Are You a Time Waster?
Convincing us to put off the important things is another way our modern societal narratives trap us into an unhappy life.
Are you a time waster? You might say, “No, I’m productive every minute of every day at work, and I make myself available at a moment’s notice outside of work, and when I’m not working, I’m spending all of my free time building my side hustle. Oh, and I’ve got a million followers on social media. I’m the most productive person I know!”
According to the “rules” of our society and capitalism in general, you’re 100% winning. You are gaming life and you’re going to “make it” any time now. Except have you ever noticed how the goal posts keep shifting? And no one else is doing it. Our societal narratives have taught you to do it to yourself. You think, “Once I’m get that promotion, then I’ll be able to enjoy the good life!” Or, “Once I’m earning $xxx,xxx amount of dollars, then I’ll be able to do the things I really want to do. Spend more time with my kids or my extended family or my friends, or hike the mountain trails in the Swiss Alps like I’ve always wanted to!”
Except what happens when you arrive at that predetermined point? If you ever arrive at all, because often we never manage to reach the summit we’re perpetually climbing towards. What happens when you get that promotion or start earning that dollar amount that you once felt was the key to your “freedom?”
Did it turn out that actually, you have to work harder than ever to keep what you’ve gained? Did it turn out that because the cost of living continues to skyrocket unabated, that your rise in salary meant absolutely nothing, and now you’ve calculated that you actually need $xxx,xxx more to be even financially secure, and the idea of being financially “free” has become a pipe-dream? Did your kids grow up, your spouse left you, your friends moved cities, your parents pass away during all those years you were relentlessly dragging yourself toward that magical point in the future when you would have finally “made it?”
Are you beginning to realize you were sold a bag of tools that were guaranteed to build the life you’d always dreamed of, only to find they don’t work, and you’ve got nothing but a box full of junk?
Did you push back the goal posts yet again and just kept on dragging yourself and your half-formed life up that hill?
Capitalism and our modern society has done a really good job at wrapping up our sense of self, our perceived worth, and our ability to access basic human rights and thus, dignity, into our outward ability to be “productive” members of society. If you’re not productive, then you’re not worth anything. If you’re not accumulating wealth and possessions (things that you then throw away so you can buy the next round of “necessary” possessions to prove you belong and are pulling your weight), then you’re lazy and not trying hard enough. If you want proof that we’ve boiled a person’s worth down to their ability to contribute to a country’s GDP (which is an outdated and insufficient model to measure the health of a country’s economy. These days we automatically think if the GDP looks good on paper, then the “welfare” of that society must be good, but this is a false correlation) you only need to look at how that country treats it’s disabled and poor people to see the truth.
Modern societal narratives have evolved over time to trap us on a treadmill — or in the rat race — that’s only spinning faster and faster. We’re working longer hours than ever. Some of us never actually “disconnect’” when the work day is over. If our boss emails us at 11 o’clock at night, we’ll jump on the computer and do whatever they ask because we know we could lose our jobs if we don’t go “above and beyond.” In fact, “above and beyond” is the bare minimum for too many people these days and they really will lose their jobs if they’re not working countless unpaid hours, taking abuse from customers or managers, and answering emails or text messages out of business hours, on weekends, or still being contactable if they happened to be brave enough to actually take a holiday.
I’m an elder Millennial, or a Xennial as many of us straddling that generational line have taken to calling ourselves. So I remember the pre-2000s tech boom, a time before smartphones, computers and the internet took over our lives.
My dad at one stage was head manager of the entire state for the government department he used to work for. So he wasn’t a run of the mill office worker. He had huge responsibilities. But he still clocked off at 5pm every single afternoon, and on Fridays sometimes it was mid-afternoon. Because the accepted societal norm back then was that work stayed in work hours, and outside of business hours, that time belonged to you. Though most people can’t even imagine it now, no one was expected to be taking calls or doing work until the late hours of the night, on weekends and definitely not on holidays.
Even more unimaginable, if we take ourselves pre-industrial revolution, new research is beginning to show that for 95% of our entire human history, our ancestors didn’t work more than around 15 hours per week (though some studies cite it might have been around 20 hours). And they didn’t work all year long. Work would be more intense during the warmer months, but come winter, it was time to rest and spend quality time with family and friends. They had more holidays (apparently ancient Romans had 175 public holidays a year), proper meal breaks during those work hours, and it wasn’t unusual for many cultures to engage in an afternoon nap.
Modern societal narratives have convinced us that these days we’re better off, our lives are easier, and that we’re ‘wealthier’ and it’s all thanks to the magic of capitalism. Except the polar opposite is true. Capitalism has turned us into human workhorses. Recent inflation and soaring cost-of-living pressures mean we’re working longer hours for less real income. Financial inequality and economic stagnation are impacting people’s well-being. We’re busier and unhappier than we’ve ever been. In fact, we’re currently seeing a global rise in unhappiness.
