[3 minute read]
Most of us are familiar with what it looks like when someone we know is living beyond their means. Expensive vacations, meals, or possessions pile up, accompanied by a veritable mountain of credit card debt. People fall into the horrible habit of paying one credit card off with another and get punished by punitive credit card interest rates.
If someone lives beyond their means for years, they may never be able to retire. Only frantic work keeps them just ahead of the tsunami of debt.
People living beyond their means often have a higher material standard of living then their friends. They have a nicer house, nicer cars, take nicer vacations and eat out more. But they tend to be more stressed out. Every month they have to figure out how to make ends meet.
For people who like possessions and don’t mind stress, it can be smart (albeit risky) to live beyond their means. As long as nothing happens that prevents them from working, they’ll get more of things they enjoy than they otherwise could, all at the cost of a little (to them easily ignorable) stress.
I think it’s also possible to do something like this with your time. By analogy, I call it living beyond your time means.
What does this look like?
When you’re living beyond your time means, you’re almost always overbooked. You have to hustle from event to event if you ever want to be able to do everything you’ve signed up for and your occasional failures make you seem at least a little bit flaky. It becomes very hard to schedule anything involving you. Your friends may have to take drastic action, like asking you about plans three months in advance.
There are benefits to this! Your life will almost always be interesting and you’ll quickly end up with a large network of friends. You’re less likely than most to get fear of missing out, because you miss out on so little. On Mondays, you have more stories about the weekend than anyone you work with.
There are costs to this as well. Many basic person- and space-maintenance tasks take time and time is your most precious currency. It’s more likely than not that your living space deteriorates and is never quite as clean as you’d like it to be (unless you pay someone to clean it for you). Your food situation tends to become interesting, with you as likely to eat restaurant or take-out meals as quick, weird snacks or instant meals. Home-cooked, nutritious meals can become a rare luxury.
(If you buy more time with money, you can avoid some of these pathologies, at the risk that you might live beyond your material means as well.)
And when you’re living beyond your time means, you so rarely get the feeling that all of the things you need to do are done (e.g. the plants watered, lunch for tomorrow is made, the washroom is clean, and the dishes washed) and your time is now entirely your own, with no more nagging worries at least until tomorrow. I love this feeling and couldn’t imagine living without it, but I know people who only experience it once every month or so.
(I think all new parents inevitably spend a few years living beyond their time means and often experience great relief when their kids get old enough that they no longer need to be constantly supervised. This isn’t so much a deliberate choice as it is a natural consequence of the difficulties of keeping young children fed, happy, and safe from their own destructive natures.)
Just as some people get a lot of net benefit from living beyond their financial means, some people find living beyond their time means to be net good. They love moving fast and doing interesting things and they’re quite happy to get that in exchange for a chaotic living situation and the nagging feeling that they’ve left basic tasks undone.
The purpose of this post isn’t to moralize at people who are living beyond their time means. Just because the thought of trying to do it stresses me out doesn’t mean that it isn’t really good for some people. But I do worry that there are people who are accidentally living beyond their time means and feeling very stressed out about that. If that describes you, consider this your wakeup call. I promise you that your life can still be interesting and your friends will still like you if you cut back on the activities a bit.