Whose Cup Are You Filling?

Today's Sunday Morning Post: Attention, finitude, and a game of life

Photo by Haley Truong on Unsplash

I am thinking of a game. The rules are simple. Every morning, you have a full pitcher of water and many empty cups. By day’s end, you pour all the water from the pitcher into the cups. The goal: Pour the water into the right cups.

Sounds like a weird game, I know. But there’s a catch. You have been playing this game your whole life. The game is attention. You are the pitcher. The water is your time: your ~17 daily hours of waking consciousness, all your care and focus and feeling. The cups represent everything you pour your thoughts and attention into. They are labeled: WORK, TIKTOK, WIFE, DISHES, EXERCISE, REGRET, PARENTS, ANXIETY, GOD. But, by its nature, water cannot go into two cups simultaneously. When you’re listening to a podcast, you aren’t listening to your husband. When you are thinking about politics, you aren’t thinking about your sister. When you are working, you aren’t praying.

It is easy to lie to ourselves about our values and our priorities. But attention cannot tell a lie. Our attention is the revealed preference of our values. Many people spend their whole lives emptying themselves without taking stock of the water levels of the cups into which they pour their existence. They spend hours, days, and decades watering cups that they never meant to water and leaving empty other vessels they always meant to fill.

I am all too familiar with the feeling. Several weeks ago, I was having a conversation with Morgan Housel, the bestselling financial writer, about the psychology of spending money. We got to talking about the qualities of admiration and attention. I had been thinking for a while about how the internet has a way of assaulting our priorities and entreating us to seek admiration and validation from people we don’t know, will never meet, and don’t even like very much in the first place. I had recently experienced a strange version of this. When Abundance came out, some people didn’t like the book very much. That’s fine. Still, it’s no fun to feel yelled at on social media all day. So, sometimes, I spent hours yelling back. By the evening, I would arrive at the dinner table feeling touchy, distracted, and frustrated. Sitting at the table with my wife and daughter, my mind was a screen upon which flickered the ghostly afterimage of little avatar photos of people I’d never met, and may never meet, with whom I was still arguing.

This struck me as a rather pathetic state of affairs. “Every day, I have a choice to fill up certain glasses with my attention,” I said. “My wife is one glass of water, and my child is another.” But when I took an honest inventory of water levels, work anxieties were getting full pours from the pitcher, while the people I love were getting droplets. As Morgan indelibly put it, my work anxieties were sucking up all the water while my family was left “dehydrated.”

The game of cups is a useful allegory, because it recommends a clear action. Think of it as a waterline inventory. At the end of a day, you can ask yourself: Who got my water today? Did I save my attention for my priorities, or do I consistently pour myself into activities and media that I would never say I valued? One can be quite precise about this waterline inventory. If you’re a white-collar worker, for example, you’ll have typed hundreds or thousands of words in a given day. Who or what got your words: Projects you care about, or projects you wish never existed? Colleagues or family? Group chats with people you don’t really care about or group chats with people you love and want to see more of? If I’m being strictly honest with myself, there are too many weeks when, looking back, I sent hundreds of words to Slack channels and group chats I don’t really care about without sending a word to a friend I care about and haven’t contacted in a while.

This whole project might sound like a major guilt trip, but I choose to see it differently. Our attention is a unique resource. Bodies degrade, wealth rises and falls, reputations come and go. But attention refreshes daily. The morning’s pitcher is always full. The morning’s cups are always empty. The game begins again, and it’s a game you can win today no matter how many times you’ve lost. So this week I wrote myself a note and taped it to my desk, where I can’t miss it: Whose cup did you fill today?