Exchanging Time for Money
These are the days of our lives
It’s crystal clear to anyone who has stepped back for just a single moment that we’re spinning on a giant wheel, a rat race that leads nowhere. Most of these people probably don’t analyze it much further, they chalk it up to what’s considered “normal” (as if we don’t decide that ourselves) and jump back onto the hamster wheel. But if you stay back and can separate yourself from the rest of the world around you, it becomes crystal clear that this is utterly pointless.
My son is by far the most important thing in my life. It’s not a stretch to say that there is a high probability I’d be dead right now if it weren’t for his birth. I was on a dangerous path until the responsibility of being not just a parent, but a good parent, was thrust upon me on accident — and it was a saving grace for me. It’s given me a reason to live, a reason to be. This is scary because one day my son won’t necessarily need me anymore, and it’s difficult to know how I’ll react to losing that identity. But I don’t worry too much about the future, it’s out of my hands.
So it boggles me why I pay someone else a small house payment each month to spend more time with him than I get to. Quite frankly, it’s fucking ridiculous. Of course one day he will be in school and that is mostly necessary (not entirely) but right now I pay a program a lot of money to hang out with the most precious thing in the world to me so I can go make the money to pay them.
We trade our time, and that time can be spent in a multitude of ways, for money. We’re getting screwed in this deal, in case you weren’t aware.
Why do we trade so much of our time to go make money? So that we can own more junk — i.e. the need to have more money. It’s self fulfilling, we create the need by being to heavily focused on being consumers that we trade our ability to forge meaningful relationships with those closest to us just to feed this addiction.
Who needs a 5,000 sq. ft. house? Who needs a $100,000 dollar car? It’s all junk, every bit of it. Whether it is now or not isn’t important, it’s just simply junk that doesn’t look like junk yet. No one needs this shit, but almost everyone shoots for it, almost everyone believes that accumulating possessions, junk, validates us as humans. We spend our lives trading our time from what’s important to chase stupid shit.
If you ever stay at work late and miss spending time with your kid, especially if it’s some sort of event or activity, you’re a shitty parent. You can attempt to justify it all you want, but there’s absolutely no way around it.
Your child would appreciate your presence far more than they do riding in that new Range Rover. They would gladly trade off their monstrosity of a house for something more modest just so you could actually be present in their life.
Yes, “work-life balance” is a new hot topic in the business world, but it’s rhetoric at this point. No one is truly creating this balance. Everyone is attempting to have it all, and it just isn’t possible. There are trade-offs to every single decision you make — if you have aspirations for that promotion and there is competition forcing you to work a little harder than expected you are giving something up on the other end. Is it REALLY worth it?
Hint: no.
The only way to truly have a work-life balance is by working as little as necessary to spend the rest of your life actually living. Having a big house, a more expensive car, or more shit isn’t living, it’s the anti-thesis of it. There can’t be balance if you are skipping life so that you can work.
Work used to be quite a bit different — not that long ago work and life were intertwined because working was living. People were often subsistent, for the most part, and working was how you actually survived. It wasn’t about how you thrived, but how you literally survived to see another day. Even then, this was often done in the company of those most important to you, rather than in an office with strangers that you attempt to call friends simply because you happened to be in the same place at the same time so you’re forcing some bullshit social existence.
If you work to survive, so be it. But if you work to thrive? You’re wasting your time. It’s pointless. You can’t accumulate possessions and enjoy them and have meaningful relationships too. It’s impossible. Stop chasing what you think you want, look deep within, and find what you need.
Take ownership of your time, it’s the only resource that you own and it’s not worth trading off for possessions.