Sleep
PartiesAnd suddenly, as if by magic, the parties stopped being fun. Why?
Because they interfered with her new top value: helping suffering kids. She
switched careers and was all about work now. She stayed in most nights. She
didn’t drink or do drugs. She slept well—after all, she needed tons of energy
to save the world.
Her party friends looked at her and pitied her; they judged her by their
values, which were her old values. Poor party girl has to go to bed and get up
for work every morning. Poor party girl can’t stay out doing MDMA every
weekend.
But here’s the funny thing about value hierarchies: when they change, you
don’t actually lose anything. It’s not that my friend decided to start giving up
the parties for her career, it’s that the parties stopped being fun. That’s
because “fun” is the product of our value hierarchies. When we stop valuing
something, it ceases to be fun or interesting to us. Therefore, there is no sense
of loss, no sense of missing out when we stop doing it. On the contrary, we
look back and wonder how we ever spent so much time caring about such a
silly, trivial thing, why we wasted so much energy on issues and causes that
didn’t matter. These pangs of regret or embarrassment are good; they signify
growth. They are the product of our achieving our hopes.