Open: Time

To start things off and my friends can attest to this, I HATE the saying, “Time is Money”. Not only is it the go to cliché for capitalism, regardless of your feelings on our system of commerce (and governance, really), it really hasn’t worked out very well for the lion’s share of us, but I’m not here to complain ab out being poor, what I really want to talk about is Time. Not only do I not care for that saying because it undermines a lot of my personal beliefs, but rather I feel it is logically incorrect. Now I say this is an opinion and to be taken as such, but really the “math” works out. Follow me on this.

For Time to equal Money I feel we’d have to base it on a few key factors. Time Vs. Money first. The thing is, given enough time, business savvy, or just dumb luck, I can POTENTIALLY make as much money as I ever wanted. I can always make more money if given the time. Make sense so far? The problem is, I can’t in turn exchange money for time, not evenly at least, as I am a mortal human that only has so many years before I expire. I can have all the money in the world, and yes that helps my survival rate to be sure, but I will still eventually run out of time. Thus I can’t make more Time.

I can always make more money, I can’t make more time.

This is a refrain I say often. I don’t have anything against money itself, any qualms I have with it are usually in what’s being done with it, or for it, but that personal philosophy aside, I wanted to focus more importantly on a resource that we all only have so much of, which is to say, Time. To me it is the most valuable thing we have, but I feel we often get lead to believe that it isn’t worth as much as it is. Sure to your employer your time may be worth $15 per hour, but that doesn’t change the fact that’s time you’re not getting back.

Now of course we trade our time for dollars out of necessity, we need funds in this society, to buy all of the things we need and want, but I have always had this feeling that these societal standards of working hard and having enough money is all there is to it. It has always seemed to me a kind of trickery we play on each other and even ourselves (Look up Internalized Capitalism), to hoodwink others into working harder or even just to trick ourselves into thinking working is ALL time well spent.

Now that’s not to say I don’t enjoy a good hard days work, and having the money to keep shelter, food, electricity, running water and the like is a good feeling overall. It IS time well spent if it keeps my family and I off the streets, I thank my lucky stars every day that I’m not still homeless. Even then I wasn’t unsheltered because I have a wonderful group of friends that helped me out. I mention this because I’ve been able to survive most of my life by having good friends that help me out, and I very much do the same. Time with my friends and family is always time well spent for me. I have always worked and know it’s a thing that needs to be done, and I have had some pretty cool and fulfilling jobs over the years, but if it were not for my friends and family, I wouldn’t have found those jobs, I would still be homeless AND unsheltered, I may not even have been here today if I’m being honest.

I had to take a moment to really drive that point home. If you can’t tell by now, I tend to just write what comes to mind around a particular topic, but my brain works in odd circles and wild train rides, it does what it wants in the moment.

Back to the moment. I find we often clash with ourselves or others on what it is we’re supposed to be doing with our finite time. The funny thing is, it’s the only thing you have that is limited, but you have no idea how much of it you have left. We can “expect” our lives to go until a certain point, but that’s barring any infinite number of disasters that can happen during that whole timeline. Chuck Palahniuk wrote it best, “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero….” Kinda bleak, but not incorrect.

Now you’d expect me to say something along the lines of “Live your best life!” and leave it at that. Of course as with most things in life, it’s not as simple as a saying or mantra, though they are useful tools, if not a little annoying at times. I can’t say that throwing caution to the wind and doing whatever you want always works out. In a perfect world perhaps, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to “make” time to put efforts towards the things we’d like to do more of.

“Personally, I like to sleep. And I intend to appropriately confine myself more and more to my living quarters and pass my life away sleeping.”

― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

And that dude was a Samurai! I love that quote, it illustrates no matter how duty bound you are to something, you still have things that you enjoy, or find fulfilling. I suppose if I spent my life on and off the battlefield, I’d feel the same way. Well I’m an insomniac, so I do feel the same way as sleep often alludes me.

That being said I feel it’s important to take the time to do more things you’re passionate about, which sounds a little cliché unto itself I know. I’ll say that we don’t always have the option to do as we please most of the day, through work and all of life’s other obligations, which I’m not mad at, we do what we have to. I have found, however, after spending most of my life working, that I was getting lost in my work and placing too much of my value on my work (again Internalized Capitalism). I worked myself into a pretty big crash last year, but when I came out of it, I found the value in rest and taking the time to do things I wanted to do rather than the things I have to do regardless of my feelings.

I’m finding that I am appreciating my free time so much more, these days…..

How are you spending your time?

Do you feel like most things you do are time well spent?

Given the chance what are some of the things you’d do more of if afforded the time?