The Values-Living Gap

Asked to select their five most important values from a list of 48, respondents converged on a strikingly consistent set. The top five are entirely relational and moral — dominated by how we treat each other and the bonds we form.

Family is the clearest point of consensus in the entire dataset — the #1 value in every generation, every gender, and every country with sufficient sample size.

Nearly one in four people (23.2%) rank Family as their single most important value. The next closest — Kindness, at 6.9% — sits at less than a third of that level.

The culture gap

In a culture that relentlessly promotes achievement, visibility, and financial success as the markers of a life well-lived, the values people actually choose tell a different story. Society rewards one set of priorities. People report living for another.

The generational story we got wrong

Gen Z — the generation routinely characterized as disconnected — values Family more than any other generation. They also rate Love significantly higher (25.4% vs the 16.7% average) and Friendship at more than double the rest of the population (29.1% vs 13.9%). Theirs is the only generation where connection outranks meaning as the dominant motivator.

There is a tension in the Gen Z profile: they also rate Wealth (9.6% vs 4.0%), Achievement (19.0% vs 15.0%), and Physical Fitness (13.2% vs 9.0%) higher than average. They appear to want deep relationships and material success simultaneously — the generation of and. Meanwhile Curiosity (8.7%) and Collaboration (4.0%) run strikingly low against roughly 18% and 13% for everyone else. Whether that reflects developmental stage or a genuine generational shift is a question the data raises but cannot answer.

Before beginning the values selection, respondents rated their own values clarity on a 1–7 scale. The average was 4.49 — above the midpoint. Many people arrive already feeling reasonably clear on what matters. The uncomfortable finding is what sits alongside that clarity.

Clarity is not a shield. It may even sharpen the pain of misalignment — the clearer you are on what matters, the more acutely you feel the gap when you cannot live by it.

The wellbeing picture

Among the 6,231 respondents who completed the nine-dimension wellbeing assessment, the two lowest-scoring dimensions are rest (3.88/7, with 20.9% severely exhausted) and presence (3.61/7, with 24.5% very disconnected). The highest are empathy (5.79) and support (5.64). People are skilled at caring for others — and significantly less skilled at sustaining themselves.

Among people who place Family in their top five, the gap is stark:

One in four people who say Family is what matters most are too depleted to show up fully for the people they love — physically there, mentally elsewhere.

Women are carrying a disproportionate burden

Women report higher stress than men in every age group (3.76 vs 3.45 average; 27.2% vs 22.4% at high stress). The wellbeing data deepens the picture: women outscore men on empathy (5.86 vs 5.67) and support (5.68 vs 5.63) — and score lower on every other dimension.

22.4% of women are severely exhausted (rest ≤ 2), compared to 16.0% of men. Women also report lower purpose clarity (3.98 vs 4.29) and lower fulfillment (3.98 vs 4.08). The pattern is consistent across self-reported and independently measured data: a gender that has cultivated extraordinary care for others while systematically depleting its own reserves.

Purpose: the strongest buffer

The relationship between purpose clarity and both stress and fulfillment is the most linear gradient in the entire dataset. As purpose rises, stress falls and fulfillment climbs — in near-lockstep.

Purpose is not a luxury. It may be foundational infrastructure for managing the demands of modern life.

The gratitude effect

Within this dataset, Gratitude is the value most consistently associated with higher wellbeing — people who include it in their top five score higher on every single wellbeing dimension, and report lower stress (3.54 vs 3.70), higher purpose clarity (4.32 vs 4.01), and higher fulfillment (4.30 vs 3.95). When Gratitude is someone's #1 value, overall wellbeing rises to 5.15 — the highest of any value group. Yet only 14.4% of respondents include it at all.

The fairness paradox

In this sample, prioritizing Fairness is associated with the lowest wellbeing of any value group (4.52 vs 4.69 overall), alongside higher stress, lower purpose clarity, and lower fulfillment. Fairness + Respect as a top-two pairing produces the lowest wellbeing of any common combination (4.00/7).

This does not suggest that caring about justice makes you miserable. One interpretation: sustained concern for injustice — seeing the persistent gap between how things are and how they should be — carries a psychological cost, particularly without sufficient recovery. The people most attuned to what is wrong in the world may need more recovery, not less concern. Notably, Fairness nearly doubles from Gen Z (14.3%) to Boomers (28.3%): the awareness of injustice appears to accumulate across a lifetime — and so, potentially, does its toll.

How values shift under stress

One of the most striking patterns in the data is the way values shift between anxious and calm states. Across every generation, the same directional pattern emerges.

The shifts are substantial. In Gen Z, Peace drops from 21.7% under anxiety to 6.9% when calm. In Millennials, Teamwork jumps from 2.5% under anxiety to 16.6% when calm — a sixfold increase.

Anxiety does not appear to change what people believe in. It changes what they have the capacity to act on.

This has a direct implication for anyone leading a family, a team, or an organization: if you want people to show up with leadership, collaboration, and resilience, you cannot simply ask for it. You must first build the conditions — rest, presence, energy, clarity — that make those values accessible. You cannot lead from empty. This feedback loop is the mechanism behind the Values-Living Gap: when energy drops, the values that require surplus become inaccessible. People don't stop believing in them. They simply can't reach them.

The fulfillment plateau

People do not feel progressively more fulfilled as they advance through their careers. Only the 65+ group shows a meaningful uptick — and even then, the shift is modest. This challenges the assumption that career advancement and material accumulation produce fulfillment. In this sample, they do not appear to.

Not generic wellness advice — practices anchored to the biggest depletions and the strongest protective factors this dataset identified.

Useful companions: the values-based mindfulness practice, values-based micro-habits, and the Decision Matrix.

Between June 2025 and April 2026, 9,656 individuals completed the Values Institute Assessment at app.values.institute. The assessment collects three layers of data: values selection and ranking (9,656 respondents), a four-item self-reported check-in administered before values selection (9,327), and a nine-dimension wellbeing assessment (6,231; 6,175 completed both).

The sample spans 114 countries — the largest groups from the United Kingdom (36.8%), United States (31.9%), Australia (3.5%), the Philippines (3.2%), and Canada (2.3%). Two-thirds of respondents (65.7%) are female, 26.0% male, with the remainder selecting non-binary, other, or preferring not to say. The largest age cohort is 35–44 (27.6%).