Choice Point meditation and general use doctrine states that you use

Values

to filter noise to make decisions based on your values

As simple as that. So a very intimate and robust relationship with values must be established to be able to make short term and long term decisions.

It becomes an interesting conundrum when you add different shifts to different values. I like to give pleasure. I work in customer service writing, I'm always hoping the customer can find the information they need when navigating their less than intuitive software. I am turned on by giving pleasure in the bedroom. Love to cook and share delicious food. Love to fix things people find frustrating in their homes. Have been meditating quite a bit about how this one value drives my other values.

By and by if I'm alone, I'm usually suffering. I drink shitty beer, pick my skin, don't bathe much, if I do pleasure myself it sometimes ends up being something cringeworthy but so far hasn't landed me in the hospital yet. It becomes a bare minimum that I exist. I don't seem to be adept at self reward. I rely on others to give or to expose me to the reward or drive me to self care.

That's not a value. That's a personality defect. Or, noise on the choice point.

I value pleasure. Happiness. But I seem to be incapable of finding it on my own on a consistent basis. The antecedent to giving others pleasure is I hate drama. I like my relationships to be stable and understanding and predictable. People who are not stable elicit rage in me pretty easily.

So pleasure, happiness. No drama.

The next is the control realm. Sentience. Using tools to achieve means, capabilities. Problem solving. I'm a huge lover of tools and machinery, cars and trucks. This brings me pleasure, brings me money. I spend a lot of money on tools and time using and working on them. If no other self allowable pleasure, this is it. Every problem has a tool that will solve it. If I cannot afford the tool or don't have the time to use inferior tools to solve the chaos, it's upsetting.

This doesn't mean I'm a control freak socially... I tend to be very nurturing to people who are making rational positive choices. People who are making poor chaotic choices upset me. It must upset others that my own poor behavior choices while I'm alone/sick/despairing.

Thanks for listening, no response is expected. Im trying to understand how my tangible value set perpetuates self harm, depression, and negativity, and establishing what my values are for use in further exploration.