Time Poverty: Why You Might Be Poor Even if You Are Rich
(Read time ~14 minutes)
Summary: If time is our most valuable commodity, you need to ensure that you are investing your time for the greatest returns.
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There is an unseen and unspoken plague dominating a large segment of the developed world: “Time Poverty.” Let me define time poverty as this: the scarcity of available (uncommitted) time.
In order to define time poverty further, let me first introduce the fact that time and money are fungible: we trade our time for money – and we can trade our money for time. Time poverty, oddly, seems to follow a strangely shaped “N” curve when it comes to financial income with four major groups.
1) People in geographies with low financial income* (but where basic needs are met) often have ample amounts of uncommitted time and an associated degree of happiness. *Relative to US Standards: think of dive instructors in Belize, restaurant workers in Mexico, shop keepers in Costa Rica, Italian villagers…
2) In contrast are developing and developed regions where lower income inhabitants scratch and scrape by trying to make a little for themselves and their extended families with multiple jobs**. Time poverty becomes a necessity to make ends meet… or to keep up appearances…**Consider a single working mother in the US with two jobs, Moldovan farmers, construction workers living in Qatar, house keepers in Singapore
3) Next, we find the relatively time-rich middle class*** who trade their relatively limited time at work (~40 hours with a decent wage) for the time-based rewards of long weekends, fishing escapes and family vacations. ***These people, like my parents in their time, work to live, they do not live to work.
4) Finally, as we move to the right up the financial food-chain, we again enter escalating levels of time poverty with the wealthy or aspiring wealthy who, like group 2, trade nearly all their hours for dollars – even if they don’t need to. Statistics prove that above a certain income (~$75,000 - $95,000 USD), happiness does not increase and might even decrease with additional income. This group will be the focus of the rest of this article.
Group 4: The Financially Rich, Yet Time Poor
Despite their affluence, time-poor geographies, cultures, and individuals continue to trade nearly all their time for money and hence have an ongoing deficit of uncommitted time. Despite their financial success, affluent individuals with time poverty are always “chasing time,” are “crazy busy,” and find themselves constantly overscheduled. Oddly those in these upper ranges of financial income tend to wear the heavy weight of this chainmail of obligations with an odd mix of weary regret: “I am so sorry, I am tied up,” and feigned sheepish pride, “Somehow I have managed to be booked up pretty much solid for the next 3 months!” They tend to cast themselves as martyrs for filling all their waking hours with a full tile of work meetings, project team deadlines, home and maintenance projects, family obligations, and other committed but optional obligations like boards, PTA, HOA, and charity meetings. For the truly wealthy yet time-impoverished – say, a partner at Goldman Sachs - they wax nostalgic over the things they have vs. the time they don’t. That spacious flat on the upper west side of NYC? the estate in the Hamptons? The third home in Naples? and the little “get-away” in Telluride, Colorado? “I never see them – it’s a shame really…”
For the relatively affluent yet time impoverished, it becomes a mark of honor to sacrifice their days, weeks, months, and years in service to activities outside themselves. But it is all a lie – they are deceiving themselves, their families, and their friends, falling prey to the ethos of their culture, the programming of their upbringing, and the whispers from their egos where a successism work ethic usurps the fabric of relationships and the experiences that define life itself. They are not the best leader, follower, husband, wife, son, daughter, sister, brother, neighbor, and friend that they could be. How do I know and how can I say this with confidence? Because I was the poster child for the time impoverished for more than a decade. Maybe you are too.
When I entered the working world, I was a completely inexperienced, well-educated, retired elite athlete. The only recipe I knew for success from my time as an aspiring Olympian was to outwork my peers. Trading race courses for conference rooms I put my programming from athletic competition into the new arena of the office.
For the next decade and a half, I worked 70 – 80 hours a week nearly every week. At first, this may have been somewhat necessary – as a dumb-jock 30-year-old with almost no work experience I needed to catch up on lost time as compared to my peers who had already been in the workforce for nearly a decade. But it eventually became its own game, and I, a pawn.
My first full-time job was a year-long assignment at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street in New York City. Just days after my wedding and honeymoon, I began commuting to New York City from Phoenix on Sunday red-eye flights leaving at 11 pm and landing at 7 am. The project demands and deadlines required us to stay and work every other weekend. Home only 4 days a month and surrounded by a money-driven culture I quickly fell prey to the slave-to-the-grind mentality of management consulting at an investment bank. Our job was to help Goldman prepare for Y2K: a year-long grind of 80-hour weeks starting at 8 am daily and ending after 9 pm (sometimes midnight) nearly every single day. Upon completion of this first assignment, I received the reward of my first performance review: “PM - partially meets expectations.” I was livid that my sacrifice of nights and weekends for almost a year was met with such disdain, but this only furthered my fuel for working harder in the future on my next assignment.
The next few years I spent as the project lead designing trading systems for Enron Corporation, including gas, power, bandwidth, and freight trading – increasing trade velocity and decreasing trade time for the energy giant. It was an exciting time working in a high-profile position indirectly reporting to Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay in a company ranked the most innovative by Forbes for 7 years running. I continued to work 70 to 80 hour weeks, but for the first time, my time investments into work were rewarded with an “EE: exceeds expectations” and then an “FE: Far exceeds expectations” with the associated promotions and pay raises. In my third year there I was “force-ranked” number one out of all my peers in the company – just four years into my career. I thought I had figured it all out: just like sports, the key was to outwork all my peers. Meanwhile, 108 of the 168 hours of each week were spent on a plane or away from home.
