What do we do with our time? Do we really use it intelligently? At what price are we willing to sell it? These are questions that we often answer with our behavior, but on which we rarely reflect.
Last update: June 17, 2019
In Marc Levy's novel, If Only It Were True, the writer proposes a curious situation that at first has nothing to do with time. “He asked him to imagine he had won a contest where every morning a bank would have credited his account with $ 86.400. But every game has its own rules, and that one had two: "The first is that everything you haven't spent during the day is taken off your account in the evening, you can't cheat, you can't transfer money to another account, all you have to do is spend it, but every morning when you wake up, the bank opens a new account, with another 86.400 dollars, for the day.
Second rule: the bank can stop the game without notice; at any time he can tell you that it is finished, that he closes the account and that there will not be another one. What would you do?".
And you? Would you spend that money every single day? For sure all of us would take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.
But the truth is that we all have this bank account, we are all customers of the same bank from the moment we are born. This bank is called life and the investment fund is called time. In the first instant of each day, 86.400 seconds are credited to our account, which we can spend in those 24 hours. Each evening, the surplus will be zeroed.
It is not allowed to accumulate this balance for the following day. Every morning the account will be recharged and every evening what has not been spent will disappear. There is no point of return. Everyone can invest this amount in what makes them happiest: family, success, friends, passions; but remember: we only have one life (there is no news to the contrary, except if we believe it). The important thing is not how much time we have, but what we do with it.
Who is happier? Who has the most time or who has the most money?
What would you prefer: having a less busy working day, which allows you to devote more time to your family, your personal activities, your partner, etc. or would you prefer to earn more money every day, even if this prevented you from dedicating time to everything just said?
This dilemma was investigated and the results were published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, where nearly 4500 Americans were asked whether they cared more about money or time to achieve happiness.
64% of the survey participants said they preferred to earn more money; however, research also highlighted that those who gave more importance to free time were more satisfied with the life they led, which resulted in higher levels of happiness.
How to be happier
Spending our free time enjoying what we like brings, in the long run, a greater degree of satisfaction. Some data show that investing in experiences leads us to be happier compared to when we invest in material things.
We are social beings who live and feed on relationships, social life, the laughter of friends, time with our partner, with our family and doing what we like best.
We forget that this time is limited, that there comes a day when it vanishes and unfortunately we do not know when this will happen. We continue to convince ourselves that we are eternal and we miss the opportunity to invest every second. Time passes, life passes: let's live it.
We are the time we have left.
– José Manuel Caballero Bonald
As we age, we value time more
Research conducted by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada) has shown that valuing time on the basis of money is associated with higher levels of happiness, especially when long working days are required to obtain this money. As you age, time begins to take a higher position on the priority scale.
With the passage of time we are more aware of its value and, proportionally, the value we give to money loses importance.
Time is something we cannot recover, it belongs to us and we are the masters of deciding how we want to invest it. Don't let others calculate your earnings in seconds, don't let time get out of hand. Do not allow a day to come when you will regret not having made the most of this time.
