Love First Priority Order

Tracing down the root cause of all our worldly problems yields a powerful opportunity for cascading change.

In Love First, the act of diving deeply into your core truths, core beliefs, and core values is strongly encouraged—it’s a central part of the Water Element’s practice to Be Truthful!

And the truth will set you free, even if at first it may piss you off.

For the Priority Order model, it’s important to acknowledge two fundamental truths:

First, that our current economic systems prioritize power and profit over people and planet. This is obviously unsustainable; any system that pursues infinite growth in a finite system is doomed to kill the host system—and in biology, such behavior is called cancer.

Second, that unless we prioritize People and Planet over power and profit, this self-destructive system will consume itself and collapse as much as our entire civilization.

That’s why Love First has only one rule that you truly have to agree with and abide by when Going Love First, and that is to Prioritize People & Planet over power and profit.

Do this in every decision. Every purchase. Every policy. Every conversation.

And do this as best as you can—knowing that perfection is not asked of you, nor expected.

You can make exceptions without shame, blame, or guilt for the times you can’t. Many of us currently live a life we cannot simply overturn and change to fully abide by this priority order, and that’s okay!

The purpose of this model is not to make you feel bad about failing it; rather, it’s to give you a clear way to evaluate challenging yet commonplace ethical situations.

I’ll give you an example: shopping on Amazon is out of alignment with my values, because Amazon is a major exploiter of people, of systems, and of government, all for the sake of power and profit. It has consciously and intentionally used unethical tactics to undermine competitors’ businesses in order to destroy them.

While I’ve long cancelled my Amazon Prime membership, I still have an Amazon account itself, to hold on to purchased digital content and access historical orders. This in itself is in alignment with the Priority Order model and my personal values.

However, on the odd (and increasingly rare) occasion that I need to order something and it is either 1) only available on Amazon (or only there in the quantity I need), or 2) is an urgent need for something I can’t run to a store to buy, I still use Amazon. This is not in alignment with my values, nor with the Priority Order model. But I don’t think it’s healthy for me to feel shame or guilt over every such purchase. Thus, it puts me in a dilemma: how do I uphold my values and try as best as I can to live up to this model?

This now gets my brain going into strategizing mode, solving the problem of this quandary. What that’s led me to is that I will commit—as part of being a Love First Person—to transparently share on my primary social feeds whenever I do such a thing, as well as talk about an area in my life where I will put extra effort that is in alignment with the Priority Model (and my values) to compensate.

Doing so not only feels good, knowing that I’m not casually neglecting my responsibilities as a Love First Person, but it also helps me not be as susceptible to feelings of shame or guilt for not being 100% perfect 100% of the time. Because nobody is that, but we as good-hearted human beings put pressure on ourselves to try and be that perfect all the same. And that’s something we have to unlearn, as well.

So for this model, try and reorganize your root priority order in the depths of your mind to consider People and Planet before the pursuit of power and profit.

Do this whenever you can.

Don’t beat yourself up when you can’t.

Each time you successfully change a decision, an action, a habit, a policy, or a purchase to be more aligned with this model than before, you make the world a better, more Love-centric place.

Celebrate those steps. 💖