Thoughts on work, time, and value
We talk about money when we talk about work.
About salary, about purchasing power, about productivity.
More rarely do we talk about what is actually used to pay.
Time.
Time is the true currency of our society.
It is finite, cannot be increased, and is non-refundable.
And yet we treat it as if it were negotiable—
as if we could get it back later.
We trade lifetime for security.
For housing.
For provision.
For the promise that things will eventually become calmer.
This agreement is silent.
It is not signed, but lived.
Those who question it are seen not as critical, but as unrealistic.
Yet it is historically young.
The idea that most of a life consists of work,
interrupted by short periods of recovery and concluded with a pension,
is not a law of nature.
It is a model.
It emerged in a time when physical exhaustion was visible
and recovery was necessary to preserve labor power.
Work has changed.
The model has not.
Today exhaustion is quieter.
It no longer resides in muscles, but in the nervous system.
In permanent availability.
In compression.
In the absence of transitions.
The day no longer begins slowly.
It switches.
From private to function.
From care to availability.
Recovery is not part of everyday life,
but an exceptional state that must be organized.
Vacation serves less as freedom
than as the restoration of work capacity.
Overtime is considered commitment.
Not a symptom.
And it is rarely done to get ahead,
but to keep up.
To finance normality.
The added value of this efficiency is real.
It is measurable.
But it is not evenly distributed.
From the stagecoach to email,
from fax to permanent digital presence,
work has become faster, not freer.
More productive, not shorter.
The profit has been generated—
it just has not arrived where it would have eased daily life.
Now we stand at the beginning of the next level of efficiency.
Artificial intelligence will accelerate work further.
It will simplify processes, prepare decisions, save time.
The question is not whether this is possible.
The question is what happens to the time that is freed.
And who decides.
Because time does not stand alone.
It is embedded in other currencies:
power, money, health.
Those with little power pay more.
With more time.
With greater strain.
With slower recovery.
Health becomes a silent side bill.
Strain generates costs
that must be borne privately.
Therapy, exhaustion, compensation—
financed from the same income
that strain made necessary in the first place.
Thus a circle closes
that is stable for the system,
but costly for the human being.
This column is not an indictment.
It seeks no one to blame.
It describes connections
that we often perceive as individual,
even though they are structural.
Perhaps work is not too much.
Perhaps it is simply distributed incorrectly.
And perhaps change does not begin with new models,
but with the willingness
to see time again for what it is:
Not a resource.
But life.