Time’s Perfect Equality: Where Money Loses Power
Time is the only tyrant that treats billionaires and beggars identically.
Wealth can buy better healthcare, safer living conditions, premium experiences. But it cannot purchase additional hours in the day or slow the calendar’s progression. Every human gets exactly twenty-four hours daily, approximately 700,000 hours in a lifetime if you’re fortunate enough to reach old age.
This democracy of duration is both comforting and terrifying. Comforting because it’s the one area where inequality cannot exist—we all age at exactly the same rate, one second per second, one year per year. The billionaire’s minutes are no longer than the beggar’s. Death approaches both at identical speed, indifferent to bank accounts, social status, or accumulated power.
Terrifying because it means time is the one resource that’s truly finite and non-renewable. Money lost can be earned back. Health can sometimes be restored. Relationships can be rebuilt. But time spent is gone forever. Every hour wasted is an hour stolen from the finite supply you’ll never recover. Every day poorly used is a day deducted from your total, bringing you one day closer to zero.
The wealthy try to purchase time through proxies. They hire people to handle tasks they don’t want to do—cooking, cleaning, errands, childcare—theoretically freeing their own hours for higher-value activities. They buy convenience: faster transportation, better technology, services that minimize friction and delay. They pay for experiences designed to feel meaningful, as if the right vacation or meal or entertainment could somehow make their hours worth more than others’ hours.
But this isn’t buying time; it’s buying the illusion of time. The hours remain identical in duration whether spent in a private jet or a crowded bus. The subjective experience might differ, but the objective reality doesn’t change—time passes at its fixed rate regardless of how much money accompanies its passage.
The poor, meanwhile, often spend more time achieving the same outcomes. More time commuting via public transportation. More time shopping for deals and bargains. More time waiting—in lines, in government offices, in emergency rooms. Their time has less convenience, less efficiency, less cushioning from life’s friction. But it’s still the same time, passing at the same rate, equally precious and equally limited.
What if time’s equality is the universe’s way of ensuring that wealth cannot buy the most precious commodity of all?
If time could be purchased, inequality would become absolute. The wealthy could literally buy more life—not just better quality of life but additional quantity, extra years stacked on top of their privileged existence. The ultimate class distinction wouldn’t be between those who have and those who don’t, but between those who exist and those whose time has run out.
Time’s equality prevents this final inequality. It ensures that no matter how much wealth you accumulate, you face the same fundamental constraint as everyone else: limited duration, aging at a fixed rate, approaching death at one day per day. The richest person alive will die someday, and all their wealth cannot postpone that death indefinitely. They get more years than some—healthcare and nutrition matter—but not infinitely more, and certainly not years that last longer or pass more slowly.
This creates strange equalizing moments. The billionaire sitting in traffic experiences the same temporal imprisonment as everyone else in the jam. The powerful executive waiting for a delayed flight wastes time at exactly the same rate as other passengers. The celebrity aging in real-time loses youth at precisely the pace that ordinary people do. In these moments, wealth’s advantages evaporate, and everyone is reduced to the same fundamental reality: we’re all just consciousnesses trapped in time, unable to escape its progression or negotiate better terms.
There’s something almost spiritual about this—as if time itself is sacred precisely because it cannot be commodified. In a world where nearly everything has been turned into a market, where almost any experience or object or service can be bought given sufficient resources, time remains stubbornly non-commercial. You cannot buy it, save it, invest it for returns, or transfer it to others. You can only spend it, and once spent, it’s gone.
This makes time the great leveler, the ultimate equalizer, the one domain where democracy is enforced by physics rather than policy. Every hierarchy of wealth, power, beauty, or achievement ultimately dissolves in time’s democracy. The monuments crumble. The empires fall. The accomplishments are forgotten. Time treats everything and everyone as temporary, provisional, destined for erasure.
Perhaps this is why we’re so obsessed with legacy—the desperate attempt to escape time’s erasure by leaving something behind that outlasts our limited hours. We write books, build buildings, have children, create art, anything to project ourselves beyond our finite duration. But even these extensions are temporary. Eventually, everything succumbs to time. The books are forgotten, the buildings collapse, the children die, the art deteriorates. Time wins every contest, claims every prize, outlasts every challenger.
And yet, despite time’s tyranny, or perhaps because of it, the hours we have become infinitely precious. If time were unlimited, individual moments would have no value—there would always be more. But because time is scarce, because our supply is strictly limited, because we’re all counting down from an unknown total toward zero, every hour matters. Every moment is unique, unrepeatable, literally priceless because it cannot be purchased or recovered.
The beggar’s hour is as valuable as the billionaire’s—not in what it can accomplish or acquire, but in its fundamental scarcity. Both have the same amount. Both face the same depletion. Both will eventually run out. In this sense, everyone is equally rich in time (until they’re not), and everyone is equally poor in time (because it’s never enough).
This equality should change how we think about time, but it rarely does. We waste hours as if they’re infinite. We spend time on activities we don’t value, with people we don’t care about, pursuing goals we don’t actually want. We treat time as if it’s renewable, as if more will always be available, as if the supply is unlimited despite overwhelming evidence that it’s not.
Maybe time’s tyranny isn’t that it treats everyone identically, but that it gives us this equal, limited, precious resource and we consistently fail to recognize its value until too little remains. The billionaire and the beggar both waste time—different activities, different circumstances, but the same fundamental mistake of treating the irreplaceable as expendable.
Time is the only tyrant that treats billionaires and beggars identically. And perhaps that’s exactly as it should be—the one form of equality that cannot be corrupted, the one democracy that cannot be bought, the one resource that remains fairly distributed even in an unfair world. Not because it’s generous, but because it’s absolute. Not because it cares about justice, but because it doesn’t care about anything. It simply passes, indifferent and impartial, giving everyone exactly the same amount per day and taking it back at exactly the same rate, until eventually it takes everything and everyone returns to the equality of non-existence from which we briefly emerged.
