Our Time is Valuable

photo credit Unsplash

Time is a precious, but unique, commodity. We need to view it as such and begin demanding equality of time. Right now time is being leveraged against us and we don’t even realise it. This means that we are missing out on its true value and how it can add to the quality of our lives and our society. It’s time (no pun intended) to look into how we can shift our perspective and evolve our world into one that allows us, all of us, to fully utilise this precious commodity.

Time is unique in that it is individually limited, yet impossible to measure. We each have only a certain amount of time in our life, but we lack the ability to ever know how much of it we have. So we live our lives, feeling as if we have all the time in the world, while simultaneously feeling like there are just not enough hours in the day to get everything done. As you get older and life gets harder and filled with more stress, time has a habit of slipping even further away without you even realising. You end up just trying so hard to survive that you forget that your time is actually precious and you should have the right to enjoy it as others, specifically the wealthy, do.

So how is time being leveraged against us? Look at your life. There’s so much to do, that when one thing gets accomplished there are typically ten more that pop up. You have daily responsibilities, weekly, monthly, yearly; jobs to go to, careers to develop, bosses to please, houses/apartments to maintain, food to prepare, children to raise, bills to pay, your health to manage. And most people are not lucky enough to have assistance with the majority of these tasks. Most people have to find a way to do it all just in order to survive. And while you are struggling to do it all, there are those, typically wealthy people, with the audacity to say that if you really wanted to be successful you’d just work that little bit harder and they’ll point to the single mother who is working two jobs, taking care of her children, and going to night school and say that that is what you need to do to be successful and if you are not doing that, then you are lazy and don’t deserve success. And we have fallen for it. But they are wrong, we are wrong. Instead of revering that hard working single mother, who is certainly working herself to death, we should actually be questioning why we as a society decided that working oneself to death is seen as the ideal. We should be helping each other, not demanding more self-sacrifice. Having to work multiple jobs, whilst going to school and raising a family is a failure of our society not an accomplishment. It doesn’t make us better or more successful, it is, in fact, a detriment, it is weakening us. We are so burnt out and exhausted that we can’t think, feel, care instead we find it easier to blame all those others who obviously aren’t working as hard as we are for getting all of the benefits that only we deserve. But that isn’t true. Those others are working just as hard, they are thinking just the same, and they are getting just as little as you. It isn’t lack of hard work that is stopping our progress as society, it is our lack of time to develop into better people which in turn would allow us the ability to create a better quality of life for all.

A lot of people look back at the US from the fifties and lament about how much better it was then. The problem is that people are misinterpreting what actually made that time better. It wasn’t the racism or sexism, it wasn’t that white men were treated as superior. None of that made the fifties better, in fact it hindered the actual potential of that era. No, the fifties were better because people weren’t struggling to survive. Families could live comfortably off of one income, allowing people free time to pursue their hobbies and be social. We progressed as society because we didn’t have to worry about how we would survive and instead could focus on things to make our lives better. Now, though that isn’t the case. Our lives are so busy with tasks necessary to survive, that we don’t have the time for anything except surviving till the next day when we have to wake up and do it all again. And the really disingenuous aspect of life today is the narrative constantly fed to us by the wealthy that their success was solely due to their extreme work ethic. It wasn’t. It was due to their wealth giving them an unfair advantage in lots of areas, but mainly in the fact that they have more time in their days to focus on things beyond the normal survival tasks that envelop the common person. Being able to outsource your needs to others, be it personal assistants, chefs, cleaners, nannies, etc, frees up a great deal of time that the ordinary person is unable to do. And with that free time, they can shift their focus on becoming more successful. So while you are busy waiting in lines at the grocery store, gas station, post office or picking up your kids from school, soccer practice, scouting or cooking dinner, washing dishes, walking the dog — all of which take time on a daily basis — they are having meetings, investing, creating, influencing, becoming more successful. Working twice as hard will not help you succeed, it will only burn you out. Besides what is the point in life if you are too busy and too exhausted to even enjoy it?

We don’t have to accept this narrative. We can acknowledge that our time is as valuable as someone who is wealthy and that success is not solely dependant upon working oneself to death. We can elect government officials who understand this and we can demand regulations and policies that help us achieve this — laws regulating businesses from overworking employees, antitrust legislation to prevent businesses from colluding or merging with the effect of raising prices,  government using its power to provide affordable childcare, utilities, grocery options. Once we have affordable options that can free up our time, we can then relax and enjoy life. And with that enjoyment we will progress. There will be so many talented people being able to pursue interests and hobbies instead of wasting away barely surviving. They will develop and invent and find creative solutions to problems facing us. And we will all benefit. Our quality of life will drastically improve. But first we need time, we all deserve time.