The Wealth of Time
Money buys time.
If you have a grand excess of money, you are free from the confines of the necessity of working a 9-5 job. If you have an excess of money, it allows you eat at restaurants rather than shopping & preparing the meal yourself which “eats up” time. Money allows you to go on exotic vacations in which you are able to utilize the time in any manner you might see fit.
An abundance of money is essentially the “middleman” between a person and their “free time”.
Ultimately the dream of the majority of the hard-working masses is to win an exorbitant amount of money via the Lottery or a variation of get rich quick ideas. The end goal is basically for the purpose of buying your “free” time. The majority of people I’ve interacted with regarding what they would do if they came across a large financial windfall is to start by traveling the world in conjunction with quitting their current occupations. It comes down to utilizing the benefits of money to create an abundance of time for themselves to do as they please.
The question then comes down to analyzing the everyday life of the majority of people today and how much “free time” they actually have.
If you live for 75 years on this planet, 25 of those years will have been spent sleeping. This is an aspect that stays rather constant for humans although there have been anomalies in which some people need much less sleep while maintaining their health. Generally speaking, this would leave someone with a waking conscious life of 50 years.
The combination of “formal education” aka “school” and “formal employment” aka “a job” equates to roughly 17 years of your life assuming you start a variation of school at the age of 5 and quit working at the retirement age of 65. That means that during your waking state of 50 years (75 total years minus 25 years total sleeping time), you spend about 1/3 of your waking life “working”. This leaves us with about 33 years of a conscious life to actually have “free time”.
Wait… you mean that the 75 years of total life was just an illusion?
You mean to tell me that between sleep and work alone, literally more than half of my life is gone? The bad news is that it’s actually more than half that’s gone if you’re a workaholic putting in more than 40 hours per week at the “J-O-B”.
Unfortunately for some people, they have been put in a situation either intentionally or inadvertently in which they must commute to their job. For some poor souls, they must travel 1 hour one-way to reach their occupation destination. The total amount of time would equate to about 3 years or almost 10 percent of their conscious, non-work time dedicated to commuting. This leaves us with 30 years of a conscious life for “free time”.
The next detail of life to decipher the true amount of “free time” would be the dedication to our cleanliness and bodily functions (urine & bowels). 1 hour a day of your waking life can be dedicated to taking a shower, brushing your teeth, peeing, and shitting throughout the day. This would equate to an additional 3 years of your life. This leaves us with 27 years of conscious life for “free time”.
If you’re a lucky person in 2015, you can dedicate one hour of your time to actually savoring each meal you consume. For many people that encompasses eating 3 meals a day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). This would equate to roughly 9 years of your conscious life dedicated to the consumption of food out of the remaining 27 years. This would leave us with 18 years of conscious life for “free time”.
Once you factor in necessary maintenance of life via grocery shopping, toiletries, etc. you are looking at an additional year “lost” which equates to 17 years of conscious life out of 75 for “free time”. This is roughly 22% of your entire life that you will literally have the time to do absolutely anything that your heart desires. The biggest catch in all of this has to do with the majority of these 17 years of “free time” will begin to take place once you have retired at the age of 65 and die at 75. If you are one of the unlucky ones to die prior to 65, you’re looking at a dramatic compression of “free time” closer to 12% or about 8 years.
If you decide to have children, that 12% can literally shrink to something akin to less than 1%. However, that doesn’t factor in the joy brought forth by child in which any and all free time will want to be spent with the child.
When you analyze the percentages it’s no wonder that many of the working class feel a vicious time constraint on a consistent basis. It’s also no wonder that the prognosis of “chronic fatigue syndrome” is on a dramatic rise throughout the population.
It’s rather interesting that the lifestyle that most of the modern world has adopted gravitates towards becoming extremely “time poor” for the eventual hopes of someday becoming “time rich”. We value high paying jobs in order to pay for houses that have become increasingly expensive and subsequently requiring unnecessarily long commutes. We are a society based on many assumptions in terms of the medical system and how they can help us once we have developed habits that affect us detrimentally. It’s easy to tell us about the health benefits of exercise but when someone has worked a 10 hour shift coupled with a 2 hour commute, it is not surprising that exercise simply isn’t a priority.
