Look at what you’d grab if the house caught fire. That’s your values in a backpack.

Priorities become legible under constraint. Given unlimited room, everything seems worth keeping; given thirty seconds and two hands, you discover what you actually care about, and the answer is usually not the expensive items. Photographs, letters, something a person made: the list tends to be about relationships rather than assets.

Run the exercise without the fire. Name the five things and notice what they have in common. Then check whether your ordinary spending and attention reflect what that list says you value, and adjust one of them if it does not.