Kind of tired, so we'll see how much sense this makes.
So, you don't have those values anymore, now that you're a grown up?
Yes. "Always be honest" is too rigid to adhere to. Do you know people who've never lied in all their lives? I might put autistic people in that category (I don't have enough data yet), but on the whole, I don't believe in people having the ability to tell the truth. The limitations of perception, language, memory, and other factors don't allow for it, I believe.
It's possible my idea of concepts like "truth" or "hurt" is broader than yours. Also, I'm looking at the big picture and the chain of consequences and the implications.
Mistaken perceptions. Faulty memories. Jokes. Social etiquette. Self-preservation. Over- or underestimating yourself or others or situations. Things like this could very well lead to lies, intentional or not. I write fiction which, by its nature, is an elaborate lie, and I fucking love it. To complicate things further, I believe there are layers of deception and truth. I see nothing wrong with setting aside a value like "always tell the truth" when it doesn't match my current way of viewing the world or my understanding of human nature.
As for hurt, it depends. If I happened upon a man strangling a seven-year-old, I'm not the sort of person who would politely tap him on the shoulder and request that he stop. I may very well bash him on the head with a blunt object. The only regret I might have is whether I've made the experience more traumatic for the kid, not how much I hurt the would-be murderer.
It really doesn't need to be that extreme; I'm just being dramatic. If I judge a contest, some people might feel hurt when they don't win. But contests, real ones based on merit, aren't about everybody winning. That's just how it is. I'd just being doing my job, even if someone is upset about it. Recently, I told someone I care about that she should get counseling even though the suggestion might hurt her feelings. (And it did.) From my perspective, she needs help to sort out emotional fallout from a recent development. While I didn't want to tell her to get counseling, I also don't want her to continue suffering. In the long run, it seems to me it'd be healthy for her to carve some kind of safe space to talk about what troubles her. At the moment I suggested it, yeah, it hurt her feelings. It sucked.
So I'm not above hurting people, I just have to see a reason for it. That doesn't mean I run around kicking over grannies, or whatever. It means I let the situation dictate whether hurting someone is necessary. Even if I were to refrain from hurting people, I'd still hurt other living things. I'm not a vegetarian, so eating meat makes me a participant in the slaughter of animals. If it weren't animals, it'd be plants or bacteria or cancer cells or whatever. Meh.
More whimsical than when you were a teenager, when you believed in honesty and not hurting others? Your mood determines your values? So, what happens when you are in a bad mood. Do your values change to reflect that? Everything becomes more nuanced and complex as we grow older. But you're saying your values changed when you grew up and are now dependent on your moods.
I wouldn't say my values changed so much as they got streamlined and clarified, and there are times when I consciously decide not to go with a value.
I get the impression—and this may be off—that you think my sense of values was better when I was a teenager. If that's untrue, feel free to ignore this. If it's true, then you'll see what I mean by "too rigid" in regards to values. When I was a teenager, I thought that if I were ever raped, I'd kill myself. I thought that if I were raped, it'd mean I didn't fight hard enough. Yeah. So years later, after being exposed to anecdotes, stories, and movies where people experience and deal with sexual violence and coercion, I realize how twisted that old "She didn't fight hard enough" chestnut is and how demeaning it is to define someone by their sexual purity, as it were. I personally think I was more of an ass as a teen because my point-of-view was so limited, and my morals were based on much ignorance and an unearned sense of superiority. I think that's part of what growing up is to me, learning to broaden your narrow worldview and understanding life better.
When I'm in a bad mood, I try to avoid people or make fun of myself to ease my tension. When I say my values are based on my mood, I mean things like...I should recycle. If there isn't a recycling bin convenient to me, I just think, "Fuck it" and throw the trash in a regular bin. Before, I'd feel guilty about "going against" a value like that. Now that I'm more capricious, I wouldn't be bothered. (There are plenty of other things I have hang ups about, so it's great to have one less thing driving me nuts.)
Easier? You do what is easier. Obviously you don't have "core" values.
Yeah, sure.
I know I should help homeless people because community-mindedness makes us better as people, but I don't run to the bank, withdraw my meager savings and donate it to homeless dudes and chicks left and right. That's what I mean by having an ideal and not fulfilling it. It's like a fantasy more than a part of my life, a fantasy where someone lives in an earth house, rescue animals, take care of foster children, run a soup kitchen, and volunteer for a suicide hotline. I suppose it's my idea of a "good person," but it's not really my idea of me.
I've mostly learned how to separate my idea of a good person from myself. It used to be that I'd think the two were one and the same. Now it's harder to delude myself into thinking I'm some wonderful human being. I'm just me. Most people are just themselves. It helps me be more realistic about who I am and what I'm about. It also means I get less disappointed when others don't meet some standard of mine. After all, that's not anyone's job.
It doesn't help that I can think of a perverted version of any value. Seeing how these things can be warped made me leery of them and of being too caught up in the idea of a thing to see the reality playing out before me.
