“No one has time any more for anyone else.” The words sat there, just a few pages into our novel study of Fahrenheit 451. My breath caught in my throat. I’ve read those very words over a dozen times, but this year, they read differently.
In 1953, Bradbury predicted many things. From screens that interact with us (hello, Facebook Portal!) to the earplug-style radios (hello, AirPods!), his work intuited much about our current world.
Over 60 years later, a teenager’s lament at the start of that book has become our reality. In a world that’s been consumed by busy-ness and a round-the-clock desire to hustle, we’ve run out of time. For ourselves, yes, absolutely. Even more alarmingly, we’ve run out of time for anyone else.
Whereas the self care industry seems hellbent on getting us to shell out for gobs and goops (you made it too easy with the name, Gwyneth) as salves for running ourselves ragged, there isn’t a communal corollary. The fact that we all seem too busy to notice is what’s really alarming.
Looking Outward, Not In
Personal finance enthusiasts love sports metaphors. Financial journeys are often compared to running. There’s the adage “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
As someone who ran one torturous season of indoor and outdoor track in high school, I learned many things. Our head coach shouted “Run” exactly seven times in a row or not at all. It never varied. An assistant coach promised us baked goods if we worked out hard enough to throw up. “Toss yours and I’ll buy more!” he’d shout. And in a relay, if someone crosses into your lane after their hand off and knocks you down, you both get disqualified. Ask my bruised ego how I know.
I also learned running isn’t for me.
While I’m definitely not an expert, it doesn’t take Usain Bolt to figure out why we use running as the defining metaphor in finance. Finance is a solo journey. Me, my spreadsheets, and I. We’re even cautioned to not worry about others and to stay in our lanes (though, clearly, Becky from that other school team never heeded that advice).
We expend so much time and effort ignoring the Joneses and their new cars, that we seem to have not noticed that we’re distancing ourselves from the people in our lives. Of course, there are amazing online communities of like-minded individuals, and there are local meet ups as well.
But when we decide that we have nothing in common with family and friends and neighbors, what are the consequences of that? My bank account might be better off, that’s certainly true. Something else I’ve realized, though, is that keeping your head down and running your own race is a really insulating and isolating way to live a lifetime.
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The Wrong Kind of Busy
It was the beginning of August when I got the phone call. A close relative was sick.
Immediately, I started running numbers in my head. I counted the days until the start of the school year. I did a mental review of outstanding freelance projects. I wondered when it would be easiest to slot in a visit. Perhaps the weekend. Maybe the following week. I could just call and talk to her.
Before I could even articulate just how very and terribly busy I was, the voice on the other end of the phone continued.
“She has seven days left. Maybe ten.”
I thought I was busy before that phone call, and maybe I was. Of course, I had commitments that mattered. I’m fortunate and hardworking enough to have fallen into a life I love. My son, my husband. My family, my friends. My neighbors, my hobbies.
But those weren’t actually the things that I was most devoted to. Not really. Just thinking about where my mind went when my phone rang is confirmation of that. I allowed myself to become so utterly consumed by the idea of being busy, to be swallowed up by our culture of busy-ness, that I lost track of what really mattered.
I got busy with all the wrong things.
RELATED POST: When It’s Time to Choose Time Over Money
Time and Money Well Spent
There’s a lot of pressure to be judicious with your time and your money. So it seems frivolous to take an hour to accommodate a last-minute ask from a friend to grab coffee. It’s burdensome to go to yet another family dinner. It’s awkward, uncomfortable, or even painful to attend a neighborhood gathering. These are all things that are rain-checked, pushed to later calendar dates, layered with polite, albeit half-hearted, apologies.
Get the coffee.
Plan the lunch.
Arrange the dinner.
Buy the flowers.
Order the book.
Pick up the phone.
Send the text.
FaceTime.
Listen.
None of these things are catastrophic to a budget nor do they require supreme amounts of time. If I can lose hours a day scrolling through social media and doing the open-close-open dance with the work email app on my phone, I can take fifteen minutes (or 5!) to check in.
If you can’t spend money, spend time. If you can’t be there in person, be there somehow.
It’s hard. I know it’s hard. But the more often we do it, the easier it gets and the better it feels. Because what Hustle Harder culture overlooks is how sad it is to run a race only to find no one waiting for you at the finish line.
