ACT, Part Four: What Are Your Days Adding Up To?

Values, and Choosing a Direction for the Life You're Already Living

You never arrive at north. You keep choosing its direction.

Most of us don't wake up one morning and deliberately decide to spend our lives on things that don't matter. It happens much more quietly.

Work needs something. Family needs something. The house develops another opinion about where our money should go, and the phone continues its remarkable campaign to convince us that whatever just happened on it deserves immediate attention.

So we handle what's in front of us. We solve problems, answer questions, make appointments, pay bills, meet deadlines, replace whatever started leaking, and eventually go to bed. Then we get up and do some variation of it again.

A person can live this way for quite a while before a different question begins making itself heard:

What is all of this adding up to?

That question brings us to another important part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy— Values. The first three parts of this series have been about creating room. We don't have to believe everything we think, and uncomfortable feelings can be present without automatically deciding what we do. We begin recovering choices that anxiety, anger, shame, fear, and old habits have a way of narrowing.

But freedom by itself doesn't tell us where to go.

If thoughts don't have to choose our direction and feelings don't have to choose it either, something else has to.

Values help answer that question.

Most of Life Doesn't Happen at the Summit

When we think about the direction of our lives, we tend to think about large decisions. Who will I marry? What kind of work will I do? Where will I live? Will I have children? When should I retire?

Those decisions matter.

But surprisingly little of life is lived at that altitude.

Most of a marriage is built from ordinary evenings, conversations, irritations, meals, affection, misunderstandings, repairs, and thousands of small decisions about whether to turn toward or away from another person.

Parenthood accumulates through car rides, interruptions, ball games, arguments, worry, laughter, eye rolls, apologies, and the strange experience of gradually becoming less necessary to someone you would still gladly throw yourself in front of a bus for.

Friendships are built much the same way.

Somebody keeps calling. Somebody remembers. Somebody shows up.

A meaningful life is rarely constructed from one magnificent decision. It accumulates through choices too small to look important while we're making them.

Values become interesting when they leave the page.

Wanting Something Isn't the Same as Valuing Something

Suppose I say, I want my children to respect me. That's understandable, but respect is an outcome, and outcomes have an inconvenient characteristic: Other people, even our children, get a vote.

I can persuade, encourage, explain, reward, lecture, and perhaps make myself thoroughly exhausting in the process, but I cannot finally control what another adult thinks of me.

ACT makes an important distinction here. Outcomes are things we hope will happen. Values describe how we want to live while we pursue them.

I may want my children to respect me. What I can choose is to be a father who is present, dependable, interested, appropriately firm, willing to listen, and capable of admitting when I’m wrong.

I may want a happy marriage, but happiness isn't directly under my control either. What I can choose is honesty, affection, faithfulness, curiosity, humor, forgiveness, and a willingness to remain in some difficult conversations long enough for something useful to happen.

We spend enormous portions of our lives trying to control outcomes when what we actually possess is considerable influence over direction.

You Never Arrive at North

This is one of my favorite things about ACT's understanding of values. Values aren't destinations. They're directions.

Think about an old-fashioned compass. If I'm hiking through unfamiliar country and need to travel north, the compass can point me in that direction. But there's no place on the trail where the needle suddenly announces:

Congratulations. You have arrived at North. There is always more north.

I may not even be particularly aware during every step that I'm heading north. I walk, notice the trees, cross a creek, climb over a deadfall, get distracted by something moving in the brush, and keep going.

The compass remains available when I need it.

What becomes considerably easier to notice is when I get off north. Perhaps I've drifted northeast. Then east. I check the compass and realize that somewhere along the way I've stopped moving in the direction I intended. And I certainly know something has gone wrong when the compass tells me I'm walking south.

Values work like that.

You can finish college, but you never finish learning. You can get married, but you don't finish loving. You can apologize for what you did yesterday without completing the lifelong business of becoming an honest person.

You never finish being curious, courageous, compassionate, faithful, or generous.

Values remain unfinished because we remain unfinished.

What Pays Now and What Matters Later

Unfortunately, the things that matter most aren't always the things that reward us most quickly. Avoiding a difficult conversation can provide relief within thirty seconds. Whatever intimacy might come from actually having the conversation may take considerably longer.

A lie can save embarrassment today.

Integrity plays a longer game.

Our nervous systems pay enormous attention to what happens next. If something removes discomfort, we learn quickly. That's useful when learning not to touch a hot stove and more complicated when trying to construct a life.

A person can become extraordinarily efficient at making the next ten minutes tolerable while gradually building ten years he never intended to live.

That doesn't make immediate pleasure the enemy. Eat the ice cream. Take the nap. Watch something ridiculous. Go fishing for no defensible reason whatsoever.

A life organized entirely around delayed gratification would be its own peculiar form of misery.

It would be more interesting to ask the question, Who or what is choosing?

Sometimes I rest because rest matters. Sometimes I rest because I'm avoiding something. From across the room the two may look exactly alike, but somewhere inside myself I usually have at least a suspicion about the difference.

The Things We Say Matter

Most of us can produce a respectable list of values without much difficulty: family, health, friendship, faith, honesty, meaningful work, learning, generosity. I doubt many people would list resentment, compulsive phone checking, impressing strangers, winning unnecessary arguments, or remaining irritated about something somebody said in 2019.

