I Was a Billionaire at 30 — This is What I Wish Everyone Understood About Time

It’s impossible to talk about time without comparing it to something else. Have you noticed this?

We’re always “killing time”, “saving time”, “spending time”, “making up for lost time”, or “searching for lost time”; time can “drag”, it can “fly”, it can “hang heavy” over us; we can waste it, we can wither it away, we can try to stop it. But nobody has been able to tell us what it actually is. Unlike all our other senses, there’s not a single spot in the human brain where our sense of time can be processed.

It can seem as though time is the water we’re all swimming in, and that we’ll never break the surface. We believe that time will continue on for much longer than we will, long after it has any meaning for us as individuals, and that we can never “escape our bowl.”

One thing that time — absolutely and categorically — is not, however, is “money.”

I stubbornly refuse to compare the two, because the comparison is nothing short of nonsensical. Time will always be more valuable than money, and, while we can always make more money, none of us can ever make more time. That may be an obvious point, but how obvious is water to a fish?

Now you’re probably wondering whence I acquired my wealth. You know, where I got my billions. I should tell you, then, that I was born into it. Let me explain.

See:

1 million seconds is 11 days.

1 billion seconds is 31 years.

The life expectancy where I live (Canada) is currently 82.52 years, and I just turned 30. You know what that means. That’s right: I’m a Time Billionaire, the richest of the rich, wealthy beyond my wildest expectations!

So, if you’re younger than, say, 47, and you expect to live to the average life expectancy of 78.6 years (United States, but, increasingly, worldwide)…

Well that makes you a Time Billionaire as well.

Now, some people believe that the first humans who are going to live to the age of 1,000 have already been born, although that’s certainly not a widespread belief. I’m not sure I believe that either. Even so, just because you’re older than 47 doesn’t mean that you’re not also a Time Billionaire. The advances we’ve made in peaceful conflict-resolution, sanitation, medicine, food production, law and order, and all the rest of the causes of long and fruitful lives have been nothing short of explosive.

For example, since 1990, 2.6 billion people have gained access to an improved water source, which means that 285,000 more people got safe water every day for twenty-five years.

Humanity solves more problems than it creates, and before the year 1800, not a single country in the world had a life expectancy higher than forty years. There are billions more multibillionaires walking around today, and you’re probably one of them.

Astonishingly, if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline ‘Number of People in Extreme Poverty Fell by 137,000 Since Yesterday’ every day for the last 25 years!

So let’s have a big round of applause for Humanity, if you please!

Now, personally, I’m an extremely stingy billionaire. I hoard my wealth. I don’t just go spending my time anywhere and on anything, regardless of considerations of value. And my argument here is that regardless of how many billions we have in our possession, none of us have any moments to spare.

Our lives are but infinitesimal moments between two eternities, and every moment brings us closer to time-bankruptcy.

So whenever I can feel and enjoy laughter shaking my insides; whenever I can feel my fingers gliding over a smooth keyboard when the words are flowing; whenever I can put my mind deep inside my muscles at the gym and really feel the life pounding away inside them; whenever I can taste the hazelnut of my coffee and smell the distinctive aroma of book-pages in my library, I make sure to feel those things as intensely as I possibly can. I have to do it Now; there is no later.

Heaven is under our feet, as well as above our heads

Thinking this way doesn’t come naturally to most people. Not in an economy based on time and attention, where companies and people are constantly warring in order to separate you from your lifeforce: time and attention.

There’s a lot of money to be made by separating people from their time and attention, and this realization fuels big business. Now, I have nothing against business, but I have a lot against the mindless throwing-away of infinitely valuable Time.

Among the worst that this profligacy does to us is to cause us to abandon our most worthwhile aims. Here’s what Marcel Proust had to say about that:

“I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it — our life — hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.”

Thousands of years before Proust, Seneca wondered at people who could devote so much brainpower and energy to amassing gold fortunes and yet throw away time like it was nothing.

Just like Seneca’s book, On the Shortness of Life, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations changed how I thought — and felt — about time as well:

“Is it your reputation that is bothering you? But look at how soon we’re all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows all. The emptiness of all those applauding hands.”

And this, oh man, this:

“At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”

Obviously, I’m not the first to be horrified at how much time is wasted simply preparing to live, rather than actually living. I include myself in this, naturally. I have wasted so much time. And still do. Even after realizing I was a billionaire, it didn’t completely stop me from wasting time. It’s an effort that has to be made every day.

