivation, the pull of immediate reward, the gap between intention and action that runs through virtually every domain of human psychology.

A person can genuinely value family time and work 70-hour weeks. They are not lying about the value — family time is genuinely important to them. But when their behavior over time is examined, what is revealed is a different ordering of priorities.

The ACT framework treats this gap specifically. It asks: if a stranger observed your behavior for the past month without knowing your stated values, what values would they infer? The answer to that question is your enacted values. The gap between your stated values and your enacted values is the territory where values clarification does its most important work.

This does not mean stated values are dishonest. It means that living one's values requires ongoing attention and deliberate choice — that values are not automatic guides that inevitably shape behavior, but standards that must be actively consulted.

11.4 The Psychology of Belief

Values concern what is worth pursuing. Beliefs concern what is true — the more cognitive dimension of the self-system.

Beliefs are representations of the world that we take to be true, whether or not they are. Like self-schemas (Chapter 9), beliefs shape what we perceive, remember, and interpret. Unlike purely cognitive schemas, beliefs carry an assent: we hold them as accurate representations of how things are.

Several categories of beliefs are psychologically important:

Core beliefs about the self

"I am fundamentally capable." "I am not really lovable." "I am the kind of person who can handle hard things." These basic self-beliefs (sometimes called "core beliefs" in cognitive-behavioral therapy) operate as lenses through which experience is filtered. A person with the core belief "I am not fundamentally capable" will interpret successes as flukes and failures as confirmation.

Beliefs about others

"People are generally trustworthy." "People will use you if they can." "Most people are doing their best." These interpersonal beliefs shape how social situations are approached, how intentions are attributed, and how conflicts are processed.

Beliefs about the world

"The world is fair, basically." "Bad things happen to people regardless of what they do." "Hard work reliably produces outcomes." These world-beliefs shape what risks are taken, how adversity is processed, and whether agency is experienced.

Beliefs about the future

"Things will work out." "The worst tends to happen." "I can make the future better through my actions." Prospective beliefs shape motivation, initiative, and resilience.

What is notable about many of these beliefs is that they function as self-fulfilling prophecies. The person who believes people are trustworthy extends trust, which produces trustworthy responses in most cases, which confirms the belief. The person who believes people will use you treats others with suspicion, which elicits defensive or adversarial responses, which confirms the belief. The world partly cooperates with our beliefs about it.

11.5 Cognitive Defusion: Working with Beliefs

A significant contribution of ACT and related therapies is the concept of cognitive defusion — techniques for changing the way we relate to our thoughts and beliefs, rather than trying to change their content directly.

The standard cognitive-behavioral approach to problematic beliefs is to examine and challenge them: is this belief accurate? What is the evidence for and against it? Can it be modified?

Defusion takes a different approach: rather than arguing with a belief, it changes the relationship to it. The belief "I am not capable of this" becomes "I am having the thought that I am not capable of this" — which is a different experience. The belief is now an observable event in the mind, not a transparent window on reality.

Defusion does not assert that the belief is false. It creates distance from the belief that allows behavior to be chosen based on values rather than on the belief's content. You can have the thought "I'm not capable of this" and take the capable action anyway, because the thought does not require you to act on it.

This is particularly important for limiting beliefs — beliefs that function as behavioral rules even when the person would endorse different values if asked directly. "I'm not the kind of person who does that" is a limiting belief of exactly this kind.

11.6 Meaning: The Integrating Dimension

Values and beliefs provide the raw material; meaning is what is made from them.

The psychology of meaning has been substantially advanced by the work of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived four Nazi concentration camps — including Auschwitz — and developed a therapeutic approach (logotherapy) from his observations of what distinguished those who survived psychologically from those who did not.

Frankl's central insight: the ability to find or create meaning in suffering is one of the most powerful determinants of psychological survival. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Frankl identified three sources of meaning: 1. Creative work — what we contribute to the world through our actions and achievements 2. Experiential value — what we receive from the world through beauty, truth, love, and connection 3. Attitudinal value — the stance we take toward unavoidable suffering

The third is the most radical: even suffering that cannot be removed can be given meaning by the attitude one takes toward it. This is not a claim that suffering is good or that all suffering is meaningfully transformable. It is a claim about the range of human freedom — that something remains available even when everything else has been taken.

