The Currency of Time
How what we exchange dictates the life we live
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.
Book Club
For anyone interested, we’re going to try reading a philosophical text and discuss it via Substack chat this month.
To pair with the monthly theme as well as the time commitment to a work, we’ll try Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life for February due to its brevity.
I will be reading this translation. You can also find the essay for free here.
I’ll kick off our first discussion this Friday in our chat, no need to have read the full thing by then, we will take it so we cover the entire work by the end of the month.
Introduction to Monthly Theme
“The time allotted to our lives may be short, but it is long enough to live honestly and decently.”
How much time do we have?
It’s an impossible question to answer yet one that needs to be thought about.
Time is relative. To a ten year old, it’s as though 1,000 years sits before them, unable to grasp the concept of time or the length of a life. To a 70 year old, time, and its limits, is a much more familiar foe.
When we’re young, time is irrelevant. As children, we don’t count the minutes or hours. We don’t know we need to be somewhere by a certain time.
Time itself is not a thing, it is a concept, one we can’t really grasp.
Yet as we get older, time finds a way to become a major factor in our lives. When we go to school, when a class will end, when we’ll get picked up. And this carries us into adulthood. What time we have to be at work, when our meeting will end, when we can go back home.
Time is one of those tricky things where if you’re not careful with it, it will slip through your fingers like sand. But at the same time, if we burden ourselves with the stress of it, constantly thinking about the numbers ticking down, then we miss out on actually living our lives.
For the month of February, we’re exploring time, what it gives us, and how we can live a good life through it.
Time is an asset.
It is the only currency that cannot be replenished. In many ways, it is the only currency that matters.
Unlike other assets which have the possibility of being possessed, time cannot. We do not know how much of it each of us has, nor do we know how to control it.
Time is elusive in this regard. We work around time’s schedule, not the other way around. We play to the clock looking for how to find more of it by adjusting our lives, but we cannot in any other way possess more of it the way we can possess more gold, more cars, or more material items.
Early in book two of the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that “there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”
But what are we chained by?
A Stoic would say anything we give power to outside of, and including, ourselves. We’re chained, for example, by our emotions and allowing them to run our lives. How many of us have been upset and allowed that to ruin our entire day? How many hours were depleted from our reserve, never to be returned? In this regard, we’ve chained ourselves.
But how does time free us from this? It seems like we’re just losing time.
And that’s because we are. Time is always slipping from us but it is also the force that grounds us.
When we take our problems and review them from the perspective of how much time we’re exchanging to do something, the world—and what’s important to us—becomes much clearer and centered in our vision.
We think of time in terms of exchange but we don’t apply that idea to the whole of our existence, rather, we limit it usually to business meetings and favors for others. Do we have time to jump on a quick business call? Do we have time to help a friend move?
But when we expand this view to the whole of our life we begin to see that the power of time is in helping us decide what we will put our attention to, because outside of time, attention is our most valuable asset.
Shortly later in the Meditations, Marcus again writes to himself:
“Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthhwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions.”
In other words, if you’re going to allow yourself to be pulled in other directions outside of what you need to focus on, you better make sure it is something that will be worth the exchange in time. In Marcus’s case, he would likely be referencing improving oneself and their character which was innate to being a Stoic.
We think devoting a few minutes here or a few hours there is not much, but over time, these little moments add up and compound. Stopping for coffee is only 10 minutes out of the day. But by doing that every day of the week, we’ve now devoted over an hour of our weekly life to grabbing coffee.
And we’ve only got 168 hours in the week.
This does not mean we need to be militant about our time, making sure every minute is properly accounted for. Rather, by bringing attention to the actions we take on a regular basis, we can quickly see where we’re devoting our time and attention, and see why we may not be as happy with our lives as we want.
We can bring attention to our endless doomscrolling, our swiping of TikTok videos, or our rabbit-hole of Reddit threads.
When we can teach ourselves to become present with where our time and attention are going, we give ourselves an opportunity to intervene and interject some reason to pull us out of the habit.
Maybe instead of the doomscrolling we pick up a history book. Instead of the incessant swiping of videos, we go for a walk and see life as it really is. Perhaps instead of the Reddit threads, we ask if a friend wants to get together.
We take back control of our time by becoming aware of where and how we’re exchanging it. Our lives are made up by where we place our attention, and our attention goes where we devote our time.
So if we’re going to let things distract us, we better make sure they’re worthwhile.
Before you go…
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Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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