I Am Rich If I Have Time On My Fingers
In the novel I wish it were true by Marc Levy, the writer presents us with this curious situation not related, in principle, to time. Imagine that you have a bank account and every morning when you wake up you have a balance in favor of € 86,400. There are only two rules that you must follow to receive this opportunity. It is not allowed to transfer the money from one day to the next, that is, every night your balance will return to zero, even if you have not managed to spend it during the day.
The second of the rules consists of knowing that there will come a day when your account will stop having this figure every morning, but you will not be able to know when this will happen, nothing will warn you. What would you do? Do you think you would spend that money every day that passed? I am sure that we would all take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.
We all have this account, we are all clients of it and we are enrolled in it as soon as we are born. This bank is called life and the investment account is called time. In the first second of each day, 86,400 seconds are credited to your account, which you can spend during those 24 hours. Every night, what you have left will go back to zero.
It is not allowed to accumulate this balance for the next day. Every morning your account will be reset and every night the leftovers evaporate. There is no way back. Everyone can invest this figure in what makes them happiest: family, success, friends, hobbies, but remember, you only have one life (there is no news, except faith, of another). The important thing is not how much time you have, but what you do with it.
Who is happier, who has more time or who has more money?
What option do you think you would choose: having a less extensive working day, which allows you to dedicate more time to your family, your personal activities, your partner, etc. Or, on the contrary, would you prefer to charge more money for the day even if this prevents you from dedicating time to the above?
This question was the subject of study and the results were published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, asking nearly 4,500 Americans if they valued money or time more to achieve happiness. 64% of the people who participated in the study declared that they preferred to have more money; However, the research also showed that those who gave more importance to having time, turned out to be those with the highest level of satisfaction with life, which translates into a higher level of happiness.
Spending free time enjoying what we like, gives us a much higher level of long-term satisfaction, there is data that affirms that investing in experiences brings us a higher level of happiness than when we do it in material things.
We are social beings who live and feed on relationships, social life, laughter with friends, time with our partner, with our family and doing what we like the most. We forget that this time is running out, that a day comes when it disappears and that unfortunately, we are not able to know when it will happen. We continue to convince ourselves that we are eternal beings and we miss the opportunity to invest seconds. Time passes, life passes, we are going to live it.
We value time more when we get older
Research carried out by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada) showed that valuing time over money is associated with higher levels of happiness, especially when long working hours are required to get that money. As age increases, time moves higher on the priority scale.
As time passes we are more aware of its value, and on the contrary, the value of money is losing importance. Time is something that we cannot get back, it belongs to us and we are the owners of deciding how we want to invest it. Do not let others decide on your income in seconds, do not allow time to slip through your fingers. Don’t let a day come when you regret not making good use of this time.