A half a year later, Enron crumbled and after a couple of less-than-interesting new consulting engagements that again demanded my nights and weekends, I decided that I had had enough. Or, rather, someone else decided for me. A few months later I was getting ready for my early Monday morning commute to the airport for the week. Unexpectedly, my young daughter Katelina, just 1.5 years old, toddled out to the door, tears in her eyes, and asked, “Wait! papa, where are you going??” That was it for me and despite stock options and the promise of partnership and all the financial rewards that might entail, I quit just a few weeks later.
Unfortunately, the escape from the rat race of consulting only led to a new maze: title-chasing in a Fortune 500 telecom company. The long hours away from home in consulting actually took a turn for the worse with this new job in an organization where the company culture was essentially a religion. Everything was about and in-service-to the company. After joining the corporate cult, I inadvertently cut ties to most of my friends and family. Due to the incessant demands of the company, I had almost no social activity that was not work-related. I got raises. I was promoted. I led large teams. I received stock options and bonuses. I was a “success” on paper… and slowly became abjectly miserable. My entire life became one of “have to’s” – I have to travel to this weekend convention, I have to get to work early, I have to work late at the office (almost every night), I have to work at home past midnight (almost every night), I have to mow the lawn, I have to attend every game or concert, I have to attend my spouses’ family functions, I have to, I have to.
I was not living extravagantly – this was not the typical hedonic treadmill of trading up to ever bigger and better “things.” No this was something perhaps worse – a time trap of endless meetings and escalating commitments based on outdated programming: the chessboard of my Outlook calendar had me in full check. Before I finally swept the board clean by leaving, I attended - on average - 38 hours of meetings every week my last 3 years in corporate America. My real workday contributions didn’t even start until the traditional 9-5 workday was over.
Psychologically I was experiencing some sort of weird career vertigo. I had climbed Maslow’s pyramid, obtaining 1) food and shelter, 2) safety and security, 3) love and belonging, and 4) the esteem of my peers… and found myself on a precipice, arms windmilling with no place to go in any direction. I saw no path up to self-actualization, and many avenues back down to oblivion. More than anything I missed having some control over my life and schedule. Eventually, I reached a boiling point – a moment, where, in my mind, I was “willing to do anything but this.” It was then that I finally I made a massive shift…
First, though, don’t get me wrong – I think there is definitely a time and place to double down on sports training, education or career in order to pull the curve of your future trajectory up. I call this “investment time” and it is best done early to reap the rewards of the compounding returns. However, for many, this initial investment into the future takes on a life and lifestyle of its own. The operant conditioning programmed into us in our youth and early career starts to become a collective adult neurosis. We ignore the math of our ever-shortening lives in service of already aggregating financial returns. Life begins to pass us by and yet we still continue the habitual trade of time for money when the returns on that investment have inverted.
At some point, the value of your time, the value of your future, becomes vastly more important than the value of your financial assets. By any Western first-world financial index I was not rich when I quit it all: but quit it all I did and in the process I became vastly wealthier than nearly all my peers in the areas that matter most – my time and freedom.
I left consulting and corporate America and started my own business where my time was my own. I walked away from stock options and golden parachutes, but in the process, I bought back my time and became a form of wealthy beyond most billionaires’ imaginations. Maybe you can too.
So… what to do? It may be time re-think your future trajectory and place the value of your time investments as the primary area to focus. Most adults feel that time accelerates the older we get: hence life isn’t just short, it is actively getting shorter. If you are in mid-life, have a solid 401K and stock options, and have climbed Maslow’s ladder to rung 4, but not farther, then it may be time to make that change. If your intuition is kicking in right now, then you know exactly what I am talking about. This (the life you are living) is not the end goal.
Now.is.the.time.
It is time. It is time to get busy dying, or get busy really living.
It is time to get back out there, get back in there
It is time to get off the hedonic treadmill, time to un-climb the corporate ladder
I want to climb the ladder of my internal clock and clock the ladder of my internal climb
I want to slow the hands of father time, and time the slow hands of my fatherhood
I want to kiss my young child’s forehead, and wake to find her still a child
I want to love the love of my life and live a life that I love
I want to sleep the dreams of heroes and be the hero of my dreams
For the people we truly love, this one sacred gift we can give
The gift back of time, It is time to really live
I believe that time is the ultimate currency – even, perhaps, usurping love. We already know money can’t buy love… However, I believe that time can absolutely buy love. What is the greatest gift you can give? The gift of your time. How do you give and receive love? With your limited resource of time. How will you invest your time with those you love? Well, that is up to you.
Let me conclude this essay by stating this as directly as possible. If you are financially successful and fail to trade your hard-won money for more time, you have just purchased the deed to your own death. Time poverty is the death of life. We are all dying of a terminal disease called life. You can’t buy your way out of it, and you can’t take it with you.
It is time.
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PS: This article was originally written from my RV parked on a gorgeous beach in Bahia Concepcion on the Sea of Cortez in Baja, Mexico last August. In 2020 after CO-19 hit, I sold nearly everything I owned in order to invest my time in the things that matter most – people, travel, and experiences. While I burned some financial resources to take on this adventure, I am vastly richer for all of the experiences of the past year. If you read this and you know me, or even if you don’t know me, but you want to make changes in your life trajectory and you want to talk – Please, drop me a text, or call me at 312.437.1509 or email me at john@johnkcoyle.com
I have time for you. I have designed it this way.