But it helps when you think of how many amazingly worthwhile things there are to do in on this beautiful earth! As Henry David Thoreau pointed out in Walden, Heaven is under our feet, as well as above our heads. And he would agree that since we have so little time with which to enjoy the company of our friends, how on earth do we find time to make enemies?

This is all well and good, of course, but down below I have some practical suggestions for how you can take back your time. These are a few things I’ve learned that I hope will help.

Some friendly, practical advice

First, let’s dispense with some bad advice. Living as though “every day were your last” is bound to end in dissatisfaction and pain. Not to mention a probable job search, and a group of family members and acquaintances who now know what you really think of them. No one needs that.

Living that way isn’t necessarily the wrong answer, it’s just not the whole answer. To my mind, the whole answer comes in three parts.

First, live as though this were your first day. Why? Well, just think of how magical everything would seem — especially in our advanced technological society — if you were just thrown into this place one day and were seeing it with fresh eyes. We have people printing kidneys FFS! That’s crazy!

Second, live as though it were your last day as well! The place for this piece of advice is right here in the middle. The part that’s correct about this is that we have to do what we always planned on doing today; we have to live immediately, because we are guaranteed nothing. But like I said, living completely in this mode leads to rash decisions, hurt feelings, regrets, and needless pain and suffering.

That’s why the third part is so important, where you live as though you were going to live forever; as though your actions have consequences (they do), and as though you may be around to feel their effects (you might be).

This is definitely a skill that becomes more developed over time. I still take things for granted, I still put things off, and I still live with the consequences of stupid decisions from my past. But, every moment is a new moment.

Also very important here is maintaining one’s sanity. Yes, work diligently on not wasting any time, living intensely, and all that great stuff — absolutely worthwhile. But just like obsessing over every measly cent in one’s bank account is usually a bad idea, it’s the same thing with time. You can drive yourself insane worrying about whether or not you’re wasting time and how you can be wasting less time! It’s all about balance.

A final bit of advice, then, is to realize that the best way to manage one’s time is to discover how you’re spending it now. That means taking a day, or a week, or maybe even a month, and meticulously tracking where exactly you’re spending your time. I’ve done this, and the results were enlightening.

Vincere diem

Control over your time is the greatest luxury that money can buy. Don’t let anyone deceive you otherwise. Avoid the trap of thinking that trading five days of your week for two is a good deal. That’s usurious, plain and simple.

Again, it’s all nuance. There’s nothing “wrong” with a regular ol’ Mon-Fri, 9–5 existence, so long as it’s freely chosen. There’s a trap on the other side too: the borderline pyramid scheme of people getting rich on the internet by telling other people that they can get rich on the internet. But when you can more or less control your time, influence how your day unfolds, get the opportunity to do important work — whatever the context — you’re winning. Time is not money. You win the day by winning back your time.

You wanna know how I win the day?

Well, I wake up around 7am, complete my no-stress morning routine of music, movement, washing up, getting breakfast, etc.; then I put on some coffee, read for a few hours (yes, hours! It’s bliss!); then, when I feel like it, I go to the gym (when they’re not closed temporarily for cleaning in the middle of the day thank you very much corona); I come home, work on some YouTube videos, do some writing, maybe fit in some more reading when I feel like it — I gained control over my time so that I could read 179 books in a single year and not feel guilty about it.

You wanna know what else?

When my mother asks me if I want to see a movie with her, I say yes. When my dad wants to take me out for coffee, I say yes. When Aristophanes is calling out to me from my bookshelf, begging to be read, I say yes, yes, yes! When I feel like going out and lifting some heavy shit at the gym, I say yes. When life calls out to me, I answer an emphatic yes!

Time will always be a puzzle to us — enigmatic to the extreme, mysterious beyond measure. We’ll never be able to stand outside of it, observe it, ask questions of it. For example, is it always the same “now,” or does it change? And if it does change, when does that change occur?

One thing I do see though is that seemingly everyone’s in this giant rush to “become” something; they rush around in a great panic, trying to achieve something beyond themselves when they have all this eternity to enjoy right here and now.

Without disrespecting the achievements and sacrifices of those who came before, and without giving ourselves away to a future which will never arrive (because it will always be “now”), let’s come back to the present, to our luxuries and conveniences, sure, but also to this ridiculously unlikely miracle of Time.

We are billionaires, all of us.

How will you spend your billions?

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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