The time

Whether here or on other sites talking about the stock market and financial independence, we obviously talk a lot about money. Certainly too much even. It's true that money is what makes the planet go round, whether we like it or not. So, we monitor the price variations of the main markets, we look at the performance of our own securities, we count our dividends... in short, we are a bit like Scrooge McDuck, trying to find out, day after day, if we are richer or not.

All this for what? What is the purpose of getting so rich? A question of prestige, power, personal pride? A need to always have more? Or, more basically, a need for security? For some, perhaps even for most of us, money is a goal in itself, even an obsession. However, this is to forget that money is only a means of exchange.

Beyond the satisfaction of seeing one of our stocks rise by a few percentage points, does money make us happy at all? Do we feel more fulfilled in our mid-forties, with a well-filled wallet, than when we were broke during our student years? This is far from certain, as the weight of responsibilities and the fear of losing what was hard-won can weigh heavily at that time. happiness curve confirms that this is indeed not the case. Forty-something men are even a population particularly at risk when it comes to suicide.

As we get older, we paradoxically worry more and more about money and less and less about time. However, it should be exactly the opposite, since our hours are limited. When we are young, we not only have a lot of time ahead of us, but we also have a lot of time in general. Our priorities are strongly oriented towards pleasure, entertainment, good times. Later on, these are certainly still present, but unfortunately they often come after our adult "duties", namely essentially work and parenthood. The two together actually occupy a major part of our lives. As a result, the time we can devote to hedonism is limited to a few hours per week at best.

It is only when we manage to get out of this loop of duties, in fact when we have time, that we manage to find a little clairvoyance. We reconnect with our own values, we find our inner child. This happens during a sabbatical or even during certain long vacations. This can also be the case if we work part-time, provided that household chores leave time. It is not for nothing that the best decisions are made during these moments. We see things differently, with hindsight, wisdom and insight. Because we have time for ourselves.

They say that time is money, especially with the idea that every hour of our life spent working is likely to generate profits. But the comparison stops there because we cannot lock time away in a safe and even less invest it to increase it tenfold. Whatever we do, our temporal heritage diminishes, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute... As a result, time is worth infinitely more than money. The only thing we can avoid doing is wasting it for the wrong reasons, that is to say, spending it doing things for others that we do not want to do. That alone is no small feat...

The search for financial independence is paradoxically first and foremost a search for time. We seek to free ourselves from our salaried work to reclaim the time that belongs to us. We want to recover the five days a week that are stolen from us by our boss. To do this, we need money, a lot of money. Time is the end, money is the means...