Unspoken Principles: What Guides Your Life Choices?

If you ask a soul—what principles define how you live?—you’ll often get two answers, though the soul may only speak one aloud.

There are the declared principles: Be kind. Work hard. Tell the truth. Live authentically. These are real, but they’re also the soul’s public face—the values it aspires to, the ones it can articulate at dinner parties, the architecture of the self it wants to inhabit.

Then there are the actual principles—the ones the soul follows when no one is narrating its life. These are harder to name because we don’t always recognize them as principles. They feel more like instincts, survival strategies, old promises we’ve forgotten we made.

Some souls live by: Don’t be a burden. Every choice filtered through that ancient fear of taking up too much space, needing too much, asking for too much. It’s not a noble principle, but it’s a defining one.

Others live by: Control what you can. Not because they’re domineering, but because chaos once swallowed them whole, and now they organize, plan, anticipate—holding the world at arm’s length through sheer preparation.

Some souls’ deepest principle is simply: Survive. Get through today. Make it to tomorrow. Everything else is negotiable. This sounds grim, but there’s a fierce dignity in it—the soul that refuses to quit even when quitting would be easier.

And then there are the souls who live by contradictions: Be honest, but don’t hurt anyone. Be yourself, but don’t disappoint them. Dream big, but don’t be foolish. These souls are exhausted from trying to honor principles that cannot coexist.

The most honest souls might admit their truest principle: Figure it out as I go. Try not to break what matters. Hope I’m doing more good than harm.

Because most souls don’t live by elegant philosophies. They live by approximations, course corrections, and the quiet hope that their stumbling might somehow trace a meaningful path.

What principle defines you that you’ve never named?