The other day we watched a movie called ‘In Time’ which is based around the concept of that you pay and receive payment not in money but in chunks of time, be that seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years.
The plot of the movie
The movie takes place in a future where we only age up until the age of 25. When we reach 25, a time clock, embedded on the left arm, starts counting down the weeks, days, hours and seconds you have left to live. Unless you gain or loose time you’ll die after exactly one year.
In this world the rich are the ones with an abundance of time and the poor are the people who live day by day fighting for survival by lending, stealing or working to earn more time. The rich they don’t have to work. Time is theirs in abundance. They are the ones who can slow down, stop running, properly sit down and enjoy a meal. The poor on the other hand, they can’t stop. They constantly need to run and find a bit more time to keep them going for another few hours, a day or perhaps a week if they’re lucky. Though the movie has its flaws, it’s got me thinking.
Time in our society
In the movie time is the ultimate currency. That’s what you strive for. That’s where the value lies. It’s what you exchange in order to get something else and it feels very familiar. The more I get into this year and try to find the balance between work, byFlock and life outside of both, the more value I put on my time. I need and enjoy my spare time even more now than what I did before, but I’ve also found a shift in perception of how I view time in general. Everything comes at a price of something else and that something else is always time.
Instead of stealing, buying or working to earn more time, I’m involved in constant time negotiation made up of shifting time from one bucket to another to keep a certain balance. Every day has a certain amount of time allocated to the different buckets and by using my time wisely in one bucket I can increase the time to my disposal in another bucket. When I reach the end of my time allocation in one bucket, rather than die it automatically starts taking time from one or many of my other time buckets. When that happens I need to run faster to use the time I have left at my disposal as effectively as possible to make sure the other bucket doesn’t run out completely. If I run fast enough I can re-gain some time and distribute it back to the other buckets as I wish.
Conclusions
Comparing it to the movie, working on a startup and the way we live life in general is down in the time poor end where we run around to make means come to an end. Contrary to the movie, in our time poor society working doesn’t necessarily buy us more time. Rather, for most of us the more we work the more time poor we get. When time in one bucket runs out the allocation left in the others is automatically re-distributed, often starting with the buckets we care about the most. Our spare time. Or sleep.
It’s a game that all of us play, but it’s a game we can learn to master in order to make sure that the time allocation and balance between our different buckets is one we’re happy with. It’s “just” a matter of daring to slow down despite not knowing where the time will come from and staying on top of our buckets, prioritising and ensuring that the buckets we really care about don’t run out before we want them to.
Tomorrow – Day 089 | Work taking over
Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/tonivc/2283676770
