I voted yesterday, but it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Like I said earlier, my plan was to totally skip the voting booth this year. Since the decision to not to vote is usually attributed to laziness or cynicism (and usually that’s accurate), I want to take a few minutes to explain how I made my decision. It’s pretty simple, anyway:

It’s not worth my time.

I know that sounds like cynicism, but that’s not how I mean it. When I say that it’s not worth my time, it’s more of a statement of the high value I place on my time. I don’t have enough time in the day to do everything I want to do. Every night ends with a battle between my desire to keep going and the limits of my stamina. No matter what I’m doing — whether it’s working on a big project for work, watching a movie with my wife, programming on a side-project, writing a blog post, etc. — I always seem to want to do it 30 minutes longer than I can stay awake. When I eventually go to bed, I often fall asleep thinking about the time I lost and how I won’t let it happen the next day.

Whether or not that’s healthy, it’s who I am. That’s how I behave, and I do it because I want to. As the election got closer and I started to see huge lines for early voting, the biggest thought in my head was, “That’s one night I’m not getting [X] done,” with [X] being whatever I happened to be into that day. I started to resent Election Day, even! I believe that it’s best not to dwell on things that cause stress or discomfort, so in true GTD fashion I decided to make a hard, fast decision and relieve the pressure. I decided not to vote.

I’m still happy with that decision, and I would have kept with it if there was any wait at my voting station. Since there was no wait, I didn’t have to give up the rest of my plans for the night. And what a night it was! I had a nice, quiet dinner with my wife at a restaurant (oooh, Olive Garden!), I debated individual rights with my family at an Election Night party at my brother’s apartment, and I spent over an hour working on my always-going GTD project. And I made it to bed before midnight, too! How horrible would it have been to have to sacrifice any of those things just to cast a ballot for a group of people and issues that I don’t care for.

And for those that might not know what I mean by sacrifice, check out what Leonard Peikoff wrote in “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.”

Life requires that man gain values, not lose them. It requires assertive action, achievement, success, not abnegation, renunciation, surrender. It requires self-tending—in other words, the exact opposite of sacrifice.

A “sacrifice” is the surrender of a value, such as money, career, loved ones, freedom, for the sake of a lesser value or of a nonvalue (if one acquires an equal or a greater value from a transaction, then it is an even trade or a gain, not a sacrifice). A rational man, however, chooses his values and their hierarchical ranking not by whim, but by a process of cognition. To tell such a man to surrender his values is to tell him: surrender your judgment, contradict your knowledge, sacrifice your mind. But this is something a man dare not sacrifice.

Needless to say, I totally agree with that, and it’s a great way to live!

But what about participating in the work to make our country better? Isn’t that a value? Definitely, but I don’t think voting is a very effective way to cause *change* (this year’s magic word). Most of the work involved in voting is done BEFORE any votes are cast. Just look at the ballot and ask how it was created. Why did we have to choose between a Republican and a Democrat? Why people voting on whether all state documents have to be in English? Why are people voting on whether gay people can get married? And why did we ever have to vote on whether citizens would be taxed to refurbish the Kansas City Chief’s stadium? The real driving force between things like these are *ideas.* Ideas such as “Every man has a right to his life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and property” or “I am my brother’s keeper!” or “I like football and you should pay for it.” The only way this country is going to get better is to get the objective, pro-human-survival ideas to trump the many of the other ideas that are popular today today. Based on this, I’d say that someone with a random opinion and the ability to pull a lever every 2-4 years does nothing when compared to someone with good, objective ideas and the ability to spread them to others.

I like to think that I’m one of the latter. Did I mention that through good, honest discussions about individual rights with friends and family, I convinced at least two people not to vote for Obama? Don’t tell me I didn’t have my say in this election!