Linking values and identity

Sam LaCrosse lived in Cleveland, Ohio for the first eighteen years of his life before attending university at Ohio State for the next four years. He then took an entry-level job in Boston before moving to Austin Texas in summer 2021.  Since then Sam has written a book called Value Economics. The study of Identity.

The motivation for writing his book came in the summer of 2019 when he was doing an internship. He was talking to his mother about believes and what to put your energy into. At the time there were a lot of different things going on culturally but they started talking specifically about Sam’s generation, Gen Z. His mother said that she didn't feel they believed in anything. Sam thought this sounded a little harsh so he decided to look a little more deeply into what was going on in the world. His conclusion was that there was some merit in what she was saying - he wasn’t sure if she was correct or not but he thought the idea was worth exploring.

Sam thought about his time growing up and, more specifically, the household he grew up in. Both his parents were there and his grandparents lived very close by so it was a tight knit family unit. The one constant was the ethos of values and growing up Sam know they were important but he didn't really know what they really were. Later he started asking what are values and from this the relationship between value and sacrifice. He came to the conclusion that the more you value something the more you will sacrifice to get that something. The less you value something, the less you will sacrifice to get that something.

When Sam was at university he had to take a mandatory economics class. One day in class they were talking about supply and demand and he decided that he would use the model of supply and demand to navigate and map out the value of sacrifice to relationships. Sam’s definition of value is that it is something scarce, rare or hard to find. There has to be a finite resource element to it – there is only so much of something to go around. He links value in an economic sense rather than in the psychological sense of beliefs and values. He does feel though that he is talking about both belief systems and values as the central thing you hold close as a person. He wanted to have a rationale when explaining it to people and he gravitated towards economics for explanation because he saw a clear line between the two things.

Sam feels that a value is something that you hold close to yourself and that it can depend on your culture, family or place you grew up, how people value different things. If you want to look at it from an economic stance, these values are generalised in the market place. You can go and purchase or gravitate towards something in the market place but you have to find values that you find work for you. This can be based on experiences - how you like interacting with the world or other people, discipline, self-awareness or how much you care about these things. You have to take the values that most closely match up with those requirements and use them as the anchoring point of who you are as a person. The sacrifice comes in because these things are so important to you that you have to sacrifice so you can live them and let them work for you.

Many people are fascinated by the idea of identity and it’s become an abstracted question to answer in a lot of different ways. Recently, its been seen as the subject of group identity and classifying yourself with a group of people - black, white, male, female gay, straight. Sam feels there is merit to having that side of identity, the genetic and biological characteristics of a person, but that sense of looking at people is limited. Identity should be composed at the individual level and formed of individual values. The implementation of your values is what truly forms an individual’s personal identity in the most total sense that you can capture in a person.

Sam’s proposition is that you have to figure out what you value and then make choices based on actually living those values by getting rid of the things you don't value and living a life around the things you’ve decided are important to you. Self-help is warranted in some cases but if you don't know who you are and don’t know what you find important then what good is any help going to do you if you go in the wrong direction - if you help yourself for the wrong reasons its not helping at all.

Sam feels you can’t help yourself until you know who you are and knowing your values helps to understand who you are and your identity. We all make a series of choices at certain points in our lives and these choices can change – things we may decide when we are in our 20’s will be different to those at 40 and Sam thinks we need to test our values over time. They are things that are really important and self-identification really matters and should we should live our lives around them but need to be capable of change.

 You can find out more about Sam at LinkedIn, read his blogs on dontreadthisblog.com or listen to his podcast Don't Listen to This Podcast. His book is Value Economics: The Study of Identity.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
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