Sure, some of us are doing better than our mid-19th century ancestors, before reforms came in, when people were working on average 70 hours, 6 days a week. But I’ve seen people boasting online about their 60 to 80 hour work week, as if “hustling” and grinding yourself into mental and physical health issues was some badge of honor — because modern capitalism based narratives have convinced us that’s the pinnacle of our worth.
Time is the most valuable thing we have. You can’t put a price on time, even though capitalism has tried by assigning a dollar amount to your working hours — how much an hour your wage is — and we’ve all heard the saying that “time is money.”
Except time isn’t money. And money certainly isn’t time. Ask anyone on their deathbed what they wish they had more of, and almost every answer will be, “More time.” No one on their death bed is saying “I wish I had more money.” Or “I wish I’d worked even more hours in the job I hated.”
The saying “live like there’s no tomorrow,” or the idea of living each day like it’s your last has become a bit of a cliche. An idle thought we might sometimes scratch the surface of in what little spare time we may have. But if you honestly imagined that you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what is your first visceral reaction and thought? That you’d miss your loved ones? That there’s so many things you haven’t done? That you’d wasted too much time doing things that made you unhappy, putting off the things that were important to you for some undefined “later” date?
Capitalism relies on us to keep churning our lives away, working longer and harder, and then using the money we earn to consume and consume again. We can’t individually change or escape capitalism, but we can choose how we spend our time. Time, when spent wisely, can be the difference between a happy life and a miserable life. Money, however, no matter how it’s spent, will only bring brief moments of superficial happiness (I’m talking once all basic needs have been met. For a poor person, more money can mean happiness because they are then able to access basic human rights denied to them before. However, there is definitely a wealth threshold where money no long contributes measurably to a person’s overall happiness. In fact, it has been proven that a certain level of excessive wealth can have the opposite effect and make people unhappier) and most importantly, money cannot buy time.
In fact, money is probably responsible for stealing your time. The pursuit of it, the management of it, even spending it are probably taking up more of your time than you realize. But the second we’re not chasing the almighty dollar, those societal narratives that are etched deeply into are minds are there waiting to jump out and tell us we’re not being productive enough. That we’re wasting time. That we’re not worth anything unless we keep hustling, grinding and buying more stuff. We feel guilty if we even think about taking time for the things that deep down, our hearts and souls are whispering are the most important aspects of life.
The thing is, if we keep putting off the important things — spending time with our kids, doing the things that bring us joy or feed our soul, or simply taking time for yourself to be physically and mentally well — then there’s every chance that we’ll just never do them. Or we won’t be able to do them because we’re too old to hike the Swiss Alps any longer, or our friends all moved away, or our kids grew up and don’t want you to chase them around the backyard any longer.
A few months ago, I found myself faced with a choice. I had been working a regular-paying writing contract for the previous twelve months which brought me more financial security than I’d ever had in my life. I thought that if I could maintain it long term, eventually I might even be able to afford to buy a house and update my ten year old car. Except over that year, even those goals started to look unobtainable as rising cost-of-living expenses ate away that money just as fast as I made it. At the end of that twelve months, I wasn’t much better off financially, but I was physically and mentally exhausted and burned out because of the tight deadlines and creative output expectations. In effect, I basically wrote 12 books in 12 months.
By the end of that year, not only had I made myself physically unwell and mentally exhausted, but I also had three kids who were rightfully upset because of all the school related activities I hadn’t attended, events we hadn’t gone to, time I hadn’t spent with them on weekends and school holidays, homework I hadn’t helped them with, and moments I just hadn’t been there when I should have been. Even the time I did spend with them, I was stressed, tired, unwell or distracted thinking about all the work I needed to get done.
So when the contract was up for renewal and the company wanted even more from me, I had to step back and really take a look at my reality. On one hand, I could have financial security, but sacrifice my time, health, mental well-being and what was left of my kids’ childhood. Or, I could figure out how to live on less and find a way to accept the idea of having “enough” instead of “more and more.” If I could accept that I may never be financially “free,” and that I’ll have to instead find creative ways to work with what I’ve got, then I could gain things that I realized were far more important to me than monetary wealth. Companies like the one I was working for (in fact nearly all large companies) don’t care about the people working for or contracted to them. They’re driven by algorithms and increasing profit margins. I couldn’t keep up, but I can guarantee there would have been a dozen other desperate people willing to step in to fill my role because they needed the money. It’s all completely inhumane, and I couldn’t be a part of it any longer.
