Got stuff?
I’ve sure got stuff. I’ve got stuff hanging on me like barnacles. Books I love but will never read again. Exotic crafts from faraway lands. Knickknacks and doodads from friends. Antiques passed down from ancestors. Assets worth money if anybody wanted to buy them.
Somehow I have come to need two refrigerators. I have a top-end lawnmower that won’t start. Two giant televisions. Antiquated phones. Artwork. A funny sweater that flowed from my mother’s fingers. More furniture than I need.
My stuff holds me prisoner. I can’t free myself from it. It should be easy, but it’s impossible. I don’t know if it clings to me or I to it.
Once I dreamed that I came home and found my house burned to the ground. I owned nothing but ashes and an empty lot. I thought, Good.
It isn’t just me. Everybody I know has too much stuff. Yes, I know there are people who lack food, need medicine, can’t clothe their kids. I know it isn’t fair that we accumulate frivolous clutter while they lack necessities, but I don’t know what to do about it except say I’m sorry I’ve spent so much on stuff.
It took me a lifetime to enrich myself with this stuff. Now it turns out that all I really want is time.
Time, that infinite non-commodity that no one has enough of. It’s precious, priceless, and unpriced. You can spend time, but you can’t buy it.
Time isn’t money. Money is time. You can take your money to the mall and trade it for some stuff, but you won’t find any time there.
Where can you buy it? Only inside yourself. How do you buy it? With decision. Cash? It’s time wasted in a wallet.
I wrote a stupid novel once, a horrid piece of junk, long since recycled into cardboard. But at its core was an interesting idea, a protagonist dedicated to inverting both capitalism and communism. Her premise: we should not be trying to maximize production and consumption. We should be minimizing both and letting free time fill the void.
Time, in her dream, was to replace stuff as the fundamental value of the economy. Free time would be the symbol of status. The wealthy would be those who sat around all day like the people we currently call bums. The poor would be those enslaved by their unenlightened need to keep producing and consuming.
Yes, of course, she knew we’d still need to put time into the production of necessities, but everyone’s goal would be to live with as little as possible. People in BMWs would be in envious awe of those who work two days a week and commute on a bike. And those on bikes would feel outdone by those who could afford to saunter.
The climate crisis presses the issue. Less production and consumption means less fuel burned. It gives us more time to solve stuff-born problems.
In some ways, the pandemic lockdown is a dry run of a time-based economy. People are producing less and consuming less, albeit not voluntarily. People have more time, but they feel like they’re doing time.
The stuff-based economy has not adjusted to this new way of life. It’s still painful. People have learned to live without restaurants and road trips, but they still have to pay rent.
A time-based economy is a revolutionary idea but possible only at the pace of evolution. No mob or army can make it happen overnight.
It’s a shift as big as the transition from feudalism to industrialism. But anyone living above the level of strict necessity can start opting for time over stuff.
The first step is simply decision: to reorient your valuation of wealth.
The stuff-based socio-economic system is inimical to such change. It will do nothing to facilitate. It will resist. But it cannot resist absolutely. You can find small ways to find time, and you can always find small stuff you can live without.
Automation and technology should be helping. We’re all producing more per hour than people did 50 years ago, yet we’re all working more. Robots are helping, yet the workload worsens. If we’d stuck with the production and stuff that satisfied us 50 years ago, we’d have a 20-hour workweek today.
But this tectonic-economic shift leaves us with a couple of key questions. What should we do with so much free time? And what would we actually do?
Think about that during your bounty of idle quarantine moments. What would you do if you had half your stuff and twice your time?
Glenn Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.
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