11.7 Meaning in Contemporary Psychology

After decades of neglect, the psychology of meaning has re-emerged as a serious research area, particularly under the influence of positive psychology.

Roy Baumeister's framework (1991) identifies four needs that meaning satisfies: 1. Purpose — a sense that one's actions lead toward desired outcomes or fulfill valued goals 2. Values — a sense that one's behavior is justified by important principles or moral standards 3. Efficacy — a sense of having control over outcomes in one's life 4. Self-worth — a sense of being good and valuable

When any of these four needs is substantially unmet, meaning deficits develop — experienced as emptiness, futility, pointlessness, or existential anxiety.

Michael Steger's research using the Meaning in Life Questionnaire has identified two distinct dimensions of meaning: - Presence of meaning: The extent to which a person currently experiences their life as significant and meaningful - Search for meaning: The extent to which a person is actively looking for meaning or purpose

Interestingly, presence of meaning and search for meaning are not simply opposites. Some people have high presence and low search — they feel their life is meaningful and are not looking for more. Others have low presence and high search — they feel their life lacks meaning and are actively looking. And some have high presence and high search — they experience meaning and are still curious and engaged with questions about its sources.

The most psychologically healthy pattern varies by age: for younger adults, high search combined with moderate presence is associated with good wellbeing; for older adults, declining search with stable high presence is more common.

11.8 Terror Management Theory: The Meaning Problem at Its Extremes

One of the most provocative theories in social psychology addresses why meaning matters at the most fundamental level.

Terror Management Theory (TMT), developed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, proposes that much of human cultural and psychological activity is motivated by the management of anxiety about death — specifically, the anxiety that arises from being a creature with both the awareness of our own mortality and the survival instinct that makes death terrifying.

In the TMT framework, cultural worldviews (including religious and secular systems of meaning) function as anxiety buffers: they provide: 1. A sense that the world is meaningful and ordered 2. A path to transcendence — a way of achieving literal or symbolic immortality through contribution to something larger and more lasting than oneself 3. Validation of one's self-esteem as a valued member of a meaningful world

When mortality is made salient (by reminders of death — called "mortality salience"), TMT predicts that people will cling more strongly to their worldview and react more negatively to worldview challenges. The research evidence for these predictions is extensive and replicable.

What TMT suggests about meaning: meaning is not a luxury. It functions as a psychological buffer against existential anxiety. The person who lives without a coherent framework of meaning is not free — they are exposed, without protection, to the existential fact of mortality.

This is not an endorsement of any particular meaning system. It is an empirical observation about what human psychology requires.

11.9 Values Clarification in Practice

The most practically relevant dimension of this chapter's content is values clarification — the process of explicitly identifying, examining, and prioritizing your values as a guide for decision-making and life design.

Values clarification is not about choosing "better" values (from whose perspective?). It is about developing sufficient self-knowledge to understand: - What actually matters to you (not what you think should matter, or what your family thinks matters) - Where your behavior is aligned with those values and where it is not - What the specific costs of values misalignment are in your current life - What action would move you toward values alignment

A simple values clarification process:

Step 1: Generate candidates Brainstorm freely. What things — activities, relationships, qualities, principles — feel most important? What do you most regret when you have insufficient time for it? What would you most hate to look back and discover you had neglected?

Step 2: Group and prioritize Cluster similar candidates. Identify 5–8 core values from the clusters. Force a ranking: if you could only express one of these fully, which would it be?

Step 3: Examine enacted vs. espoused For each core value: rate how much your current life expresses this value on a scale of 1–5. The gap between importance and expression is the values-alignment deficit.

Step 4: Identify one action For the most important value with the largest expression gap: what is one specific action this week that would more fully express this value? Not a goal, not a resolution — a single, concrete act.

From the Field: Dr. Reyes on Values and the Long Game

In clinical practice, values come up most often when people are in trouble — when they have spent years pursuing something that turns out not to matter, or when they realize they have organized their lives around an inheritance rather than a choice.

The question I ask, in various forms, is: when you imagine your life from the vantage point of very old age, looking back — what do you want to have mattered? Not what do you want to have achieved. What do you want to have mattered?

The answers to this question are almost never about professional accomplishment. They are almost always about relationships, about presence, about having contributed something that was genuinely useful, about having lived in a way that felt like their own.