There's another way of discovering what we value in practice.

Look at the calendar.

Notice where your attention goes, what repeatedly receives your best energy, what gets whatever is left, what you protect when life becomes crowded, and what you consistently postpone.

Imagine someone quietly observing your life for a month. They aren't allowed to ask what you believe is important. They can only watch what receives your time, attention, money, affection, worry, and effort.

What might they conclude?

This isn't intended as an exercise in guilt. There are seasons when survival takes nearly everything available. Raising children, caring for an aging parent, grieving someone we love, working two jobs, living with illness, or simply getting through a brutal year can radically rearrange where our energy goes.

Behavior isn't a perfect measure of values.

But sometimes there is considerable distance between the life we admire and the life we're actually practicing.

That's when the compass becomes useful.

Some of Our Directions Were Handed to Us

Not everything we call a value necessarily began with us. Families, churches, schools, professions, cultures, and generations all hand us ideas about what a worthwhile life looks like. Achievement. Productivity. Independence. Success. Status. Security. Being nice. Making the family proud.

None of these things is automatically shallow or wrong. But ACT uses the word chosen for a reason. At some point we have to ask:

Do I actually value this, or have I simply become very good at pursuing it?

That's a difficult question when you've already invested twenty years. There are people who finally reach the thing they've been climbing toward and discover, somewhat inconveniently, that they don't particularly want to be there.

The ladder worked beautifully, but it was leaning against the wrong wall.

Values invite us to examine the wall before spending another decade climbing.

Values Become Interesting When They Cost Something

It's easy to value honesty when telling the truth costs nothing. Courage matters when we're frightened. Patience becomes interesting when somebody is testing it. Forgiveness matters because something happened that is difficult to forgive.

This is where values connect directly with the acceptance we considered in Part Three.

Sometimes moving in a valued direction requires us to experience exactly the feelings we'd prefer not to have.

Intimacy may require vulnerability. Honesty may require embarrassment. Parenting an adult child may require the nearly unbearable experience of helplessness. Growth usually contains uncertainty, and reconciliation may require walking toward a conversation we've become quite talented at avoiding.

If our first priority is always feel better now, values will repeatedly lose.

A more psychologically flexible question is:

What matters enough that I'm willing to be uncomfortable for it?

Life Doesn't Always Pay Us Back

We often carry an unspoken contract with life. Love your children and they should make good choices. Work hard and you should succeed. Treat people well and they should treat you well. Take care of your body and you should remain healthy. Be faithful to your marriage and the marriage should flourish.

Sometimes life honors the arrangement.

Sometimes it appears not to have read the contract.

You can be a devoted parent and watch an adult child make choices you cannot prevent. You can love someone who cannot love you well in return, work with integrity and be overlooked, or take excellent care of your body and still become ill.

If values depend on guaranteed results, they become transactions:

I'll live this way if life pays me back.

Values make a different claim. Some ways of living are worth choosing because they describe who we want to become, even when the outcome remains uncertain.

I want to love because I want to become more loving. I want truthfulness woven into who I am. I want to remain curious because I don't want age to harden into certainty, and I want to be present to the people I love because ordinary time with them turns out not to be ordinary forever.

Sometimes the effort isn't merely the price we pay for the reward.

Sometimes the effort is part of the reward.

The Compass Is Not a Weapon

There is a danger in all this. Give the human mind a beautiful idea and it will occasionally figure out how to beat us with it. If family really mattered to you, you wouldn't have done that. If you valued your marriage, you wouldn't feel this way. If health mattered, you'd have exercised. Apparently you aren't the person you thought you were.

That's not values work.

That's shame wearing a therapy badge.

The purpose of a compass isn't to condemn a hiker for wandering east. It's to tell him where he's headed now.

Suppose I realize that work has gradually consumed nearly everything. I don't need to prosecute myself for the last five years.

I need to notice the needle and decide what happens next.

Maybe I put the laptop away tonight. Maybe I call my daughter, walk with my wife, pick up my guitar, read something that has nothing to do with my profession, or sit quietly long enough to remember that usefulness and productivity aren't synonyms.

Nothing dramatic may happen.

That's often what returning to a value looks like.

What to Carry Forward

Part Four adds three things to what we've learned so far. Values aren't goals or guaranteed outcomes; they're directions we keep choosing. A compass is for reorientation, not condemnation. And discomfort becomes easier to understand when we know what we're willing to experience it for.

Part One gave us room to make choices. Part Two gave us room around our thoughts. Part Three gave us room for what we feel. Making room for things allows us freedom to incorporate new things.

Part Four gives that freedom a direction.

And we will wander. Everybody does. Sometimes we're a few degrees off. Sometimes we've been heading east for three years. Occasionally we look down and discover we've somehow turned completely south.

None of those discoveries requires shame.

They require a turn.

But there's one fairly significant limitation to even the finest compass ever made.

It doesn't walk.

You can stand in the woods all afternoon, know exactly which direction is north, and remain precisely where you are.

Part Five begins there: Knowing North Isn't the Same as Walking North.

© 2026 Thomas Kurtz. All rights reserved.

Published by Thomas Kurtz Counseling, LLC.