In a Well-Being Economy, Time Isn’t Money—It’s Care

True economic freedom isn’t about GDP growth or maximizing wealth—it’s about having the power to shape your own life and care for yourself and your community. New America’s family well-being and economic security team brought together 32 writers to reimagine an economy centered on time, freedom, and belonging. This is the final installment in a three-part series highlighting stories from the collective.

Time seems to have a Jevons paradox of its own: A more efficient use of time leads to more things to do, so we never actually get less busy. Like resources, time is one of those things where there never seems to be quite enough. There is always too little or too much, with corresponding feelings of stress or boredom. That Goldilocks sweet spot where there is enough time feels more like an emotional or spiritual determination than an economic one.

Our disjointed relationship with time comes from this economic-centered culture we’ve been indoctrinated into. We’ve been taught to believe that we, individual humans in the capitalist economy, are the arbiters of how much time things ought to take. We adamantly refuse to situate ourselves in a broader ecological context, to allow the cycles of nature and evolution to govern the flows of time. It’s not our fault, of course. We refuse because our economy forces us, because it conditions us not to. 

Everything is at the mercy of some arbitrary goal of sameness and efficiency, which above all serves the ticking of the clock.

At the same time, conformity has its uses. It creates mutually navigable spaces, shared rules that become infrastructure, and the same is true of the clock. But I don’t want to “reclaim” time from the clock-oppressor. I want to integrate and dance between the clock and the organic rhythms that move the world. The clock hasn’t stolen time from me, so I don’t need to claim it back. 

The clock has a right to some of my time. It organizes it. It makes possible coordination and therefore also exchange, care, and cooperation. To claim my time as wholly my own would be wildly selfish and economically naive. I am my relationships, so my time belongs to those networks of reciprocity, not to an isolated self.

If anything, a healthy relationship with time requires relinquishing control over it. Sometimes my body sets the pace, sometimes the rhythms of nature do, and sometimes I must synchronize with someone else’s timing. A well-being economy depends on honoring these layered tempos—biological, ecological, relational—not just the metric of output.

Our greatest struggle may be too much agency, not too little of it. We are told to optimize every hour as if time were private capital. Without these organic, dependable relationships of trust, we try to self-manage every minute. With it, a deep feeling of anxiety follows: We’re constantly agitated, bored, stressed, rushed, trying to skip ahead to the future or return to the past. We attempt to construct realities in midair, ungrounded from the realities that sustain us.

I feel this in the urgency around social causes like climate change. Yes, of course, time matters, but cultures, economies, and collective psychosocial functioning do not transform at the speed of news cycles. When has anything natural ever moved at such a speed? Our urgency is well-meaning in a sense, but also self-interested. It’s an urge to see the fruits of the change happen in a timeframe that we, personally, can benefit from. So work of responding to this moment is not found in ever-increasing acceleration, but in rebuilding an economic life where well-being and the health of the earth are central. 

But making such changes is difficult, and far from guaranteed.

“Yes, of course, time matters, but cultures, economies, and collective psychosocial functioning do not transform at the speed of news cycles.”

Working as a community organizer, I found a great deal of peace by remembering that I don’t work for myself, or you. I work for the future, for the generations upon generations yet to come. It is to them I am beholden, not to us, here, today. I don’t do this work in the expectation that I will reap the rewards myself. I do it in the trust of building a future that looks better than this, several generations down the road.

Moving our economies from extractive, industrial, capitalist ones to regenerative, localized, communal ones will take time. It took a couple hundred years for industrialism to grab hold of our economies, so I’d guess we’ll be in a liminal space of economic transition for about another hundred years. And there will be plenty more transitions after this one.

So I don’t concern myself with a five-year plan, I’m thinking about my 100-year plan. What world do I want this to be in a hundred years, what do I want to leave long after I am dead, and what can I do here and now to lay its foundations? 

I don’t really see it as my job to predict the economy of my great grandchildren, but to use my life to help turn the world’s face in the right directions: toward the land, toward relationships, toward itself—and with love, care, and reciprocity. If there is to be an economy worthy of our descendants, it will be one that measures wealth in the health of the soil, the strength of communities, and the time we are able to give one another. There are a thousand ways such a turn can look, and focusing on this goal allows me to see the countless opportunities that cross my path. I attend to these opportunities to make the shift. I try to give up control over everything except that which is my responsibility, including my time, and spend it in ways that help grow an economy centered not on industrial extraction, but on well-being for all living things.

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