A good life is built on thoughtful, informed, and loving decisions — little gifts to your future self, family, friends, and colleagues– like buying the right ice cream on a hot summer day. Your ice cream ethic.
Sometimes, you have to decide between keeping the friend or keeping the money.
Being true to an ethic offers relief from inner turmoil and helps nurture family, friendships, and collegiality, reliability and trustworthiness. Likewise, ethical companies and institutions achieve and maintain brand loyalty. Ethical lapses lead to airplane crashes and compromised reputations. Only if your rich enough can you avoid the consequences of such failures.
Which is a huge incentive to amass as much wealth as you possibly can, thus compromising your ethics. A vicious cycle currently being won by the algorithms of cold, hard capitalism, energized by an oligarchy who systematically put power and money over the welfare of humanity and the planet.
We look for ethical alignment when seeking love, meaninful work, and basic comfort. One decision at a time, we build the routines we use to navigate, interpret, and grow. Furthermore, practicing our own unique ethics with care and attention is an exercise of fundamental freedom.
Over time, choices get subsumed into our routines and environment. Activities become “normal” and no longer require attention… yes, flossing is an ethic. So is yelling at the dog. (Practical ethics also require a moral framework, which you can read more about here.) We structure our world through the choices we make.
Conflict between values and actions feels crappy, and induces shame, illness, and dangerous behavior. To avoid “cognitive dissonance” (a kind of “bad karma”), values, ethics and actions must all align consistently, decision by decision. Therefore, reflecting on your values to inform your ethics, your practices, which will become your future actions. You become an intentional participant in your own story.
In work settings, this framework leads to collaborative creativity, high performance, and pride in achievement — stimulating and fun environments that channel conflict and churn value.Put simply and given the opportPut simply and given the opportunity, an ethical life leads to abundance and happiness. Avarice does not.