Time: It’s all you have. How are you using yours?

“I’m not going to kill you.  Your job will be to tell the rest of them that death is coming for them, tonight.  Tell them Eric Draven sends his regards.” – The Crow

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You would have thought that Doc Brown would have warned Marty about the Parkinson’s.

I was at my job in Alaska, talking with a co-worker, Jim.  We were talking about finances – Pugsley had just been born, so I was probably whining about how babies are expensive and that The Mrs. and I were running out of corners filled with oily rags for children to sleep in.  I suppose I was thinking about selling Pugsley to the Iranians for some of their spare enriched uranium, and Jim said, “Well, that’s just money.  You can always make more money.”

For whatever reason, that phrase struck me.  It took the way that people normally think and feel about money and inverted it.  Money was available, and there was no shortage of ways to get it.  Most people feel the opposite – that money is as scarce as evidence in a House impeachment inquiry.

After thinking about it, I decided Jim was right.  There are dozens of ways to make money, and some of them are even legal according to my lawyer.  Does this philosophy apply to more things than just money?

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I was going to tell another time travelling joke, but you guys complained about it in the comments.  Also, Einstein didn’t kill himself.

Yes.  In my experience, almost anything you need, including money, you can get more of.  This is especially true if you have a lawyer in a wheelchair with rabies – they play well to juries.  I’m not saying that it’s always easy to get money, and I’m not saying that money isn’t important.  But you can get more of it.  But not everything is like that.  But the one thing you can’t get more of is time.  The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote about just that nearly 2,000 years ago:

“You are living as if destined to live forever.  Your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply, though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last.  You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.”

So, of all the things that you can have, the only one you can’t get more of is time.

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Bill and Ted is an underrated time travel movie.

Why is that important?  Well, to toss out another quote, Benjamin Franklin said: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”  It’s important because time is all you have – it is the single most precious commodity, after PEZ®.

So, what to do?

Stop wasting time.  Every minute you waste is a minute you’ve lost.  Most people have a life that’s long enough to accomplish what they want, as long as they don’t waste it.  How many lives are lost, a minute at a time, staring at a clock, waiting for it to show 5:00?  How many lives are lost a mile at a time on long commutes?

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I used to be addicted to time travel, but that’s all in the past now.

When I was younger and didn’t have much money, whenever there was a chance to trade my time for money, I did.  I put on my own roof after a hailstorm.  I built my own deck.  I fixed my car myself, changed my own oil.  This was a good trade at the time.  I was longer on time and shorter on money, and I learned skills that helped me understand the world just a little bit better.

Now time is shorter, and I don’t have an infinite supply of full Moons ahead of me.   Here’s a pretty powerful quote from Paul Bowles’ book, Sheltering Sky:

Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.  And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.  How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it?  Perhaps four, or five times more?  Perhaps not even that.  How many more times will you watch the full Moon rise?  Perhaps twenty.  And yet it all seems limitless . . . .

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I wonder if there’s any future in time travel?

Don’t waste your time – don’t waste your life.  Make yourself better every day – you can always make more money.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

21 thoughts on “Time: It’s all you have. How are you using yours?”

  1. For me, a focal point is putting up Christmas tree ornaments with my wife. A lot of them have etched dates, stretching back over 25 years all the way back to our first Christmas together. I don’t expect to be hanging one up etched with 2045.

    Every year now I wonder just how many more times I get to hang ornaments up at all.

    That thought always makes me enjoy the fruitcake even more.

    1. Nicely said. This will be our first year without a full-sized tree. Just a small one. Never know when a tradition will end.

  2. A corollary to your reflection on limitless sources of money is that there is ALWAYS money for what you really, really want. Poor, starving secretaries behind on their rent but with expensive nail jobs leap irresistibly to mind. So does every broke Tom, Jorge and Trayvon with a smartphone but no job to go to.

    And on the subject of time wasted, something that grinds my gears more than anything else, short of running low on Pez, is young, smug punks sneering at us ‘mature’ types for having grown old, or at least older. Why? Because your youth is the one and only thing you are GUARANTEED to lose in this life, as you go about frittering your days away. Just as I rue the time I wasted drinking at bars and watching mindless TV years ago, today’s clueless millennials will eventually look back on the countless hours spent obsessing over their electronic devices and wish they had been spent on something less frivolous.

    Seneca may well have been speaking of our collective 5 hour daily television habit in his lament about time squandered, but cable TV only had, like, ONE channel back in his day. At least all the reruns were new.

  3. NOW-?

    I am drinking a well-earned bourbon and icing my knee.

    I’m actually immortal (just like all of you) and the knife’s edge of *now* that allows me to shape time and space in this entirely mortal universe means that in about 10 minutes when the Daughter Product finishes her math, I’m going to get up, do laundry, make dinner, and work on the old comic.

    Because I want to be more of the kind of person I am going to be stuck with *forever* when this tiny space of *now* ends.

  4. Enjoyed this article, went thru a whirlwind of memories. In my mid fifties and I can relate with many of you. Hope I don’t waste the rest of my waking hours. Merry Christmas and god bless you all.

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