Re-centering Life's 3 Foundational Values: Time, Attention, & Health - MR #2
Transform your Midlife experience by prioritizing your 3 most important assets.
In the last edition, I talked about the Machine Economy and the dehumanizing game that it seems to be playing with our lives.
I discussed the importance of crafting your own alternative game in the service of your own well-thought out values and goals. You can read that here.
In Midlife Renewal, we follow this simple framework to begin constructing our own game.
We:
✅Get Crystal Clear about what we value.
✅Detoxify and Declutter what does not serve our own human-level values.
✅Hyper-prioritize human-level values and our own Infinite Game.
The first part of this framework is about solving the question:
What are the most important values in my life? What is most important to me?
Of course that answer is different for everyone.
There are many different perspectives on what constitutes a well-lived life.
One thing is for certain though.
In order to build a life worth living, you must cultivate and harvest the 3 most important forms of value in ANY life. These are:
💎Time
💎Attention
💎Health
These 3 forms of value are the foundation upon which all other values can be built.
Time Is Your Most Precious Asset
Everyone only gets 24 hours in their day.
The average human life span is 80 years.
This amounts to:
⏳960 months
⏳4174 weeks
⏳29 220 days
This is the time that has been allotted to you.
Some might receive more, some less.
Regardless, within every moment lies the power to cultivate a life worth living.
Attention: The Golden Currency in the Digital Age
Attention is the highest form of value and it's the easiest to waste.
Especially in our modern world.
In a spiritual sense, you could say that what you give your attention to is what you are choosing to worship.
The most important work in life is to make sure that our attention is being given to something that has been carefully chosen based on it's worthiness in our lives.
Health is True Wealth
So far, we only get one body in this life.
It is our most important vehicle.
I have seen people spend incredible amounts of time and attention on their cars and trucks but next to none on caring for their body.
It is true that the body has an amazing capacity to heal itself given the right supports.
But if you damage it beyond repair, you're out of luck.
Investing your time and attention into the care and maintenance of your body is one of the best investments you can make.
The Cost of Neglect: Squandering Our Priceless Resources
The modern world likes to lull us into believing that cash and material goods are the highest forms of value.
We spend our time, attention, and health on chasing cash so we can turn it into more and more material goods.
We lose time and attention that we could be devoting to what we really care about.
The question is, what do you care about? Do you know?
What do you want to invest the remainder of your time, attention, and health in?
You might say:
But, Charity! There are so many responsibilities and obligations in my life! I don't have enough time and attention for anything else.
Which leads us to another important question:
Is what you are spending your precious time and attention on worthwhile in the grand scheme of things?
Yes, or course we need cash/material wealth to meet our basic physical and material needs.
But once those basic needs are met,
When is enough, enough?
Beyond Wealth: Redefining Riches in Today's World
The truth is, in our modern world we are rich beyond our ancestors wildest dreams.
Most modern people in the developed world have more than enough to meet their basic material needs.
But what are most of us really lacking?
The time, attention, and health to invest in something that truly matters to us.
My experience has been that once people have enough of their survival needs met, they habitually continue to amass material goods or fill their lives with empty distractions until they are blindsided by the clock running out.
How do I know this?
Because I have spent 10 years as a nurse watching this play out at the bedside of sick and dying people over and over again.
The Meaning of Success: What Are the True Goals of Human Life?
So now you might start to ask yourself - What is the goal of human life?
And this is truly one of the most profound and important questions you can ask.
Common responses that people give off the cuff are to love others, to find joy, to be creative, etc.
But often, people won’t actually live as if those things are important to them.
And, why? Because they haven’t taken the time to carefully select and consciously decide to act out the values they say they care about.
And even if they do try, the very act of seeking can lead to more confusion.
Because, in our postmodern world this question is getting harder and harder to answer.
We are adrift in a sea of perspectives and possibilities.
Here is just a sampling of some different ones:
Out of all these perspectives, I believe the Scientific Materialist one to be the most damaging to human well-being and quality of life.
But, this is the view that is implicit in our modern culture.
It goes something like this:
"Our job is to work like a machine to survive, consume goods, and reproduce so the next generation can do the same thing. The common goal of humanity is to feed the algorithmic machines that sustain our economy."
Sounds pretty bleak when it's put like that, doesn't it?
But being able to see this as the reality of our modern world frees you to ask yourself another important question:
Have I unconsciously accepted this way of living as my fate without questioning it?
Whichever worldview you choose to base your life on, there is one thing I now know for certain:
Your Time and Attention are the currency that you exchange to achieve any of the goals associated with it.
Ultimately, you have to answer this question:
What will I do with the rest of the Time and Attention that has been allotted to me?
or put more directly:
What is the goal of MY human life?
And so, to recap:
The way I see it, the most important forms of value in our lives is not cash or material wealth, but these 3 things:
💎Time
💎Attention
💎Health
Our job is to make sure we are treating these natural resources that have been freely given to us with the respect they deserve.
I hope this post has triggered some reflective moments for you.
Stay tuned for the next edition where we will continue to dig deep into these important questions in our journey toward Midlife Renewal.
Thank you so much for reading🌺
Thanks for reading! And please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on this post or how things are going with your own Midlife Renewal. I’d love to hear from you🌺.
I LOVE this. I have an interest in longevity, midlife and all as I just hit 50. This post really puts some great concepts on the page with elegant simplicity and helpful pictures too. Thanks for this I just subscribed.