How to Be the Richest

The pinnacle of the equation is not money.

Today, I’m writing to you from Portland, Oregon. I came here on a mission: to purchase some new technology. Part of the reason I haven’t written in the last month and a half, the reason I broke my promise to write once a week, is because my laptop was severely on the fritz. Using simple programs would cause it to freeze. Pressing the spacebar would cause it to freeze. Often, I’d be mid-sentence, working on an article, and I’d have to sit there holding on to a thought for dear life, until my laptop came back to life.

I’m a patient person in many ways, but I am not so patient with technology. It took everything in me not to throw the laptop straight off the balcony. To ask myself to use my laptop beyond absolutely-necessary work obligations was too much, so I gave myself a pass.

Today is my third day using the new laptop. I worked my ass off throughout April to be able to afford this new divine piece of machinery without having to put it on a credit card. Now I have it. Now I’m here, sitting on a couch in my friend’s living room in Portland. The speed and agility of this machine are moving me to a peace I haven’t felt in months. I’m suddenly a bit more time-rich again.

The thing about being time-rich is it comes from a mix of circumstance and decision. Some people are born into wealth and never have to work. They’re as time-rich as it comes. Sometimes, a random life event or circumstance can make a person time-poor, temporarily or longer. Decisions we make (especially the boundaries we set regarding our work lives) also have a big impact on time-wealth.

The past few months, I’ve been amid a small but impactful circumstance that was impacting my time: a slow and barely functioning laptop meant I was spending extra hours every day just waiting for it to do very simple word-processing tasks. It was making me much more time-poor than I should have been. And being time-poor is a weight, or a kind of drowning. The unrenewable resource of time is too valuable to waste. Too short to waste it drowning. I bought the new laptop as soon as I could.

It feels surreal having much more money than I’ve had in a long time. I was able to say, in April, I’ll be able to save enough money to buy a new Macbook Air by May—and that wasn’t previously part of my financial equation. Before, even though I loved my job, I wasn’t working much. I had it in my mind that working more would have left me time-poor and unhappy. That was the truth for a while, too. But things have changed as I’ve moved into my mid and late 30s; I’ve changed. While I still believe the 40-hour workweek is a capitalist scam, now I’m beginning to reconsider certain “work-life” parameters on my own (new) terms.

It started during Covid, when I first noticed my preferences changing. Going out to parties and staying out late all the time wasn’t fun for me anymore. Life’s thrills were shifting away from the late-night social scene. Waking up early to go hiking. Waking up early to read a book. Waking up early to write as the sun rises. Dinner parties or picnics with friends. Afternoon outings. Long walks and hangs in the park. Sleeping when my body is tired. Sunrises. These are the activities that excite me now.

An interesting shift within that shift, something that I didn’t realize until recently, is how this different lifestyle was impacting my professional life. Before this change, I was serious about working only very part-time. I had too many things of my own to do, and I didn’t want to waste my time on much else. I especially didn’t want to spend too many hours working a job, any job, that wasn’t my poetry or art.

Ask me what’s more important, time or money, and my answer will always be: money starts losing value once my needs are met. I choose time.

Yet my recent change in lifestyle has changed my experience of time. For example, I go to bed early, which means I wake up early. I drink less, and I eat better, which means I have more energy. And in this, there is an unexpected math. The lifestyle change has led me to an increase in time-wealth.

What was I doing with this extra time? At first, nothing. It didn’t occur to me that I had “extra time.” It was like how, when I was 21, I quit smoking cigarettes, and it took me a while to register all the extra money I had.

And then I was unemployed for five months. Time is different for the forcibly unemployed though. Instead of feeling free because of all my free time, I often felt suffocated with anxiety. The work of finding balance when anxiety creep threatened my well-being every single day was so exhausting. I worried about how I would pay my bills. I worried about if I’d ever find a job I liked again. Worrying became a treacherous part of my normal existence.

In March and April, I was suddenly hired three times. And I went from gainfully working roughly zero hours a week to over 40 hours a week. In another era of my life, I might have been unsettled by this, but my point of view had already become entirely new. I was happy to be working so much, making up for the financial security I had lost. I was grateful to have found work that was paying me far more than I’d been making before. I was elated that I’d be able to pay for a new and much-needed laptop in a matter of weeks.

And now I’m feeling like things have changed a lot more than I anticipated, in a good way. I’m not going to be consistently working over 40 hours a week like I did in my hurry-up-I-need-a-new-laptop month, but I will be working more than I had been.

The difference between the past and now is that working more is not going to leave me time-poor, thanks to my lifestyle shift these past few years. And that’s among the most important things to me. I have lots of time to do the things I enjoy, somehow, despite dedicating more time to the capitalist machine of employment. I have more money without having had to trade it in for my soul and my happiness.

Instead of questioning too much, I’ll just take it. Thank you to the forces of the universe for this little pocket of sweetness. Life is far too transient to wallow in doubt.

Is this extra money going to make me happier in the long run? That’s a funny question. Get back to me after I’ve bought a car and Raava and I are taking month-long trips to various Mexican beaches together.

If you ask me, this is how to be the richest. It is to be time-rich and still have the resources to do lots of things that make me full and warm and happy. I had it before in a much different way. I’m looking forward to what this newfangled shape of existence will bring to me now.