Thursday, April 1, 2021

What Is an Hour Worth?

By Kevin Kohut, BC Director

When something is too available, plentiful, or easy to acquire, it is typically regarded as less valuable—dirt, coffee mugs, tourist t-shirts.

Things that are hard to come by and are in limited supply, or are difficult to obtain, are deemed to be of higher value—diamonds, the ability to shoot par at golf, a fish taco that isn’t too dry.

The same concept even applies to a dollar. In Germany, during the Great Depression, they printed money (called marks) until there was so much of it that it literally cost millions of marks to buy a loaf of bread. Ultimately, a dollar had virtually no value.

Lately, I’ve been acutely aware as to how this truth applies to the concept of time. When I think I have a surplus of time—say if I took a week’s vacation but wasn’t allowed to go anywhere due to government-sanctioned social restrictions (as just one bitter, hypothetical example)—I might feel as though I have plenty of time at my disposal. I might then be inclined to squander my excess of hours flipping channels or surfing social media for mindless clips of epic parkour fails.

Conversely, when I am busy and have little free time, the value of an hour goes up, and I seem to want to utilize the precious hours I do have. Apparently, this was an issue even long before the modern distractions we face. Over 2,000 years ago, philosophers were urging folks to quit wasting their time and to treat their hours as they would their money.

The Roman philosopher Seneca was one such fellow who expressed this thought well: “It’s not at all that we have too short a time to live, but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it’s given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well.”

Of course, none of us know how much time we’re going to get in life. But if I’m an average Canadian, I should have a “bank account” of over 700,000 hours to spend during my life. My wife saw what I just wrote and said, “Is that all?” (Glass half empty.)

It is sobering to think about the finite number of hours that I have. But this thought does help me think about treasuring each “free” hour, and to hopefully spend them in a way that recognizes their true value.

This also makes me question how I experience and utilize the time that isn’t so free, but is more ear-marked—work, sleep, as well as the various mundane responsibilities life demands of us (mowing the lawn, changing the kitty litter). These activities will use a significant portion of my life’s hour-bank.

In my younger years, I viewed these spoken-for hours as a necessary evil that I begrudgingly endured and wanted to get over with so I could enjoy free time. As I get older, I’ve grown to appreciate the meaning that time spent at work has given me over the years. Whether I was working out of logging camps in the rainy BC mountains, serving as a care worker for individuals with developmental disabilities, or negotiating collective agreements.

There have been many “puzzles” solved, successes celebrated, failures learned from, and relation-ships built. Since much of life will be spent doing some form of work, I don’t want to wait until it’s gone to find its significance, but rather to be in it while I’m performing it.

What Is an Hour Worth?

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