Resting and trying to relax becomes the priority. This usually encompasses some form of drug related activity such as “happy hour”. It helps us unwind and decompress from the prolonged state of “high beta brain waves” necessary at work and puts us in an artificially induced “alpha brain wave” state. Unfortunately the drug of choice, “alcohol” continuously wears the liver down which subsequently wears the body AND brain down. Once the liver is damaged, there is no pill or basket of pills provided by “modern medicine” that can reverse the situation. You will simply be on the path to taking more pills to plug “health holes”.
Sometimes it is necessary to take a step back and analyze how we as a culture are living and whether our choices have led us to become “time poor” or “time rich”. Ultimately the reason for wealth accumulation is to become “time rich” and eventually allow our successive offspring of inheriting a “time rich” environment. However, that doesn’t equate to wealth being the ONLY method of becoming “time rich”. If you understand math, learning to preserve one’s time is rather straight forward.
- Beware of long work hours
- Beware of long commutes
- Beware of mindless overeating
- Beware of your vanity
- Beware of the unnecessary fixed monthly expenses
- Beware of your ego and the need to “keep up” with your “friends”
- Beware of being mindless
- Beware of the incessantly ingrained “need” to “own” a house
Nobody wants to live in a dangerous, crime ridden slum but I don’t believe that it is necessary to put yourself in a living situation that will require you to become “time poor” in the process. Remember that 1/3 of your life is spent sleeping so unless you are one of the rare connoisseur sleep walkers that needs more space to prance around during your sleep time, a bed in a studio apartment or a bed in a 20 bedroom mansion generally provide extremely similar sleep environments.
The credit card debt, the school loans, the house mortgage, the car payments, the insurance payments, & all the extra fixed monthly expenses we acquire become the adversary to becoming “time rich”. At some point in modern history, this list of time killers became simply known as “the way of life”. Unfortunately when coupling this way of life with the increased exposure to blue light and EMF (electromagnetic fields) in this era of technological integration, the long-term prognosis for health is not very good. It’s one thing to be relatively healthy and tackling all of the issues related to having a heavy debt burden. It’s another thing entirely to be dealing with underlying chronic health issues in conjunction with a hazardous lifestyle.
High stress levels induce your blood Cortisol levels to remain elevated unnecessarily for an unrealistic amount of time. Prolonged blue light exposure (cell phone, computer, television screens) severely decreases the amount of Melatonin your body produces which ultimately regulates a multitude of extremely important cellular functions. If you truly believe that because your grandparents made it to the ripe old age of 100, that somehow you will do the same because of your genetic heritage, you are making assumptions based on out-dated scientific dogma and simply aren’t aware of the emerging field of science known as Epigenetics.
Epigenetics has proven that our genes/genetics do not control our health nor our fate. This field outlines the mechanics behind external and internal body environments that dictate gene expression and replication. You might have inherited a healthier internal environment from your parents and therefore have the genes to “live longer” but unfortunately genes mutate according to their environment. Excessive blue light exposure, consistent liver damage, and excessive EMF create gene mutations and your once “healthy genes” are no longer replicating.
This is the foundation of the cause of cancer and if you look even further, potentially the majority of many life threatening diseases… gene mutations.
This is why I believe it’s very important to be cognizant of all these factors, not in a worrisome manner but rather in terms of perspective. With the proper perspective and knowledge your priorities will eventually adjust. You might begin to assume less as a member of society and actually think more as an individual contributor to society.
Being a parent today requires you to educate yourself as to the life you suggest for your child. Ultimately we want to see the next generation of children grow up healthy and happy. To push them to adopt a lifestyle that is increasingly leaving them “time poorer” and less healthy than the prior generation is an absurdity. I’m not saying that we should teach our children to strive for nothing… I am merely making the important point of giving our children some proper perspective for their future.