Final Thoughts on Showing Up
One of the hardest things I’ve done was to answer that phone call. Not to click the button on the phone, but to actually answer the call. It meant digging deep. I had to juggle and stretch, cry and laugh, plan and scramble. Ultimately, I had to confront where my time was going and if that actually aligned with any of the things that I claim to care about.
I had to decide to what or who in my life I was showing up for.
Later in Fahrenheit 451, another of Bradbury’s characters shouts, “We need not to be let alone.” He’s right. We need not to be let alone, and we need not to let others alone.
So Tell Me…How do you make sure you show up for who and what really matters?
Pssst…If you haven’t listened to this gem from Tim Kreider, do it now and report back. It’s 13 minutes well spent. You’re not to busy to listen, I promise.
I am seriously touched that you’re always showing up for me, friend. Especially back in August with all of that going on, we still texted and visited up at Lake Geneva and then a week or so later in DC!
We may be half a continent apart and mostly know each other from our writings on the internet, but you’re a favored friend.
As for your question, I can’t always be there in person, so I am always available to text or chat, and I will almost always open my wallet for causes dear to my friends. Sometimes it’s the only way to share a piece of my heart with them in the moment.
You are seriously someone I am trying to emulate more. I’m always good about requesting books for my library, but I’m going to try to get better about buying books (and products!) to support blogger buddies. Even if I don’t need them myself, I can spread the wealth. And you are exceptional at doing that!
Yeah, that’s a chilling line, taken in the right context. And I think running is a common metaphor in PF because I keep finding out so many people are current or former runners, lol. I’ve come up with many a post while running and it’s easy to see the corrolaries when i’m reviewing my stats at the end of the run and see my speed drop off at the end or the speed decrease when i got to a hill, or that sort of thing.
But yes, who you take time for is important. When I first quit work to focus on more family time, I felt like that wasn’t enough and I had to justify myself with past titles, what I used to do, what I accomplished before I “quit life” kind of thing.
Now, I’m like, yep, I’m a SAHD. No excuses, or mentioning past life, career, future job, etc… Just SAHD, oh, and PTA, and cub scouts, and CASA. But those don’t even get brought up anymore because who gives a shit? If that’s how Iw ant to spend my time great, if I was just a lazy SAHD that didn’t volunteer anywhere (besides Mrs SSC not letting that happen and I’d go crazy) no one would look at me any different than they do now. Ah, rural America where you can do you.
But I like it and get fulfillment out of it. Like this weekend, I started getting all sorts of “pins” popping up on a PTA messenger thread with, “can you make this?” And holy hell, I can make all the things she sent over (except the rustic tree cake stand. i could make it but I wouldn’t trust food on it, lol) and now I have a stack of woodworking projects that we can sell at our Xmas market booth in 2 months to raise money for PTA and the kids. Double win!! Sorry for the epic comment, but it’s awesome seeing how life comes together and gets settled and even ore awesome now that I can combine my hobbies with my volunteer stuff to help out the school and promote my hobbies!
I love how your enthusiasm just radiates off the screen. That’s a sign of time well spent, isn’t it?
Great post! I thought of this very thing last weekend when I was busy working on freelance projects, and I did do something community-oriented by volunteering at a trail run race, but I didn’t really know anybody, and they didn’t know me. A friend texted me and asked how my weekend was. I said, “fine…kind of boring.” He called 10 minutes later and said he was in my neighborhood and did I mind having a visitor. We’re really close, so he came in and crawled in bed with me because I was just feeling low and watching TV in my room. We decided to go for a walk and ultimately have a glass of wine and some dessert at a local restaurant, which was soooo good. I lamented that I SHOULDN’T be eating out under my extremely tight budget, but that that visit from him, the walk, the dessert made me feel SO much better! Sometimes, not always, you need to break away from all the crazy, restricted rules we set for ourselves and do what feels right in the moment!
I love this, Tonya! What a great reminder that sometimes money rules need to be bent or broken. 😀
“If I can lose hours a day scrolling through social media and doing the open-close-open dance with the work email app on my phone, I can take fifteen minutes (or 5!) to check in.”
Ugh, yes, this is so true. How many HOURS do I waste on the phone scrolling vs. connecting? It’s not the technology’s fault, exactly…it’s me! I can certainly use my phone to connect with others rather than just mindlessly consuming.
