Contents
Values are what you sacrifice for
To value something is to give up something else for it. If you aren’t willing to sacrifice for the sake of something, you don’t value it, you just like it.
If you want to know what your values are, ask yourself: what are the things you do even when they’re inconvenient?
Values aren’t hobbies (but we often treat them that way)
Mandy Brown in “Living in alignment”:
we see the work to attend to the crisis as an add-on, an extracurricular, something that doesn’t seep into the day to day but often competes with it. It is necessary to counter that narrative, to weave instead a story that shows how everything we do in every part of our lives is an act of tearing down the old world and building a new one among the ruins
I find myself falling into this trap: thinking that with work and kids I don’t have time to take care of even myself, let alone the world. But even so, I can choose where and how to work (as Buddhism’s notion of right livelihood addresses), and there are ethical choices to be made raising kids: where and how we play, the types and sources of food we eat, and more. The stuff of daily life can all be sites of activism, of embodying our values.
The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life—and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit. Robust social movements offer an opposing view. We argue that all aspects of our lives—where and how we live and work, eat, entertain ourselves, get around, and get by are sites of injustice and potential resistance. At our best, social movements create vibrant social networks in which we not only do work in a group, but also have friendships, make art, have sex, mentor and parent kids, feed ourselves and each other, build radical land and housing experiments, and inspire each other about how we can cultivate liberation in all aspects of our lives. Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like a hobby—it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us. (Dean Spade, Mutual Aid)
A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole. (Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed, emphasis mine)