Human value development · Plane 7 of 9
Experience: what moves you to act, and how you face risk
Plane 7 crosses two questions: is what drives your decisions seeking well-being or taking on a cost? (pleasure or pain) and do you face risk or avoid it? (courage or cowardice). This is the most philosophical of the nine planes — four distinct traditions have answered these questions in radically different ways.
What
Plane 7 measures what actually drives you to act — the pursuit of well-being or the willingness to take on a cost — and how you face risk when it shows up: with courage or with cowardice.
Why
There's no single correct answer about what place pleasure, pain, and courage should hold in a life — hedonists, stoics, existentialists, and nihilists have built complete, coherent frameworks that reach very different conclusions from one another.
What for
Knowing these four perspectives gives you a more precise vocabulary to name your own stance toward risk and suffering — and to recognize, in other people's decisions, which framework they're operating from, even if they've never put it in those terms.
Horizontal axis — Pain ↔ Pleasure
Four philosophical perspectives on pain and pleasure:
Hedonism
Pleasure is the only intrinsic good and pain the only evil — every decision, at bottom, seeks to maximize one and minimize the other. Its refined version doesn't chase immediate pleasure, but the absence of disturbance, which sometimes requires tolerating a small pain to avoid a greater one later.
Stoicism
Pleasure and pain are "indifferents" — neither good nor bad in themselves. The only thing that truly matters is acting with virtue, without external pain determining whether life is worth living.
Existentialism
Pain isn't an obstacle to avoid, but the raw material of authenticity — going through it with eyes open is part of building your own meaning in a world that offers none in advance.
Nihilism
If life lacks inherent meaning, pain and pleasure carry, at bottom, no objective moral weight — neither one "matters" more than the other in an ultimate sense, though that doesn't stop either from being felt with the same intensity.
Vertical axis — Cowardice ↔ Courage
The same four perspectives, applied to courage and the fear of acting:
Hedonism
Acting courageously only makes sense if the expected outcome produces more pleasure than pain in the long run — courage isn't valued for its own sake, but as a means to a favorable balance.
Stoicism
Courage is one of the four central virtues, and cowardice its direct vice — acting with courage, even under real fear, is necessary to live according to one's own rational nature, without depending on what is or isn't within your control.
Existentialism
Cowardice isn't just avoiding physical danger, but avoiding the freedom and responsibility of deciding who to be — what Sartre called "bad faith": acting as if you had no choice, when you always do.
Nihilism
Faced with the certainty of death and the absence of given meaning, acting courageously — or not — doesn't change the final outcome; some nihilists find in this a paradoxical form of freedom to act without the weight of ultimate consequences.
Each perspective has distinct practical implications for your own decisions. You can explore it in depth inside Mentefy. It is $150 MXN per month, VAT included. You create your account first; payment is the next step.
Buy me some tacos 🌮When scarcity shrinks the real margin to take a risk
Under sustained scarcity — of time to recover from a mistake, of real support if something goes wrong — a risk that once seemed manageable starts to feel more dangerous than it objectively is. It's not that courage disappeared: it's that the real margin to try again if something goes wrong got smaller.
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