“Idleness is the greatest prodigality” – Benjamin Franklin

I’ve been ruminating on the concept and meaning of time for a few years now but increasingly deeply since this past summer. The quote above from Franklin, I found in his book, A Way to Wealth and it has stuck with me ever since. The word prodigality (yea, I had to look it up) means ‘an extravagant waste’, to which is typically added ‘of wealth’. So buying fancy cars and big houses outside one’s means would be an example of prodigality. So would buying a corporate jet rather than reinvesting in your product or people or community. While this typical use of the word refers to monetary wealth being wasted, it can be used with any resource as in Franklin’s statement referring to what I believe is the only priority resource; time. Quick aside, ‘only priority’ should be a bit of a misnomer. Did you know that prior to the industrial revolution the word priority had no plural, as in ‘priorities’? Pluralizing the word diminishes its power.  So he says that idleness is the greatest prodigality alluding to an extravagant waste of time. Time is the priority resource.

It’s a resource however, that acts differently than all others. Everyone of us is currently in possession of some amount of this resource. Not a single one of us knows how much we have left to ‘spend’, as there is no wallet. We can’t ACTUALLY buy or sell it to gain more or less. It can’t be stockpiled. You can’t hold onto a bunch of minutes and then live 30 minutes all at once. The time resource is always diminishing for an individual and compounding for the universe. (That’s an odd one!) But our minutes don’t spend the same. Try as you might, you can’t spend this minute sunbathing if the moon is out but someone on the other side of the planet can. So, this time resource you have has many influences on how it can be spent. (Lots of fun and/or valuable counters to this if we consider things like relativity, quantum mechanics, income disparities, technological advancements, etc. I am purposefully putting these on pause for now)

I wrote in a previous post about people finding themselves on ‘automatic pilot’ and of my own difficulties with disassociation. This is a form of idleness and thus prodigality. Was today’s effort something you are proud of? Did it align with a purpose you’ve set for yourself, did it move you forward in anyway? Did any of it make you or someone else feel good, or less bad? I also mentioned the importance of ‘tuning-in”, idleness is quite the opposite. This is clearly not the answer. What a waste!

In the stoic work Art of Living by Epictetus he has a short chapter regarding giving things their proper name. This is to avoid assumptions about what things mean before having supporting evidence. I think it is also to give proper credence to things which are important to look at a certain way. By calling something the proper name, it allows you to move forward appropriately. So, time is the priority resource and wasting it is prodigality.

With this in mind, we can now look at treating time as a resource, despite how it might act differently than others. We can also begin to respect it in a way that causes us to shun its waste, much like we look at the extravagance of public figures or governments and think what all could be accomplished should they not fritter away monetary resources on political dogma.

At the end of this thought process, we’re left with more questions than answers. What, then are valuable uses of time being the primary one. This is a hard one to determine as it will differ from each of us. Even if we figure out how we’d like to use our time resource, we have to figure out how to adapt to all of the influencing factors on how our time is presented. Is time now more valuable than time later? Can I emphasize both and how do I structure it? Even…why bother?

Lots to think about. I think I’ll start with determining what are appropriate uses of time. I know writing down this previously mushy pile of thoughts into a slightly more structured stack of mush felt like a valuable use of my time. I hope the minutes it took you to read this far felt the same.