Time – A Nonrenewable Resource
Is $700,000 enough to last you for an entire lifetime? Imagine you were given $700,000 and can spend it any way you like. The catch is you can’t invest or make any more money for the rest of your life. If you were forced into such a scenario would you spend your days differently?
Everyone already experiences this in the form of time. Most people are given about 700,000 hours in this world, plus or minus maybe 5% depending on gender, class, and geography. I’ve already used up about 250,000 hours of mine. That was valuable time I can never get back.
We are all humbled by time. Wealth is the ability to fully experience all that life has to offer. Money will only get us so far, but the rest is up to our internal discourse about how to spend our time. It doesn’t matter if we’re financially rich or poor. Everyone is ultimately limited by that 700,000 hours. Time is the ultimate equalizer.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Gandalf
The important thing is to enjoy the things you’re doing right now. Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. 🙂 Unless you enjoy attaching all your watches together to make a belt. Then that would be a wist of time. 😀
If you’re not making progress or fulfilling your potential then you should do something else with your time. If you can’t change your circumstances then you can change the way you think about them. The clock is ticking. Make the most of today. 🙂
————————————————————————-
Random Useless Fact
How to take a selfie on a stick, without buying a selfie stick.
Time will only tell 🙂 I can live on $700k for 35 years. If I live any longer, I’d be hooped.
I’m not sure how long $700k will last me but it’s a good thing federal pension benefits should kick in for most people at 65.
How very Buddhist of you, this post.
Thing is, we could all live on $700,000 for a life time, but we only think we need more and more and more and…well, you get the idea. As Capitalists, we allocate a lot of our time to all facets of money (as demonstrated by the mangnitute of the personal finance industry), now imagine the result if we all spent the same amount of time and effort on happiness instead.
Reminds me of the old joke about the rich guy walking along the beach who runs across a bum swaying in a hammock doing nothing…
I’ve read studies which claim most of us are unhappy and most of us are thinking half the time about something else rather than our very present and immediate situation. Be happy with what you have (for a lot of reasons).
A popular, but inaccurate, account is that it takes us roughly 10,000 hours to become an expert in any given pursuit. Chop off the first and last 10 years of your life, and you could master 60 different fields.
Time’s a-tickin’!
Yeah, it’s not monetary wealth which matters. It’s the combination of liberty, security and the freedom to choose how we spend our time. 🙂