So far, I have used the term "value" to refer to guidelines about how to act and what to attend to. But in philosophy, it common to say that value statements are about what is important or good in the world—e.g., which objects, events, or qualities are of value. I believe these two are linked: if you speak about a value one way, it seems to be about your own actions; speak about it another way, and it's about the world.
Consider the attention-directing sentences we developed above. We can rewrite them, this time as statements about what's valuable in the world[1]:
Each DAP points to a choice the person made to adopt a policy. This is a choice with real trade-offs, which indicates what's most valuable to them. For examples, in adopting the DAP of "being vulnerable with friends", I'm saying this is more valuable than other things I could attend to in that context. That choice I made can be used to assign value to external events and objects, like friends and quiet rooms.
[1]. These are value-statements as they are more often understood in philosophy. For instance, by Anderson, Chang, Velleman, Korsgaard, and much of the value theorists in the philosophy of action. I believe the space of value-statements and the space of directives is coextensive, which is why I feel free to make use of the term "value" as I do. I don't, in the end, think I am leaving anything out by adopting my more restrictive definition, and where Anderson uses the separate terms "value" and "ideal", I think she has overlooked that every value is an ideal and vice versa. There is a bijective relationship between, on one hand, statements about what's important in life and, on the other, statements about how we hope to act. This is why I think the word "value" is appropriate. This bijective relationship sheds light on the perception of value, and how such perceptions can change how we live. It may seem that values like freedom, wisdom, or happiness are too abstract to map to improvisational directives which guide our daily lives. Or, perhaps that values like cryptographic security or the rule of law are too specific. I believe this is an illusion, and everything that deserves the name "values" does map to an improvisational directive held to be part of the good life in a choice context. And furthermore to say that someone has a value is the same as saying someone would want to follow the directive in a choice context. But to establish this is out of scope for this essay. Part of the problem is terminological: I believe that words like "freedom" or "happiness" are used as shorthand for a longer kind of phrase which would more clearly work as an improvisational directive.