A Debt of Time
How your lifestyle leaks years
You know with certainty you’re going to die, and you’ve got some amount of time left. Maybe it’s 50 years, maybe it’s a modest decade, maybe it’s a week. However much time is left, you know it’s only going down1. To some extent, you’re already cosmically retired: retirement begins when you shift your focus away from the accumulation of wealth toward using those resources in a way that will make the rest of your life enjoyable. You had already accumulated all the time you will ever have by the time you were born, but we tend not to think about time this way. How much time do you think you have left? I’ll give you a hint: it’s less than you think.
In (non-cosmic) retirement, there may still be past commitments that demand some of your wealth. These debts to be paid might be a car loan or mortgage or rent payments, maybe credit card debt. For some people it may be student loans. These are agreements you’ve made in the past to exchange your future resources for near-term gains.
In the same way, we make agreements, knowingly or unknowingly, to commit chunks of the time and attention we have left. Some amount of the time you have left is claimed simply by your agreement to keep living: in the same way you trade your future money so you can drive a car off the lot today, continuing to live in your body today is an agreement to dedicate a future amount of time to sleeping, eating, or working.
How much debt have you taken on for this trade? Let’s say you’re an average 30 year old with a good diet and workout routine. You might have 35 more years of working until retirement, and statistics say you might live to be around 80 years. Here’s what your bill from Father Time might look like.
A normal healthy person might already have half of their remaining years staked out. Said another way, if I’m 30, once I’ve accounted for sleeping, working and eating, I have less than the amount of years I’ve lived to squeeze in having a family, any hobbies, and whatever other ambitions I might hold.
This isn’t an argument against these debts. Obviously, choosing to die early to avoid sleeping or eating would be a little strange. Eating, sleeping, having a family, and a good career are hopefully (very) worthwhile propositions, and I don’t actually encourage such a bean counter’s perspective on life. What I do aim to highlight is that while your first impression of the numbers above might be to say, “Oh, cool, so I’ve got half of my remaining years to do what I want—not bad,” in reality, this number is much less than that.
Today’s culture lends itself to a lifestyle in which years of one’s life are unknowingly put toward time debts. The average American is spending around five hours a day on his or her phone. Five hours a day is 76 days a year, or about 10 years of 50. The average American is also spending just shy of three hours a day on TV. I’ll be more conservative and say it’s only two hours a day, or four years of 50. Of those originally unclaimed 22 years, we might be down to about 8 years to play with.
No one really spends both five hours a day on their phones and two hours a day watching TV. The bigger point here is how quickly those free 20-some years slip through the cracks. Annie Dillard’s adage that “how we spend our days is how we spend our years” highlights that the decisions you make every day are the debts you are unknowingly taking on against the time you have left. And many people are not thinking about where the hours in their days seem to go.
Consumer culture holds that more is better. More money, a bigger house, a nicer car. But what isn’t talked about is the duality these luxuries bring; a nicer car means more expensive maintenance and less reliability–more time in the shop. A bigger house means more time spent keeping things clean. More money invites you into the dull world of investing and wealth management. All of these things might look like wealth, but they can lead to poverty of time. The trope of the unhappy successful person feeling unfulfilled with their lives isn’t new. I think this is why there’s been a greater interest in minimalism in the last decade: there’s a certain intuitive sense that less can be more.
The exercise holds, however, even if you aren’t a millionaire. Every item you buy is taking on a debt of time on which you must make payments. Those extra 12 house plants that need watering. Those new tools you’re going to use once a year but now have to lug with you every time you move. Those Glade fresheners you thought might make your house smell like Hollister but will require a refill every so often. None of these things is remotely problematic on its own, but we must be vigilant of the accumulation of agreements we enter into. Otherwise, we risk seeing years of our time and attention nickel and dimed away by the trifles of abundance.
Again, the argument here is not that you should avoid taking on these debts of time–I’m in no position to judge how well another person’s time commitments match his or her values. This is just an admonition to consider whether the ways you commit your time, now and in the future, are really going to leave you satisfied in the final analysis. At any stage, a person may look ahead and wonder if things will get better in the years he or she has left. In my opinion, the answer to that question isn’t rocket science. We are how we spend our time.
The equation is maybe a bit more complicated than a negative correlation of age and time left. People can make decisions that would extend their lifespan, like quitting smoking. But there is a diminishing return to these efforts. “You’re worried about death? Don’t worry – you’ll die for sure.”