The human condition is a burdened one. We constantly need air, food, water, shelter, and sleep. These “basic needs” are accompanied by the almost-basic needs for physical security, sex, and human interaction. While non-discretionary needs ensure quantity of life, discretionary seeking of meaningful challenges, mastery, and higher purpose aid quality of life.

By needing, we lose our optionality, or the ability to choose from an array of potential options that best suit our goals. The more quickly our needs are met, the more optionality is maintained. Money, fame, and power are forms of stored value, capable of being spent and creating optionality to satisfy our needs. Beyond that, they’re largely worthless. Money can’t buy passion. Fame won’t provide enlightenment. Power can’t give purpose. Therefore, a better measure of wealth is the amount of optionality, or discretionary time, one maintains.

Pre-modern humans had virtually no “free time,” because their needs were time intensive. They worked constantly to secure themselves from hunger, danger, and the elements, leaving little time for anything more. There are two ways to combat this and increase optionality. One is to enslave others, applying their time to your needs. Or, one can engage in an economic system that encourages divisions of labor, thereby increasing total output through specialization. Unfortunately, the current world remains a mix between the two.

If discretionary time is true wealth, then the logical goal would be to maximize it by decreasing our needs and/or increasing our ability to quickly and easily satisfy those needs. This is where our modern culture becomes tripped up. We turn the means into the end, trading our time for money, fame, and power, thereby guaranteeing we’ve lost the very object of our pursuit. This is compounded by our inclination to seek meaning in comparative advantage, leading us to accumulate unnecessarily and increase our perceived needs. The result is a double-whammy of false needs and goal blindness, causing us to run a constant race where the finish line is by definition unattainable.

This syndrome is no more evident than the plight of the modern professional. He trades his time, not to satisfy his needs and create optionality, but instead to accumulate, consume, and compare, which ironically increases his need to trade his time for resources to pursue those ends. Without free time to pursue deeper meaning, he is left frustrated and anxious while the treadmill spins on.

Stepping off the time-for-stuff treadmill requires a countercultural acknowledgement that meaning is intrinsically derived. A great test is identifying what provides comfort. Recognition, competition, and accumulation are extrinsic motivators in that they require others, while learning, exploring, and mastery all derive meaning from the act itself.

Discretionary time doesn’t mean play time or leisure time. It merely means you have a choice about how to spend it to derive the most value. When asked about how to find happiness, Freud famously said, “love and work.” Most would consider work to be non-discretionary, which could be the problem to start.

In grade school, I remember being asked, “What would you do with your life if you had a $1 million?” Perhaps the better question would have been, “How would you spend your time if you weren’t concerned with meeting your needs?”