That’s why I’ve broken down my own mental narratives around time. I’ve flipped the script. I’m living for my time, instead of living for my job and trying to make enough money to gain time. Because isn’t that what we’re really doing when we spend weeks and months and years working forty or more hours a week, promising ourselves that if we just do the hard yards now, eventually we will have the time for everything else? Aren’t we supposed to be working so we can have the good life? Instead, the reality is, most of us are simply living to work and the good life never materializes. More and more, people are being forced to work until the day they die because they can’t afford to retire, the one thing we all thought we were working toward from the first day we stepped into the workforce.
Money is a social construct. And actually, so is time if we want to get into philosophy or semantics. The real truth is, all you have is now. Yesterday is gone, no matter how some of us are inclined to hold onto things that happened in the past. You’re not getting that time back. And the future is something that doesn’t exist. We’re very good at believing in the “future” and focusing on what’s going to happen tomorrow or next week or next month or next year. But the “future” is not something you can touch or hold and while we think we control our own destinies — and for the most part that’s true, we make choices and predict what’s going to happen and eventually that moment does arrive, though how it unfolds can often vary — but the reality is that anything could happen at any moment and even the best-laid plans can be derailed in an instant. Now is the most valuable thing you will ever possess. Except most of us wander through our lives without even realizing it. We’re either gazing into the past or staring into the fog of the future.
So I reassessed how I wanted to spend the two most important things in life — time and now. I realized that I’d been wasting so much of my valuable now-time. I’d spent my valuable now-time working at jobs and taking contracts I’d disliked and then struggled with simply to make more money. All it did was put me on a treadmill where I was forced to run faster and harder than I could physically and mentally sustain or manage. Working like that is a waste of my now-time. Spending hours trying to figure out how to optimize my earnings, how to invest those earnings, how to manage those earnings is a waste of my now-time. Spending those earnings on stuff I don’t need because it momentarily fills an emptiness inside me and gives me a momentary high of “belonging” when I manage to afford some expensive thing that everyone else is buying is a waste of my now-time. And if I happened to buy that expensive thing on credit, then all I’ve done is created a long-term issue that I’ll need to manage in exchange for a meaningless short term gain. There’s every chance the debt from buying that thing will outlive the thing itself, because 99% of everything we buy ends up as trash within six months.
I’m not saying this was or is an easy endeavor, or everyone should be doing the same thing. There are challenges to opting as far out of the capitalist rat-race as I can in exchange for my own time. It was hard to not feel guilty, like I was letting my kids down or depriving them of the “best things in life” because I’m no longer willing to buy them a new iPad or phone or computer or game system every time they want one. Because I’m no longer willing to be signed up to every single subscription platform under the sun, and they’re lucky if they access it once a month. It was also hard to reconcile that built-in guilt because I’m not being a “productive” member of society according to modern societal narratives. It was hard not to think I was just being lazy or giving up. But I’m finding ways to contribute that matter to me.
Now I have more time to grow my own food, so I’m not contributing to unsustainable agriculture practices. I’m saving money on fuel and emissions by not driving to a grocery store to buy these products. Not only am I doing something more ethically and sustainably productive by growing my own food, but I’m also feeding my soul and contributing to my well-being. The healthiest food you’ll ever eat comes straight out of your garden, and the satisfaction of having produced something tangible with my time brings a kind of soul-deep sense of fulfillment I would never experience no matter how many hours I spent working a “regular” job.
There’s no guide or road-map for what I’m doing, and everyone’s personal situation is different. I know it’s not easy for most people to say “I’m just not going to work like that any longer” and to be clear, I am still making money from my writing (I have to pay my bills somehow). But I think this is why we’re beginning to see things like quiet-quitting becoming so popular. In China, they have the lying-flat movement. People are choosing the van life or to go off-grid/homesteading instead of having a house in the suburbs with a mortgage. I also think it’s why so many people wanted to keep flexible working from home arrangements after the lock downs of the pandemic. I think people started seeing that the idea of a “work-life balance” was yet another gimmick sold to them by capitalism. For too many people, work has become their life. And not by choice. They literally can’t afford to live if they don’t work because we’ve managed to put a price on everything, including our basic human needs of food, clean water, shelter, clothing and safety.
We’re trapped in chains born of both modern societal narratives, and confusingly, of our own making in trying to follow the “rules” and reach a metric of success deemed by someone else — possibly someone who is holding onto obscenely excessive amounts of wealth, someone who is by definition the source of monetary inequality.
The things that I always told myself I’d do at some undefined later date, I’m doing them now. Because now is what’s real. Now is what I can touch. I can hug my kids and interact with my pets and tend to the plants in my garden right this very minute. Now is what matters.
Now I’m not wasting my time any longer.
