Forget Bitcoin. Only Your Time Has Real Value.

If there’s one thing you really should HODL, it’s your time

Vaccines. Wi-Fi. Quantum phenomena.

Our lives are filled with things we don’t understand. Part of the reason humans are so successful is our intense ability for specialization.

You don’t need to know how the Wi-Fi works. You just need to know how to use it. Somebody else does know how it works. And they will trade the knowledge and expertise for whatever you’ve got to give. This is what makes cities rise from the mud and sends our concrete tendrils spreading upriver year upon year.

My grandfather started life as a farmer. And even when he started building houses, he was still doing something real. Performing a task with particulars that had changed but a basic theme thousands of years old.

My father did the same. But I don’t. I make my living on the Internet, spitting words into a microphone for my computer to convert into text so you can read it. I’m a writer, and technically, I don’t even write. I just talk.

I don’t understand how any of it works. I just know that it does. Electronic money appears in my bank account at the end of each month, and I turn it into food and booze and rent payments. None of it seems real. It’s a strange feeling when you find your own life hard to believe. Not bad strange. Just strange.

We don’t really understand time. Even though it’s the most precious thing we have. As vital as the air and the water and the sunshine that keep us alive, the other things we so consistently take for granted. And yet we go crazy over made-up concepts like money. Never realizing that the real treasure is the hours and minutes we’ll never get back.

The machine roared into life

Sitting on the cold tiles of the living room floor, it sucked in air and blew it over blinking circuit boards. The noise was considerable, like a vacuum cleaner constantly running. Like a jet engine, the machine sucked in air at one end and blew it out the other, all in service of keeping those circuit boards cool while they crunched near unimaginable numbers and turned nothing into something.

“Does it sound like that all the time?” my wife asked.

“All the time,” I answered.

We had to make money somehow. And back in the heady days of 2017, as bitcoin climbed to a then-unheard-of peak of $20,000, we decided to get in on the bubble before it popped. I had bought some bitcoin earlier in the year by accident, looking for a way to make untraceable online transactions (don’t ask). In the few days that I was holding it, I found that the value was noticeably increasing.

So I bought more. Before long, my money had grown like mushrooms in the rain. So I dived into the forums, learning arcane terms such as HODL and blockchain and fungible. It still didn’t make a lot of sense. Everyone was calling it the currency of the future, or digital gold, but whether it was a currency or a store of value or investment seemed to vary according to who you asked.

It’s made-up money. Then again, as bitcoin boosters love to point out, all money is made up. The only difference is, bitcoin wasn’t made up by a state government. It was invented by a man who doesn’t exist.

I found out how bitcoin is made. Or mined, to use the correct terminology. Powerful computers solving math problems to access portions of the 21 million bitcoins that are all that will ever exist. All recorded for anyone to see on the unalterable blockchain. I didn’t get it then, and I don’t really get it now. But if I could put a computer to work producing something that people would pay real cash for, I was sold.

So I bought this machine. An S9 Antminer, capable of generating value out of thin air. Not a lot of value, mind you. Even as the price of bitcoin kept climbing, my machine, christened Anton, could only produce a few pennies per day. In order to make anything, we needed to keep it running 24 hours a day.

So that’s what we did. I built a soundproof box and vented it to the outside of our one-bedroom apartment and kept my magical machine running in the living room night and day. Every so often, I would take the bitcoin it generated and sell it on an exchange for a little bit of money to keep us going.

At the time, we were living in Antibes, the gorgeous sun-soaked town on France’s Mediterranean coast, and we needed every penny we could get. Anton was never going to make enough to support us. But along with a few other projects we had going, he helped keep our heads above the dazzling blue water.

Things have value because we decide they do

That’s as true of US dollars as it is of Ferraris or Rolexes or works of art. Gold, the classic store of value for millennia now, at least has some practical uses. But that’s not why it became so desirable to people.

We like it because it’s shiny. Because it doesn’t corrode. Because it’s soft enough to work into jewelry, but hard enough for that jewelry to last a long time. Stupid trinkets that we imbue with all kinds of value that have little to do with the nature of the thing itself.

Meanwhile, the truly valuable escapes our notice. The rain and the oceans that keep us alive. The bright sun that makes the plants grow and the fruit burst into life.

Most of all, we don’t value our time.

We squander so much of it. Sometimes, it’s taken from us. Wasted at some soul-sucking job or standing in line to renew a driver’s license or kicking our heels in the doctor’s office. But more often, we fritter it away ourselves. Scrolling from one depressing article to the next or crushing candy or sneering at some celebrity’s fat thighs.

And yet, while half the world goes mad for bitcoin, no one seems to care nearly as much about their time. Part of the reason bitcoin has value is because there is a finite amount of it. Unlike US dollars, unlike other world currencies that can simply be printed any time the government feels like it, there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins. That’s part of what makes bitcoin deflationary, the value constantly rising as supply fails to meet demand.

You can say the same thing about time. Your minutes and your hours come from some mysterious source and flow through the pinch point of the present, then disappear forever. Each one is nonrecoverable once it spent. We know no one’s making any more of them. The only difference is, unlike bitcoin, we don’t how many hours we have left it. We don’t know how many we’ll get.

Mortality drives us all a little bit crazy

We all know this has to end someday. We all cope with it in different ways. Some of us — me included — tend toward trying to pack every moment with as much as we can. I’m doing it now. Dictating into a headset while I drive along the highway, watching an orange pool of light from the setting sun slide slowly down the flanks of the snowcapped mountains.

Productivity is seductive. It’s nice to make use of that time, a way to pack more hours into the ordinary twenty-four we’re all allotted.

But after a while, productivity can become its own kind of trap. If you spend every hour of your life doing something, you never get to spend any of it just being.

No other animal lives like this, except maybe the brainless slaves in the anthill. Lions spend most of the day sleeping. Chimps spend a huge portion of their time having sex. We’re the idiots who rush around trying to fill every minute with something, even though our lifespans vastly exceed those of any animal of comparable size and metabolism. We already get about twice as much life as we should. Somehow, it’s never enough.

You need to protect your time

It’s the most valuable thing you’ll ever have. You can always trade time for more money, but it’s rare that you can work that equation in the other direction. And every minute you spend on tedious tasks or placating the desires of others is another minute that’s lost to you forever. A minute that could have been used to fill your heart with something meaningful, but was instead thrown away as though you’ll always have more. You will, until you don’t. One day, maybe abruptly, the clock will stop. No more minutes left to mine.

Being productive is one way to maximize your time. Finding those hacks and shortcuts that let you get more done in less time. Dictating articles in the car, for example.

But you’ll never appreciate your time properly until you learn its true value. To not squander it on empty tasks. To spend it doing the things that make you live, the sources of joy you’ve hopefully managed to find in this world. Whether it’s reading a good book or pulling weeds in the garden or just spending time with your loved ones. If time is for anything, it’s that.

No one reaches the end of their life wishing they made more money. Mostly, people wish they had had more time. So be careful how you spend it while you have it. Once it’s gone, there’s no getting it back.

All proceeds from this article will be donated to Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers.