We seem to like to chase money. Maybe it’s an American culture thing, maybe it’s a habit picked up through our environment as kids. For whatever reason, we’ve come to value money as the ultimate resource. This could possibly be the biggest travesty in human existence. If you look around every day you see it unfolding everywhere. We’ve adopted a simple framework – get up, work for money, go home – repeat tomorrow. Live for Fridays and thank god it’s the weekend mentalities are considered the norm. You feel like the outcast when four people around the table go I fucking hate Monday because I have to go back to work.
Some, not all of us live this way. However – I would say that the majority of us here in America take on this mentality or love to pretend this is how it is for them but secretly inside really enjoy what they do. Why are we trading time for misery? Money. Yes everyone needs money to survive in this economically advanced society here but everyone’s “needs” are different so the pursuit or more and more money comes at higher and higher costs unless we understand the risks and are willing to admit that money is not your greatest resource – TIME is more valuable than money.
You can always figure out a way to get more money, but what we’ve been terrible at is figuring out a way to get more time in this life. Luckily, modern advancements in medicine and health have come a long way to prevent earlier than “normal” death but we still have yet to figure out how to extend life so we can buy more time. This is where the two worlds of money and time collide. If you think about it, essentially what we do every day is trade our time for money by working. Some people find ways to extract this time wisely and leverage it for the advancement of themselves, while others suffer the harsh reality of imprisonment as a “free” man/woman.
They unwilling get in their boxes and travel to a box only to sit in front of a box with people they don’t like for the majority of their day, hopeful that the weekend will come quicker and their bank accounts will have enough money in it from their dead man walking efforts so that they can piss it away on things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like only to find themselves stuck again on the hamster wheel come Monday morning. Exhausted yet? We do this because we think there’s no other way. We do this because we think money will get us the things we need but we’ve traded hours upon hours for that money. The traditional model of working for 45 years and living your life afterward has never been questioned and continues to be the status quo.
Imagine a world that was the opposite. Imagine a world that revered time as the ultimate resource when you mention what you were doing, or where you were going and people didn’t think about the money it costs, they thought more about the time commitment of that outing. Everything was weighed against the time and the focus of the finite resource that is time was exponentially greater than it’s ever been. They say once you reach a certain age your growth stops and now it’s a race toward death and declining health. I would question that level of thinking and ask this question – what if growth was unlimited and time was actually valued more than money?
People walk around with purses and wallets every day. They hold them close. They protect them in “rough” neighborhoods and they watch them while at the beach or movie theater to make sure no one steals it from them. Yet, we let people steal from us every day. People ask us for things every day that rob us of our time. How often do we approach things with the mentality of defending our time like we defend our wallets?
The biggest deterioration of our time in the rat race is meeting requests. The dreaded three words – can we meet? These three words are almost as threatening as the man who runs into the bank with a gun and says these three words – gimme the money. Yet I can already tell that the first reaction of some of the people who have just finished reading the above sentence will go, “oh it’s not that serious.” Yes – yes it is. I see people every single day literally pissing time away. What are they doing with all this empty space? They stand in line at the grocery store, bank, school pick up line, and do nothing but scroll on their phones. You could definitely say – well you don’t know (you’re judging them, Yes, Yes I am) that maybe they’re reading something important or texting with someone they enjoy and having a meaningful conversation. Yes – they could be doing this but chances are they are not.
Maybe it’s time we watched time more closely. Track our budgets and our time. Maybe this approach will demonstrate that people can realize how much time they spend on meaningless shit, like bitching and complaining and focus their efforts in a more productive way so that they don’t turn around at 75 and go, where did all the time go?
Just my observation.