Life, examined.
Momentary Values is a home for artful stories about how we live, the systems we live within, and what we might build.
Why Momentary Values?
The name is intentionally a little paradoxical.
Values can sound timeless. Yet what we value changes.
What matters to us as children may be different from what matters as teenagers, adults, or in old age. Humanity changes too. Different peoples, places, and eras have valued different ways of living, organizing, creating, believing, and relating to one another.
Even the word value depends on context. Something precious in one circumstance may be unimportant in another. An asset can be a good value at one price and not at another. Time, place, circumstance, and perspective matter.
And yet not everything disappears with the moment.
Some values endure. Some return in different forms. Some prove more important the longer we live with them. Others deserve to be reconsidered as we and the world around us change.
Momentary Values lives inside that tension.
What is worth valuing? What changes? What endures? And how should what we value guide the way we live and the things we build?
Why I write
Writing helps me explore, understand, organize, and express what I think. It connects me meaningfully with other people. And it gives me a way to contribute something of my own.
That was why I started Momentary Values, and it remains why I return to it.
The work can take different forms. An essay about money. A story about adversity. An exploration of technology or institutions. A reflection on a walk, a relationship, a city, a flower, or a cup of coffee. Sometimes an argument. Sometimes fiction. Sometimes an image.
Life is the common subject.
My touchstones are truth, compassion, connection, and service. The work is one way of trying to put them into practice.
I don’t expect every work to arrive at an answer. Often, finding a better question—or seeing something familiar from a different direction—is enough.
But your time and attention matter. When you give them to this work, you are sharing a part of your life. I take that trust seriously. My responsibility is to make something worthy of it—whether through understanding, imagination, beauty, or simply a story you’re glad you read.
About me
I’m John Botelho. I write here as JR Boots.
My path has taken me through finance, entrepreneurship, technology, community, and a fair amount of experimentation. Those experiences find their way into the work, but Momentary Values isn’t meant to document a career or confine itself to my areas of expertise.
It’s a place to keep looking—at ourselves, at one another, at the structures we live within, and at the things we create. It’s a place to ask what is working, what isn’t, what matters, and what could be otherwise.
The best way to understand who I am is probably still to read my writing.
Thanks for being here.
