Your Time is Your Life

We should treat the idea of wasting or killing time as a reprehensible waste of life. Every minute of your life is a chance to thrive and flourish.

If you live for eighty years, you’ll have a little more than 700,000 hours in your life, a third of which you’ll spend asleep. Of the fewer than 500,000 hours you’ll spend awake, a typical education and full-time job will swallow more than 100,000. Accounting for early childhood, domestic chores, and illness, a person who lives for eighty years has less than 300,000 hours of free time as an adult. Yet many of us squander those hours like we have a limitless supply.

Every hour of your life is a portion of your lifespan—a larger portion than many people realize. Moreover, every hour of your life is a resource that can be spent sustaining and improving your life. The only alternative is to lose that piece of life, and all of its potential for growth, forever. Your time is your life, in more ways than one.

Here are three important applications of this principle to help you guard your time and put it to best use in support of your wellbeing.

Your Time is Your Own 

We often feel obliged to give up our time for those around us. Whether it’s a family party we’d rather not attend, a conversation we’d rather not have with a needy friend, or a piece of work we don’t want to do that might help someone, we often feel socially bound to sacrifice our time for others. The culture around us tells us that denying others access to our time is cruel and uncaring.

In reality, it’s cruel and uncaring to demand a portion of someone else’s life that they’d rather spend another way. Of course, we all have people we care about in our lives, and giving up some time for those people is proper, if we value them more than the other things we might do with that time. Ultimately, relationships are a trade, and our time is one of the things we trade in return for such benefits as companionship, emotional support, entertainment, and intellectual stimulation. But for someone to demand your time without offering those benefits in return—without letting you decide for yourself whether the trade is a good one—is deeply immoral.

Equally, just as no one has a claim on your time, so you don’t have a claim on anyone else’s. When another person demands access to your time, the moral thing to do is refuse. Likewise, when you want someone else’s time, the moral thing to do is offer that person value in return and not pressure others into doing anything they don’t want to do. If you pressure people to give up their time against their wishes, then no good can come of an interaction between you. You will only create discomfort and resentment in the other person and a sense of guilt and injustice in yourself.

To take a person's time is to take a portion of that person's life. Guard your time as you would guard your life, and afford others’ time the same respect.

Your Money is Your Life

Money is your reward for work, and work takes time and effort. Your time is your life, and your effort is the application of your mind and body’s energy over time. Money is the product of you spending your life—it contains the value you invested in order to obtain it. When you spend money, give money, or have money taken from you, it is a portion of your life that is being transacted—both the past life that went into obtaining it and the future life it will empower you to live.

Just as no person has a claim on your time, likewise, no person has a moral claim on money that you have earned (or that someone who earned it has given you). A person can only owe another money through voluntary agreement—for instance, a debt or a promissory note. But there are no unchosen moral obligations. A person is not entitled to your money because he is in need, nor because he is your relative, nor because he offers as his evidence the “will of the people” or a piece of government legislation. That is not to say you should withhold your money when the government tries to take it—doing so may put more of your life at risk—but the fact remains that you are still entitled to all the money that has ever been taken from you by force or deception. That money is a portion of your life.

As with time, money can be part of all kinds of trades. Not only do we give money in exchange for goods, but we give it to friends and loved ones in exchange for the other values they offer us. Supporting a friend in need is a good and selfish act—we are supporting that which we value. The same goes for supporting a charity or cause that matters to you. These are proper times to give money away, in accordance with your values and your rational judgment. But never accept the idea that anybody has a legitimate moral claim on your money unless you voluntarily put yourself in the position of owing it.

Time Can Only Be Spent Once

It is appropriate that we speak of “spending time,” because time, like money, once spent is gone forever. But unlike money, there is not a potentially unlimited amount of time we can earn back. We can take steps to extend our potential lifespans in small ways, but ultimately, we are inevitably going to run out of time one day. Once it’s used, it’s gone.

Many people have written on the tendency of young people to think and act like their life is unlimited, but one of my favorite encapsulations of this point is in the chorus of the Rush song “Dreamline”:

We are young
Wandering the face of the Earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Learning that we're only immortal . . .
for a limited time.

Even though, when we’re young, we empirically know that we’re not immortal, old age is so far away that it feels like we have virtually unlimited time in which to build and live our lives. But we don’t—we get old much faster than we expect to. When this pseudo-immortality of youth runs out and we start to notice our mortality, it’s already too late. A healthy person can still enjoy many of the joys of youth—athletic activities, adventuring, and a fast-paced lifestyle—into his or her thirties, forties, and fifties, and a person with a strong, positive sense of life and good lifestyle practices can remain active and vibrant well into his seventies and eighties (sometimes even beyond). But with each passing year, we have a little less youth and vibrancy than we had before. 

If you have goals, dreams, or plans, there is no time like the present to put them into action. Whether you’re twenty or eighty, there are things you can do now that you won’t be able to do in a decade or two—whether that’s enjoying the thrills of young love and college life or the experience of climbing a mountain or traveling the world. Use the time you have today. Squeeze every bit of potential value out of it before it slips through your fingers.

The opposite of this idea is contained in the expression “killing time.” There is never a good reason to “kill time.” You are killing a portion of your life when you do. If you are bored, take the opportunity to do something productive and meaningful. Even if all you can do is think, do some productive thinking. Of course, we need rest—that is a crucial part of living a full life too. But our lives are full of challenges, mysteries, questions, and opportunities. Tackle one of them in the moments when you feel like you have nothing to do. Plan a project, ponder an interesting question, or decide on a lifestyle change to improve your future chances of success. 

Time is a resource—the only resource that vanishes forever whether you use it or not. But more than that, your time is your life. Venerate it accordingly. Treat the idea of wasting or killing time as a reprehensible waste of life. Treat every minute of your life as a chance to thrive and flourish.