Breathe
There are the good years, the bad years, the years of change, there are the hinge years, the forgettable years and there is 2021.
I have been trying to define this year for weeks and I could not find a way to make the classic balance sheet.
And I realized that it was not a question of debits and credits, but it did have to do with administration.
There are many ways to earn money: sweat it, find it or steal it.
Or, also putting a price on the only thing we can neither recover, nor recycle, nor sustain and show: time.
Twelve years ago a person, supposedly Japanese and supposedly named Satoshi Nakamoto, published a few thousand lines of code and with a click on his computer created a new currency, bitcoin.
A hundred years earlier, Henry Ford proposed turning energy into a currency: abandoning the 'gold standard' that governed world finance until 1973 (when it was replaced by US dollars) for one that used energy as a backing.
That's why I discovered that my 'gold standard', my 'personal bitcoin' is time.
Time is ours only in the future, where we can plan how to use it.
But once we are using it, it slips out of our hands and we turn it into a souvenir.
That is why one has to be careful with that reduced portion of value of our idea of time.
For example, my time includes 48 years of life behind me, but I cannot use it or sell it. It is not stored, it is not aging adding future value. It simply does not exist anymore.
So I understood that I had to be very selfish and jealous of who or what I was going to allow to share my time, because once it was used I could never get it back.
No one gives us back a minute, an hour or a day 'spent' in the wrong way.
Bitcoin is a currency 'that is not there': it is an idea of an asset that today has value only because there are other people willing to assign value to it.
In the case of time too: it only has value as long as it is not there. Once it reaches the transience of the present it disappears without a trace.
We are co-opted by this idea of capitalism that has tattooed on us that only productive time is qualitative and we have to sacrifice and torture ourselves to earn the right to sleep or rest.
If I didn't 'do' something productive with my time, I was accustomed (by culture?) to say that I 'wasted my time'.
Only time spent doing something useful seems to have intrinsic value.
The other time, the one that did not result in anything 'monetizable' was as wallpaper.
Companies, employers and partners often act as if they are the absolute owners of our time.
The economic relationship we have with time is undermined by scales of values: what is more important, what is more urgent, what is more socially acceptable (because there is that Calvinist conception of working as much as possible because work is health and dignity).
Who hasn't ever heard in their office (when you leave at the time your contract says you have to leave) someone whispering "one of those scholarships!
And this year the price of MY cryptocurrency changed: from the moment someone wanted my job to be 12 hours from Monday to Monday, I decided to quit (even knowing that my Judeo-Christian sense of guilt would be waiting to bite my jugular).
How much is the time you put into studying something new worth? Much more than I had calculated before signing up for an online Branded Content Master's degree that left me with much more hours. There I increased the price of my cryptocurrency three to four times a week at lunchtime. It brought a bandwagon of contacts, of friends, of colleagues that it is not possible to 'buy' with a few 'hours' of classes.
Quality time is important even in my family: if my son Lucca was not progressing in a method of teaching and physical rehabilitation, it was not just a matter of accumulating hours but of selecting what the content of those hours was going to look like. And I am so glad I spent some of my cryptocurrencies of time to evaluate, encourage me to assess, and even change my work model for the greater independence he could achieve with his cerebral palsy.
This year I learned to be very stingy with my time, with my personal currency: I have said NO many more times than before to projects, job proposals and activities that in another moment I would have said yes just because "they thought of me. Thank you.
I decided that I don't want to spend my cryptocurrencies with people who don't think like me (or rather, who don't share my values), with people who are only looking for me to solve something or give my creativity + my time + my attention in exchange for a very unequal retribution.
Being busy is not important. Not anymore.
This year I tried (even fighting against myself) not to spend time in activities or meetings, or groups that do not complete me, that are not part of my dreams or my life plans.
Doing something 'in the meantime' is expensive. It's going to the casino knowing that you're going to lose everything you had with you the moment you cross that threshold.
When you look ahead and see that most likely the time you have left is less than the time you have already 'spent', it is time to start putting more zeros on that remaining life space (which is impossible to calculate its extension).
It has not been easy, it requires a different management of our values, of what we care or do not care about than what others believe or consider we should be or do.
My time is not tradable. My time is not a devalued bargaining chip.
My time is unique and whoever wants a handful of it must be in sync with the one who has the power over those coffers, that is, with me.
I learned to say NO many more times.
I learned to say YES only to what is in line with who I feel I am today (which is not the same person I was three months ago, let alone the same person I was a year ago).
Time is finite, brief, non-renewable, non-refundable, non-replicable.
It is very expensive.
And its price, like that of bitcoin, is rising as there are fewer coins left in my Personal Treasury.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
😍 A subscription is the perfect gift for these dates; moreover, it lasts for a year. Today is the last day.
Comments ()