As I approach my 25th revolution around the sun, I have found myself in what’s been termed a “quarter-life crisis.” An admittedly silly phrase that gets at the real existential dread I seem to share with many other 20- and 30-somethings as our lives officially become our own. As we go from our family homes to places of our own, from higher education to the workforce, and from odds-and-ends jobs to careers, most of us find ourselves asking something like, “What is the purpose of life, and how can I find it?”

For me, this spiral began after my last internship ended. While I enjoyed the position, by the time it concluded, I didn’t see how that pursuit fit into the rest of my life and had even forgotten the reason I had taken the position in the first place. I caught myself in a state of “going through the motions,” and I panicked. My mind flooded with questions that were rapidly devolving: “Wait, why did I do this internship again? Shouldn’t I know what I want to do with my life already?! Is my life amounting to anything?!?”

Thankfully, I saved enough money to take a month off from hunting for jobs to hunt for answers to life’s deepest questions. And after a month of reading and researching philosophy, psychology, and self-help literature, I can tell you with full certainty: I don’t have the answers to those questions. But I do think I have better questions now. Especially after reading the work of psychologist Dr. Gena Gorlin, who coined the term “builder’s mindset,” wherein…

“You approach your life as the ultimate project you are in charge of shaping and overseeing (i.e., building), by your own efforts and according to your own chosen vision and values, with yourself as its ultimate owner and beneficiary.”

This mindset, which I have come to fully embrace, has altered the way I ask myself that age-old question that I mentioned at the start. Rather than asking, “How do I find the purpose of life?” I’ve started asking, “How do I build the purpose of my life?” This has allowed me to sidestep all of the antiquated “moral” teachings that have inundated my studies. As someone living through the most prosperous age in human history, built on the mutually beneficial interactions of billions of people across the world—I cannot bring myself to take seriously the preachings of “otherworldliness” and “self-sacrifice.”

So how do each of us answer the question, “How do I build the purpose of my life?” As Gorlin says, it is “by your own efforts and according to your own chosen vision and values.” But while “efforts” and “vision” seem straightforward, what are “values,” exactly? Religionists, economists, and business people all seem to use the word in different, and sometimes mutually exclusive, ways. The term “value,” as Gorlin uses it and as I will use it, is the intellectual contribution of the philosopher Ayn Rand. In her best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand defined a value as “that which one acts to gain and keep.” In other words, it is what you really want and what you really care for—not what you desire but don’t act on and not what you admire but fail to maintain.

A value is something you rationally act toward that is integral to you living as you.

We have all had this experience before: whether you were gazing at your partner, listening to your favorite song, or deep in focus on your work, you feel something akin to “this is a part of me.” Not “it’s great, but I could do without it,” but “if I didn’t have this, I wouldn’t be the same person anymore.” This is what it feels like to truly value something. To love something as if you have woven it into the very fabric of your being.

What things in your life make you feel this way? I have my list.

This substack, as an honest reflection of my thoughts and values, will look like the inside of my brain. And like the inside of my brain, it is bound to be all over the place—a smorgasbord of seemingly unrelated notes, essays, poems, and short stories about a wide range of different topics. But they will all be unified by one central purpose: to uncover what it looks like to love your life and to take seriously the task of living it to the fullest.

Let’s get valuing.