When Your Values Are at War: Why You Don't Need to Choose

Key points

Values conflicts cause real suffering because competing values are both genuinely important to you.

Standard advice to "clarify your values" fails when your clearly held values directly conflict.

Plato's principle of the mean guides you toward proper measure, not impossible choices.

The 608e test asks: What preserves and benefits, and what destroys through excess or deficiency?

"I can't keep doing this," Sarah told me in our first session. Successful professional, mother of two, by all external measures thriving. "I value my career . I worked hard to build it. But I also value being present for my kids. Every choice feels like betraying one or the other. I'm paralyzed."

I see this pattern constantly: intelligent people torn apart not by confusion about their values but b