about time

time is everything

we’re born rich in time. and we die without any more time. and we only recognise the true value of it when it starts being taken away from us. and that’s kind of sad, isn’t it?

i thought about it. when we start going to school, we’re selling our abundance of time to an institution, in the hopes that as a result they’ll give us something worthwhile to make whatever time we’ll have left in our life worth more than it is now. because at 11, your time isn’t worth jack. or at least that’s what the world tells us. so we believe it and we don’t do anything with it.

we grow up and swap our time for knowledge, slowly but surely increasing the worth of whatever time we have left. some pay the institutions to allow them to sell their time to said institution — AKA school fees. funny, isn’t it? by the time we’ve graduated university with all our qualifications, if we’ve played our cards right, we should come out with our time worth something tangible. and, depending on what type of knowledge or skill you acquired over those years, you can increase or decrease the worth of your time. you can apply this knowledge or skill in a certain role within society and you can now start to swap your time on a regular basis for income.

but i started thinking about that famous phrase: “time is money”. and suddenly it clicked. that’s exactly what time is. money. well, a form of it. it’s a type of currency. and, like currency, it can be spent or invested. and, at 11, we’re millionaires in time but because of what society says, we don’t know it. so we spend and spend and spend. and of course we have a great time doing it too. duh. you can’t enjoy your cash if all you do is invest it. sometimes spending a little is worth it. but there’s the issue. we don’t spend a little time. we spend a lot. we’re spend-a-holics when it comes to time. we spend it on anything and everything. when we’re young, we innocently spend it on whatever intrigues us. i spent mine on skateboarding and drawing. i spent a little on conceptualising movies and some on writing. it’s good, because then you have no obligations and you spend it on what matters most to you.

but then society steps in and gives you a handbook on how you’re supposed to spend your time. and slowly but surely, your time is taxed. a certain percentage of it belongs to something automatically. school, work, jobs, etc. you name it. it’s taxed. and the amount available for us to spend or invest becomes less and less as time goes on. we start reminiscing on the freedom of childhood fondly but shrug it off as just another thing of the past that has no relevance today. that was then. but what we wouldn’t do for our time back. so how do you get time back? you get everything that your time is worth. you get money. with money, you don’t have to sell your time. you don’t have to pay to sell your time. you don’t have to give it to anyone. you can pay yourself for your own time. you don’t owe anyone a damn thing. and it’s freedom. just like childhood.

and here’s my little 2 cents on this: why don’t we let kids know how precious the time they have is? let them spend it recklessly (they’re children after all), but also let us, as ‘grown ups’, keep an eye out. let’s see what they spend most of their time on. then help them invest. support them however they need it. even if they switch from one thing to another, support them, because with each switch, they get closer to their truest passion. the thing they’d invest everything in, money and time. and maybe i’m being too optimistic, but i believe a whole generation of children like that are sure to grow up to change the world.

p.s. this doesn’t apply if you’re teaching kids values and lessons that negatively affect those around them. don’t encourage negative behaviour, encourage fruitful passions.