The reason it matters to ask the question from that vantage point is that it bypasses the anxieties of the present. Asking "what should I do?" activates all the ambient social pressure, the expectations, the fear of judgment. Asking "what do I want to have mattered?" tends to cut through.

I have sat with people in their seventies and eighties who are clear about what they wish they had done differently. The regret is almost never "I wish I had worked more" or "I wish I had made more money." It is almost always "I wish I had been more present to the people I loved" and "I wish I had had the courage to do the thing I actually wanted to do."

That is not a data set, of course. It is clinical observation. But it is a consistent one.

Research Spotlight: Bronnie Ware and the Regrets of the Dying

In a book that crossed from nursing literature into popular culture, palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware compiled the most common regrets expressed by people in their final weeks and months of life.

The five most common regrets: 1. "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me" 2. "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" 3. "I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings" 4. "I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends" 5. "I wish that I had let myself be happier"

Ware's observations are not a formal longitudinal study — they are the reported experience of one nurse working in palliative care. They should be interpreted with appropriate caution about sample bias and retrospective distortion.

But the consistency of these regrets across very different individuals — and their alignment with formal research on wellbeing (relationships matter more than wealth; autonomy matters more than security) — gives them at least anecdotal weight.

What the list reveals is a values-alignment story. Each regret is about a gap between what mattered and how life was actually lived. The regrets are not about things that happened. They are about choices that were made based on the wrong values — on what was expected, on what seemed safe, on the deferral of genuine feeling.

Values clarification, done early enough and revisited regularly, is in large part an attempt to reduce the probability of this particular form of regret.

Common Misconceptions

"Values are just preferences." Values are categorically different from preferences. A preference is what you would enjoy or choose in a low-stakes situation. A value is what you are willing to sacrifice for — what feels non-negotiable, what produces genuine guilt or self-reproach when violated, what you would keep even when it is costly to do so.

"Values are stable and don't change." Values can and do change — through major life events, through deliberate reflection, through the experience of what actually produces wellbeing vs. what produces emptiness. The Schwartz value survey, given repeatedly to the same people over years, shows meaningful change. Values are less volatile than moods and preferences but more changeable than basic personality traits.

"My values are obvious — I know what they are." The gap between espoused and enacted values suggests that explicit values are not always known accurately. The values revealed by behavior over time often diverge significantly from the values people report when asked. This is why the enacted values question — "what would a stranger infer from your behavior?" — is often more revealing than the espoused values question.

"If I have good values, my behavior will automatically align." Values do not automatically produce aligned behavior. The gap between knowing what you value and behaving accordingly is mediated by habit, immediate reward, social pressure, cognitive bias, and all the other forces examined throughout this book. Values alignment is an ongoing practice, not a permanent state achieved once and maintained.

Chapter Summary

1. Values are deeply held beliefs about what is fundamentally important and worth pursuing — distinguished from goals, preferences, and habits by their motivational weight and resistance to trade-off
2. Schwartz's framework maps ten basic value types along two axes: self-enhancement vs. self-transcendence, and openness to change vs. conservation — adjacent values are compatible; opposing values tend to conflict
3. The gap between espoused and enacted values is ubiquitous — the values revealed by behavioral patterns often diverge from stated values; values clarification addresses this gap
4. Beliefs — about self, others, world, and future — shape perception and behavior; many function as self-fulfilling prophecies
5. Cognitive defusion (ACT) allows working with limiting beliefs by changing the relationship to them rather than arguing with their content
6. Frankl's logotherapy identifies three sources of meaning: creative work, experiential value, and attitudinal value (the stance toward unavoidable suffering)
7. Baumeister's four needs for meaning: purpose, values, efficacy, and self-worth — deficits in any produce meaninglessness
8. Terror Management Theory proposes that meaning systems function partly as anxiety buffers against existential fear — making meaning a psychological necessity, not a luxury
9. Values clarification is a practical process: generating, prioritizing, examining, and acting from core values

Bridge to Chapter 12

Values and meaning provide direction — they answer the question "toward what?" But the path toward valued living is not smooth. It runs through stress, challenge, disruption, and adversity. Chapter 12 examines how we respond to those pressures: the psychology of stress and the science of resilience.