Time Millionaire

“But time is life, and life exists in our hearts, and the more of it that the people saved, the less they actually had.” ~ Michael Ende, Momo

I have written in the past about the "lying down flat” movement, which originated in China and morphed into the TikTok “minimum effort Mondays” trend where young people are opting out of the career and ambition treadmill and choosing instead to do the absolute minimum work required in order to survive in order to maximise their leisure time instead. Aiming, in other words to be, as the writer Nilanjana Roy put it, “time millionaires” instead of monetary millionaires.

Of course, ideally, one would like to be both a time and a monetary millionaire at the same time - after all, nothing quite fills time like money does (both trust fund families and the impoverished involuntary unemployed will attest to that). And that has, for many people in the middle class, been the goal, to work hard for a few decades in order to save up and become a part of the leisure classes for as many years as possible at the end of life. Younger generations are just less patient; they understand that time is not really worth saving up for later. Indeed, as the novelist Michale Ende explained so beautifully in his profound children’s book, Momo, time cannot really be saved at all, it has to be spent to be enjoyed. A use it or lose it proposition. Furthermore, unlike money, you can’t earn it or make more of it. Time is the ultimate “soul bound” token of value or non-fungible, non-transferable personal currency. And scarcity, as we know is directly correlated with value.

Now however, a new trend is emerging that aims to make the implicit, intrinsic value of our time explicit and, to a degree, fungible. Enter time banking. Time banking projects in the public and private sectors suggest that instead of choosing between maximising our time or money collection, to rather see and use our time itself as a form of alternative currency to the money we use today.

TimeRepublik, for example, is a digital platform that allows network participants to bank, save and trade 15 minute blocks of time. Participants in the network provide services for each other, in a very similar way to how other task-based platforms like Task Rabbit or Fiver work. However, instead of getting paid cash for their efforts, participants get time credits to claim back the time they invested from any other participant in the network. The idea is that time is a more egalitarian store of credit and value than fiat cash, because no one can “quantitative ease” more time into existence, and in theory at least, within the TimeRepublik network, everyone’s time is of equal value - regards of skill or experience. (How long-run sustainable such networks are, given that some individuals are more productive and in possession of scarcer skills with higher opportunity costs than others, is yet to be seen, but the idea of making time both equal and barter-able stands).

Similarly, the ageing, de-growing Republic of China introduced a "time banking" social security scheme a few years back. Citizens are encouraged to bank time conducting acts of care and  service for the elderly and infirm, which they are then promised to be able to claim back from other citizen caregivers, hour for hour, when they themselves are too old to work or care for themselves.

Regardless of the sustainability of these programmes, the questions they raise are worth considering. Will turning the implicit value of our time into explicit currency make us value ourselves - and others - more or less? You decide.

Written by Bronwyn Williams, commissioned and published by Brainstorm Magazine.