We can constantly push them to go to college with the hopes of someday being able to land a well paying job and ultimately a house where they can raise a family. The question is why? What is the ultimate purpose behind it all? There must be an extremely important underlying reason for bringing in a new human to this world other than “just to make the grandparents happy”. There must be some extremely important message or wisdom that must be preserved for humanity as a whole by teaching them to our emerging offspring. To amass such large financial constraints which will ultimately lead to an extremely “time poor” lifestyle, there MUST be something of extreme purpose and importance to carry on.
If there is no good reason given for doing so, there is no reason to put one’s offspring in such an unmanageable situation. It’s unmanageable because the assumptions that “going to the doctor” will offset the premature health issues that will inevitably arise from such a hazardous lifestyle is not sufficient advice. As a parent or potential parent, it would behoove you to utilize the age of information in 2015 to learn about the foundation and building blocks of health. Without doing so, it should be considered “cruel and unusual punishment” to bring a new life into this world only to be ill-equipped to deal with the real reality of it all.
Doctors, tech gurus, lawyers, politicians, garbage men, electricians, and teachers all die the same. The question is how much time did they spend “living” and how much time did they spend “dying”? There is a clear and profound difference between the two and much of it is predicated on the amount of free time available for the individual.
There is a fine balance between finding ways to remain “time rich” throughout your life so that the “golden years of retirement” isn’t the finish line you’re racing towards. In fact, life shouldn’t even be looked at as a race because that would imply that life is a competition to blaze through. Life is not a competition but rather a game to be played and it’s our job to not fall into the traps inside this maze.
Remember that a meal at the “French Laundry” wouldn’t be the same if you were forced to consume all the courses in under 5 minutes rather than 4 hours. Owning a luxury yacht loses it’s luster without the extended time to actually enjoy it. Downing shots of Louis XIII isn’t the same as savoring the sips in a snifter. There is a definitive difference between a 2 minute massage and a 2 hour massage. All the material luxuries in the world change shape when the time factor is included.
The same goes inversely for the “simple” things in life. Being able to savor every bite of a freshly picked apple… taking a leisurely stroll across the beach… taking in the sunset in it’s entirety without distraction, urgency, or interruption. Sometimes it seems as though it is the time allowance to savor something that weighs quite heavily out of all the factors in the equation.
The real question then becomes… what is inherently more valuable in the “formula for happiness”? Time or money? Time or materials?
The biggest challenge of the journey is finding a way to stay “time rich” throughout as much of your life as possible. One of the greatest revelations in the modern era is that there just might not be the inherent need for the middleman of incessant wealth accumulation to acquire time…
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PS. If you have an excess of financial wealth, I would strongly suggest to invest in what you cannot deny. Being that 1/3 of your life is spent sleeping which is when most of your cell/body regeneration takes place, I would suggest investing in an organic, non metal, coil-free sleeping mattress. Yes, it’s not cheap and it’s not exactly a flashy purchase you can brag to your friends about but it is without a doubt one of the best investments you can make for your well being. It’s relatively simple math… $40,000 for a car you will spend 600 hours driving each year or $4,000 for a mattress you will spend 3,000 hours sleeping on each year. Try to ensure your sleeping quarters provide the adequate environment free from Wifi, television, and any other avoidable electrical fields that can cause a sleep disturbance. Another important investment for yourself if you have an excess of wealth would be your water system. Ensuring that you are showering in and drinking the cleanest possible water would be an absolute must if you have the extra money. Once again… not something to brag about to your friends but extremely important to your health. Last but not least I would suggest to invest in a Naturopathic dentist that specializes in amalgam filling removals. It will be increasingly difficult to remain in an optimal state if your teeth are leaking Mercury into your nervous system and brain. Most doctors and dentist will assure you that all amalgam fillings are “safe” but unless they do the DMSO test to really look at your internal Mercury levels, no one will know the truth. All the medicine in the world won’t do a damn thing if the culprit of your sub optimal health is firmly rooted in your mouth…
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(This is a real image of heavy metals after DMSO administration in a friend diagnosed with “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”.)
