Think back into your life, right back to the time when you were in high school. What were your priorities when you were in this phase of your life? Perhaps getting good grades? Participating in as many extra-curricular activities as possible, even in those that you didn’t particularly like? Doing all those things must have seemed natural to you since a stellar school record was what you had needed on your resume to get into a good college.
So you eventually do get into a good college. What do you do next? The goals are bigger and the stakes are higher now. You want to finish off college with more than just an academic degree. You want to present yourself as a complete package in the job market. Therefore, you again start the cycle of studying hard, maybe even pick up a couple of part-time jobs, join cultural clubs, and so on. The aim here is to make yourself as marketable as possible for the competitive race that lies ahead of you in the job marketplace after graduation. You finally do build a fantastic resume and that does help you secure a good job.
What follows now? Well, you’re still thinking about that resume. You want to climb the ladder of success to the top; so you keep learning new work skills that keep your resume updated and relevant, you keep pushing yourself harder to get that early promotion, you continue to work extra hours so that you can make a little extra bucks. The struggle never stops.
You will also look at others and compare yourself with them to seek validation for your own success and happiness. No matter how unique or incredible your own life journey may have been, you won’t be able to appreciate it if someone else is earning better than you, living in a bigger house than you, or driving more number of cars than you. What started off as simple resume building approach in high school eventually leads to you living in the perpetual mindset of proving yourself better in the eyes of the world.
You might think what’s wrong with this approach towards life? Survival in the world demands one to be ambitious, and that does require you to do all of the above. Striving, competing, and achieving something is the necessary evil of life, but a life remains unbalanced and unfulfilled if it’s only about this outlook.
Consider what David Brooks, the famous columnist, says in his editorial “The Moral Bucket List”. He puts forward the concept of resume virtues and eulogy virtues. A person is made up of these two kinds of virtues. Resume virtues are everything that we just talked about above, starting from the degree you earned in college and job titles you held throughout your professional career right down to the wealth you’ve accumulated, how lush is your lifestyle, and other such worldly accomplishments.
Eulogy virtues are your character attributes that are going to be the talking point at your funeral. No matter how rich, famous, handsome and accomplished you might have been in the living, a eulogy at your funeral is not going to be centred around it. It’s going to take into account the more subtle but just as impactful traits of your personality, basically it’s just going to be a round-up of the person you came across as to others in life. Think virtues like kind, sincere, loving, caring, honest, courageous, and such.
It’s funny that you had spent your entire life working towards attaining the resume virtues, but that is far from how you are remembered at your funeral. Who knows what you had to give up in the course of life to maximize your resume virtues? Possibly peace of mind and true happiness and satisfaction at core due to the constant pressure of living up to someone else’s expectations. But the most detrimental loss that comes as a result of living like this is the loss of self-sense and self-awareness of morality, a sort of detachment from the basic moral values like compassion, unconditional love, genuine care, good-hearted kindness, forgiveness, etc. that come under the purview of your eulogy virtues.
Some might wonder why should we care about cultivating eulogy virtues, it’s not like we’ll be present at our own funerals to hear all the praise! But the thing about eulogy virtues is that even though they get most talked about after you’re long gone, living by them or cultivating them makes life feel more meaningful and fulfilled. The external achievements of wealth, power, fame may be good to qualify the parameters of success as laid down by the society, but these rarely make your innermost-self content. On the outside it may seem like you have it all, but your inside that only remains visible to you remains discontented.
This is not to discount the importance of resume virtues in life. But it’s to emphasize to not let them take over your entire life. It’s to understand that there needs to be a balance between resume virtues and eulogy virtues in life. While we are conditioned from the childhood to hone our resume virtues, no such training is provided to develop the eulogy virtues. To cultivate eulogy virtues, you’ll need to do some significant work at the moral and spiritual levels of your being. Let’s look at how you can restore the balance between resume and eulogy virtues in your life.
You’ll Need to Make Up Your Own Vision to Live By
One of the reasons why we end up focusing more on resume virtues is because we are trying to live by the rules, the conditions, the expectations, and the roadmap that have been long set out by the society we live in. You study hard, work hard, play hard because there’s always someone who you want to impress or some socially accepted norm that you want to live up to.
What you need to do is come up with a vision that’s solely yours. Make this vision about how you want to be remembered by your loved ones when you’re no longer with them. Think of all the important people in your life, those whom you definitely see at your funeral. Your parents, your spouse, your children, your close friends. Now think if any of these important figures of your life had to give a eulogy at your funeral, how would you like to be described by them? Don’t let resume virtues creep in here. For example, choose giver of love and support over provider of the household. While both the descriptions may be true, it’s the former that you need to work upon for cultivating eulogy virtues.
You’ll Need to Start Making a List
Keep a journal close by because now is the time to organize this vague vision into a concrete list, which could look like this:
A loyal, caring spouse. A devoted son/daughter. A responsible and honest employee/citizen. An eager, willing learner. A natural leader. A supportive sibling. An avid cook/photographer/artist/etc. A guiding mentor.
Make sure not to keep this list too lengthy. You don’t want to overburden yourself with your own expectations. Prioritize and prune. Decide what’s most important even among the things that may all seem equally important.
Once you’ve narrowed down the list to a few select descriptions, you can expound a little on each of them. For example, if being a loyal, caring spouse makes it to your list, then you can go a little deeper into the semantics of this, like how you were the perfect partner to share the joys and sorrows of life with, how by just being present in their life you made it better, how you always served as a source of inspiration to draw from, etc.
If being a guiding mentor is one of the items on your list, then explain more about this role, like how you were a tireless sharer of knowledge, how you always showed the path from darkness to light, how your guidance allowed others to bloom, etc.
Do this for each of the descriptions that have made it to your list. You’re actually making a repository of eulogy virtues for yourself here.
Take the List Seriously and Keep Reassessing It
Life changes and so do priorities. The eulogy virtues that seem essential to you now may become non-essential a year from now. Keep working on your list, which would mean you’ll need to keep repeating the above two steps at regular intervals throughout your lifespan. Doing this with the help of a journal makes the process more interesting and easy to account for. You can see the growth your list makes over the years.
More importantly, the list is not meant to be made and forgotten. Making the list is only a small part of the flow. The rest of the flow is actually about taking actions and making efforts every day, small to big, that take you closer to the descriptions and eulogy virtues that you’ve outlined for yourself in the journal. Follow the attainment of your eulogy virtues with the same passionate pursuit that you have towards your resume virtues. Don’t let one take over the other. But also never let them get out of sync with each other.
This article was in part inspired by the following articles:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-7-habits-begin-with-the-end-in-mind/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html
