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← Back to blogLooking back, can you say what you spent most of those years on?
This question is not an accusation — it is a call to awareness. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) places time, attention, and values at the heart of psychology. Because time cannot be saved like money or reclaimed. We can only choose how to use it.
The data speak clearly. In the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (n>9,000), published in The Lancet, 29.3% of those reporting the lowest “meaning scores” in their lives died over an 8.5-year follow-up period. Among those with the highest scores, this figure was just 9.3% (Steptoe, Deaton, Stone, 2015). A sense of meaning in life predicts survival — independently of age, sex, physical illness, and psychiatric history.
Modern life, by contrast, fragments our attention. A randomized controlled trial published in BMC Medicine in 2025 showed that reducing screen time to under 2 hours a day led to a significant reduction in depressive symptoms and marked improvements in well-being and sleep quality within three weeks (Pieh et al., 2025). Where your attention goes is where your life goes.
Those who are grieving know how much what remains undone can hurt. Among families who have lost a loved one, 26% report being left with “unfinished business” — words left unsaid, a relationship left unrepaired. These individuals experience significantly more severe grief and depressive symptoms (Yamashita et al., 2017).
The roadmap ACT offers can be summarized in three steps. First, name your values: spending time moving toward an unknown destination means wasting that time. Second, turn your attention toward your values: every second you do not direct is being directed by someone else. Third, take small but consistent actions: not willpower — direction. Not perfection — taking action.
The question to ask should not be “Where did it go?” but “What will I devote the time ahead to?”