Time and attention are flawless guides to what a person values

By David McElroy · February 19, 2022

I found myself feeling resentful earlier this week about the amount of time I was “wasting” at work one day. I had something more important which I was eager to do. I don’t work nearly as many hours now as I used to, but I felt impatient with work this week anyway.

As I grumbled inwardly, I started thinking about how much I’d worked in the past at other pursuits.

When I owned a couple of small start-up newspapers, I routinely worked between 100 and 110 hours a week. I was exhausted all the time, but I didn’t mind the effort. I loved what I was doing. I was passionate about it.

When I was a political consultant, there were weeks when I worked 80 or 90 hours, especially as an election approached. Other times during a year, I might work only a few hours a week. It varied. I was happy with that, too. I controlled my time — and I love what I was doing.

What dominates my time now? Writing, photography, thinking — all about things which matter to me. My income tells you nothing about what I care about, but my use of time tells you everything. I’ve realized very clearly this week that my use of time — and where I put my attention — have always been a proxy for what I loved and what I was passionate about.

That’s true for you, too. And for everyone else.

If you say you care about something, but you don’t give it time or attention, you’re lying to yourself or you’re lying to someone else. Your use of time tells the truth about what you really care about, regardless what you claim.

Every time I’ve been in love with a woman, she’s received a tremendous amount of my time and attention. It didn’t even have to be an objectively valuable use of my time for it to matter. We might have watched ridiculously silly movies. We might have spent time on the phone far past the point of having anything to say. Or we might have talked about ideas of great importance to me. It didn’t matter too much.

No matter what it was, if the two of us chose to give time and attention to each other, we were showing — in the most clear way possible — that each of us considered the other person worthy of giving these bits and pieces of our lives to.

I can also remember times in relationships when I didn’t make someone a priority. I had other things that had to be done. There were meetings. There was work of various sorts. There were dozens of other things that were more pressing.

I’m not saying those other things weren’t really important to me. What I’m saying is that those were times when my use of time showed quite clearly that pretty much every other priority in the world came before that woman. And those were the relationships that were already dead. I just hadn’t admitted it yet.

In a typical year, we have 8,760 hours. We have to spend some of them sleeping. Others are spent on eating and grooming and similar necessities. But no matter how we decide to use the remaining hours, we can’t create more of them.

And if you look at how I fill those remaining hours, you will know what I care about. You’ll know whether I love someone. You’ll know what I’m passionate about. And you’ll even be able to tell if I have no passions and loves worth giving my time to. If you ever hear someone who wants to “kill time” — and has to look for brain-numbing things to fill the hours — you can be pretty sure that person has run out of things to care deeply about.

If I sell my time to someone, it means that I either care about the work or I need the money. If I offer my time to you — wanting nothing but your time and attention in return — that means you’re a priority for me. But if I prioritize everything else before you, that tells you that you don’t really matter to me.

Most of us know this instinctively, but we don’t necessarily think about it. Sometimes it’s wise to evaluate our use of time consciously, though. And it’s wise to evaluate the time and attention which we get from others.

You’re not entitled to my time if I don’t want to give it to you. And I’m not entitled to your time if I’m not among your priorities, either. But knowing the truth about where we stand is important.

One of the greatest experiences of life is when two people mutually make the other a priority. It’s like a gift of some sort of magic. And this magical clock — which tracks our use of time and attention — tells the absolute truth about what we really care about, whether we like what it says or not.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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