Designing Your Life around Your Values and Desires

In this episode of “Facts, Values, and Flourishing,” we’ll discuss the difference between values and desires, and how to integrate the two toward making your life the best, most enjoyable life it can be.

We’ll look at how to identify and record your actual values—namely, the things that you have been and are pursuing—and create a separate list of your desired values—the things you want in life but might not be pursuing. We’ll consider how these different kinds of values relate to the fundamental principles of a rational, life-based ethics; how they relate to the proverb, “God said, ‘Take what you want, and pay for it’”; how they relate to standard, good self-help advice; and how these integrations give such advice moral weight and grounding. Finally, we’ll consider a few standing orders that I use profitably in my own life, thus showing, in pattern, how you can create and use standing orders to make your life the best it can be.

I hope you’ll join me for this episode, which airs on Thursday, September 27, at 9 PM Eastern Time.

Be sure to let your friends know about “Facts, Values, and Flourishing.” Earlier episodes of the series can be viewed on TOS’s Facebook page and YouTube channel.

About Craig Biddle

Craig is cofounder and editor of The Objective Standard, cofounder and director of education at Objective Standard Institute, and executive director of Prometheus Foundation. He is the author of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It; Rational Egoism: The Morality for Human Flourishing; and the forthcoming Moral Truths Your Parents, Preachers, and Teachers Don’t Want You to Know. He is currently working on his fourth book, “Thinking in Principles.”

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