I've been thinking a lot about a Clubhouse I did w @naval when the app was still pretty new. He said (to paraphrase) that in relationships, the only "dealbreakers" that matter concern values, and that most people don't have many values, they just think their *opinions* are values
Values, he explained, are things like what you will actually *do* when one of your parents gets sick or your kid is in serious trouble
The insight I had today is that it's almost impossible to respect someone who doesn't share your few real values. A lot of respect (and disrespect) is performative, but I mean that in the deepest recesses of your soul you will not respect someone incompatible in this way
Consequently, you can learn a lot about your true values by looking at the people in your life who you cannot respect even when respecting them would seemingly serve you well or make your life a lot easier
The more true values you have and the stranger they are within your culture and context, the harder it will be to find people to form deep long-term friendships and romances with, but perhaps, recognizing this, you will also come to be far more protective of those people
By the way, I think the reason values are quite coupled to real-world behavior is that it's almost impossible to respect *yourself* if you create significant cognitive dissonance by acting against your true values. If people have sufficient courage, that's when they find it
I also suspect that people can be made truly dangerous if forced to consistently act against their true values. Under those circumstances, I think they're prone to straight-up shut off a bunch of their self-reflective/"red flag" processes to prevent unmanageable suffering
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