BUYING BACK YOUR TIME

In Camus’s first novel, A Happy Death, a rich and dying man named Zagreus tells the young Mersault a secret about freedom. It is not grand. It is about time.

Most people, Zagreus says, spend their lives earning money, when the whole point of money should be to buy back time. We have the equation backwards. We trade our hours for income, then spend the income on things that need more income to keep, and the one resource we actually needed, unhurried time to live, drains away the whole while. Happiness takes time, he says. A lot of it. Happiness is a long patience, and patience cannot be rushed or bought in a single stroke.

This lands differently depending on your week. For some it is permission to want less, so they can owe less and therefore work less. For others it is a hard look at what their longer hours are really buying. Camus is not preaching poverty. Zagreus is wealthy and unashamed of it. The point is the direction of the trade. Money serving time is freedom. Time serving money is a treadmill with a salary.

You can test the idea on a small scale today. Look at one thing you are about to spend money on, and ask what it costs you in hours, both to earn it and to keep it. Then look at one thing you could buy back instead. An errand handed off. An evening left unscheduled. A commute made shorter. Freedom, in this novel, is simply having time that belongs to you.