That’s exactly it for me, Kristen. Scrolling and consuming content isn’t connecting. Now, I try to be really deliberate. If I’m on Instagram, I want to leave a comment or share a thought. Not just scroll, scroll, scroll.
I guess I’m blessed because I have a lot of free time. Too much, really, so I’m thinking about starting to write freelance. But the free time means that I can be there for people — fatigue permitting, of course. That’s the bigger impediment to last-minute plans or whatnot.
Still, if it involved travel I’d definitely have to do some scrambling. But I’d hope that I’d be able to show up for a sick relative, especially one at the end of his or her life. Especially since I work remotely.
I’m glad you were able to be there for the relative. Sometimes our lives/priorities need to be jarred a bit for us to be reminded of how we should be organizing/prioritizing.
Amazingly? She’s still alive. The doctors said they don’t think it’s for any other reason than she found some real will to live. She’s definitely terminal, and I expect to get The Call any day, but I can’t even believe what was supposed to be another week with her turned into months.
“If you can’t spend money, spend time. If you can’t be there in person, be there somehow.”
Amen. I think you’ve hit on one of the more sinister parts of money, or what old timey Christians would probably clarify as the love of money. That it has an opportunity cost: the time we spend working for money or optimizing the money we have is time we aren’t spending on other things.
Am I spending too much time on the financial aspects of my life? And if so, at whose expense?
I was actually thinking really hard about that this weekend. Our community does a food drive where people set bags out on their doorsteps. There are houses that are too big, cars that are too expensive, and boats. Oh the boats!
But you know what else? There were bags and bags of donations. Our church needed SEVEN U-Haul trucks to get everyone to the food pantries.
These are the same people that are dismissed by much of the community because they’re “The Joneses.” Wow. Who else am I turning my back on?
Thank you for sharing the video link. ‘Crazy busy’ is my badge I struggle with, and Tim Kreider pulls no punches calling me out on it. And thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Tim Ferriss did an episode that is the just the Tim Kreider bit. I downloaded, and I force myself to listen to it at least once a quarter. It’s *so* well done, and it’s so easy to mean to take action on it and forget. So I force myself to go back and make sure that I’m at least attempting to follow through.
In person and phone calls are incredibly hard for me so those are infrequent, but I make it a point to visit everyone we can in CA once a year. Even with determination, there are a lot of people I still don’t see because we can’t squeeze them all in.
I write handwritten letters to parental figures, send buckets of photos digitally to friends on the East Coast who want them, and text regularly to check in on people. I stretch myself with every single thing. It’s worth it but it IS a stretch and i have to remember that I can’t stretch all the time or I’ll become brittle and snap.
As worthy as it is to be the person checking in regularly, it’s also quite taxing and I have to refill my bucket with solo time just as much. That’s a hard balance because just as much as there’s this “self care self care self care!” mantra, there’s as intense a need to connect meaningfully.
Oh, yes. It is EXHAUSTING when you are doing all the checking. I think people see that and think “Oh, that person is fine!” but we probably need to check in on those who look out for us the most, you know?
I always admire how selfless you are, Revanche. And I also want to make sure you think of yourself from time to time <3
During my 20s, I used to be the guy that would show up almost everything for my friends. I thought it would show them that I can be relied on all the time to be at their events. But as time went by I realized that it was more of burden on myself to do that because I would turn down invites from family members whenever they had something going on. I figured why do that on family so nowadays my friends can still rely on me on showing up from time to time but like I used to. I have a higher priority for my family and myself and realized that the best decision to make.
Showing up. I didn’t realize how truly important this is until I needed people to show up for me. I honestly don’t think I would have been able to fully heal and grow from the experience if it wasn’t for friends that consistently showed up for me.
And even though I realize it’s importance, I still find that it takes a significant effort on my part to step away from myself, my busyness, to show up for others.
Great post and thanks for the reminder to send a few texts.
Wow, what a powerful story. And I’m so sorry for your loss. A recent health scare has had me really rethinking how I spend my time and even my attitude and thought life, too. All turned out well with me, but I don’t want to lose the insights before I knew I was in the clear. And now that I’m properly treated, feeling better, and not having a bunch of appointments, I am getting back to volunteering at my kids’ school and making those coffee dates.
Anyway, this is a welcome message in the midst of the self-care and productivity buzz so common these days.