“How many of you have dreamed of owning a sailboat?” a conference speaker asked the audience. Dozens of hands went up. “How many of you have dreamed of drydocking and painting that boat?” Hands fell back down. Few of us dream about the time, money, and vigilance required to prevent our possessions from falling apart, so we’re often surprised by what we’ve taken on.
It’s more fun to imagine the possibilities of satisfaction that our possessions will bring than the costs they will impose. Even the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge, despite years of planning and construction, were surprised by how much maintenance was required to keep the bridge standing. A year after completion, they noted that “the exposure to salt-laden fog is more severe at the Golden Gate than any other bridge in the Bay Area,” and the fog was extremely active in attacking the paint film.”
They had to hire a platoon of painters to maintain constant vigilance for corrosion, and painting ballooned into the largest expense of the maintenance budget. Even so, the fog was so pernicious that one day changing a lightbulb might reveal that an entire lamp was on the verge of collapse.
Many homeowners can relate. “Around here a repair becomes a renovation,” one client said. A renovation, in turn, might reveal that a house’s concrete foundation has nearly returned to sand, requiring emergency measures, as another client experienced.
It’s as if our possessions want to return to the elements from which they came almost from the day we acquire them, and if you want to stave off entropy, you must continually monitor and maintain everything you own. The shingles, paint, and lawn with the house; the tires and fluids with the car; the mold and algae in the pool; the instrument panel and hydraulic system on the private jet.
This maintenance takes money, which, depending on the type of possession, how long you own it, and other factors, can easily exceed the purchase price.
Maintenance also takes time, a far more elusive cost of ownership that few of us even think to investigate before making a purchase.
If you enjoy the tasks required to maintain your possessions, then it’s time well spent - a benefit, not a cost. For some people, there’s nothing better than tending to their lawns and gardens or spending an afternoon in the garage fine-tuning their vintage car. The tasks of maintenance are a meditation and a source of pride. At the end of the day, you can see that you accomplished something.
For many others, though, the time spent maintaining possessions is a cost, and there are two ways to address it: pay with your own time, or pay somebody else to use theirs. Even if you pay someone else to do the maintenance and repairs, though, there’s usually still some of your own time required. You’ve got to figure out when to fit the car servicing into your schedule, make the appointment, drive to the mechanic, and make sure you’re paying the right amount, among other things.
It might not seem like much on a per-item basis, but the accumulation of one small thing after another grows into something larger. It’s this time and cognitive load that causes us to talk about “being weighed down” by our possessions. It’s easy to see how we might reach a tipping point where the next possession with its next bit of maintenance, no matter how slight, might be just enough to degrade our entire experience and make us wish for “simpler times.”
I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
We’re not wrong to want this. In recent years, the concept of “time poverty” has garnered a lot of attention as researchers have been studying why, with global wealth having grown significantly over the past two decades, various happiness and satisfaction scores have not. One culprit: “material affluence has not translated into time affluence. Most people report feeling persistently ‘time poor’— like they have too many things to do and not enough time to do them.”
Having a sense of time abundance in our lives is, not surprisingly, key to our sense of well-being. Any parent of a young child could have told you that. What is surprising is that most of us reportedly tend to undervalue our time and fail to make choices more to protect it.
According to some researchers, “time poverty might be neglected because people tend to pay more attention to material resources than time-related resources.” Perhaps as a result, “people are “less sensitive to small losses of time relative to money.” (Beyond Material Poverty: Why Time Poverty Matters for Individuals, Organisations, and Nations)
One response to our preoccupation with material resources has been the rise of movements such as “minimalism” in recent years. Minimalists cite Henry David Thoreau’s dictum that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone,” arguing that we should strive to live with as few possessions as possible. A common minimalist aesthetic is a sparsely decorated white room with a small table, chair, and potted cactus.
There’s merit to wiping our material slate clean, at least metaphorically, but the choices with our possessions aren’t so binary. The trick isn’t to have little stuff, it’s to have the right stuff in terms of the configuration of goods and services that’s best for you.
Take something as basic as food. Today, thanks to modern farming, sophisticated supply chains, and a host of technologies, there is a fairly broad continuum of ways to spend our time and money to source our next meal:
- Grow, harvest and prepare the food ourselves.
- Plan a meal, ride or drive to the store to purchase ingredients, and prepare them ourselves.
- Select an online recipe, click a button to send it to Instacart to have someone shop for the ingredients and deliver them to our home for preparation.
- Purchase a meal kit delivered to our front door for preparation.
- Outsource all the above to DoorDash to have a hot meal delivered with the click of a button.
Depending on which method you choose, you’ll spend more or less time sourcing your next meal. The right amount of time for you depends on how much you enjoy the process; on the other uses you have for your time; and a host of other individual preferences and needs that only you can determine for yourself, through a process of experience and experimentation.
For every item we possess, we should probably enter an estimated “time liability” on our balance sheet to account for the minutes, hours and days that we’ll need to spend tending to its care and feeding. When we ask about a potential purchase “Is it worth it?,” that question should address the time we’ll give up in the future, not just the money that’s departing today.
If we give some thought to the allocation of time that our possessions require, we have a better shot at achieving both material and time abundance. Perhaps we can even expand, if not time itself, our sense of time abundance and the feeling that we have all the time in the world that we need to take good care of ourselves.