Beyond Time and Money
An invitation to explore the intricate calculus of creating a life
"An adult life...is a slowly emerging design, with shifting components, occasional dramatic disruptions, and fresh creative arrangements."
― Jill Ker Conway
The nonbinary truth of creative decision-making
Navigating the emerging, shifting, adjusting and arranging of adulthood is a tricky business in the best of times, and in this distinctly not-best time of “dramatic disruptions” in our political/economic/cultural/environmental context, it is downright formidable.
The strategies for decision-making offered by productivity culture are woefully unhelpful and even dangerous for those of us who understand ourselves to be actively creating our lives and work.
The old capitalist binary “Time is Money” is based on the false premise that are the only things of value and that both are scarce and finite resources. The practice of selling our time for a wage sets us up to imagine that our key decisions in life revolve around a single axis of choice: Do we want to have more time and less money? Or more money and less time?
As creators rather than producers, our calculations are far more complex. Within the context of an unknown, but not unlimited lifetime, and a need for financial sustainability, we also tend to be acutely aware of other important factors that figure into our assessments - factors like:
energy - how much energy do we have? what renews and regenerates our energy and what depletes it?
self-sovereignty - how much sense of freedom and control do we have over what we do with our days?
devotion - to what values, pursuits, or commitments are we devoted?
responsibility - for whom are we responsible, and what are their needs?
aliveness - what brings us a sense of joy in living?
If we add time and money to this list, we’ve got a set of seven factors that create complicated tensions and trade-offs in the calculus of our decision-making.
Here’s a collection of five snapshots that offer a sense of how these different elements are at work in the adaptations and emerging designs of five different creators.
What the hell, let’s start with me…
Snapshot: The Strange Emptiness of “Full-time”
As most self-employed people do in times of financial stress, I’ve found myself flirting lately with the idea of a full-time job. I look longingly at those sweet sweet benefits (healthcare! paid time off! vacations!) and imagine the relief of handing over the risks of doing business and the burden of managing me to someone other than myself.
But then comes the wave of dread and panic, and I learn anew that “full-time” doesn’t match the deep patterns of my energies or my values.
After a couple of decades of living outside of a full-time structure, just the thought experiment of returning to “full-time” makes me aware how much of my joy in living is tied to a sense of self-sovereignty and a certain feeling of spaciousness in my day. I can see vividly that full-time means losing the freedom to make simple, but life-sustaining decisions for myself about when I sit down to work, eat, or rest. I love being able to linger an extra 20 minutes over breakfast if I’m moving slowly or didn’t sleep well the night before. I adore being able to space out for a while in the afternoon and metabolize the intensely concentrated work I am best at in the morning. I’ve learned that I thrive on the fluidity, flexibility, and malleability of time divided among multiple enjoyable projects.
But, my antipathy towards the full-time construct goes deeper than just a list of preferences for how I follow my energy or how I feel in time. It is also connected to my sense of WHY I work. Without being fully aware of it, I seem to have developed, over these years, what the songwriter Scott Avett called a “covenant with my creativity.” I have devoted myself to creating, and that is no small thing.
So, at this particular turning point in my life, I’ve concluded for now that, for all its shiny promises, “full-time” for me is too big a price to pay. The answers to my financial questions will have to be found in an arrangement of work and life that offers a more generous balance of energy, devotion, self-sovereignty, and aliveness.
Snapshot: The Cyclical Gravity of Lambing Time
Some weeks ago, I told you about my client, the fiber artist who was awash in sheep and seeking to halve her flock…
Well, this time of year is lambing time, when all of the pregnant ewes give birth within a week or two of each other. So far, my client has welcomed 30 lambs, one of whom was rejected by its mom and requires bottle feeding every few hours.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been supporting her in choosing to make a firm break with her studio life during this time. Though she is devoted to a studio practice and has made a commitment to show up for it daily, lambing time requires that she step outside that routine completely, with no guilt or self-recrimination.
Lambing time requires that she give herself over to the needs of the lambs (and the demands of the houseguests and visitors that come to help with the lambing process). Lambing time is a periodic disruption, tied to the cycle of a year on the farm, that she knows will pass, and I suspect that returning to her studio practice will feel all the sweeter for having made a clear separation from it during these weeks.
Snapshot: Writing Time Is Not All the Time
A second client, a fiction writer, has been experimenting with declaring regular official “work hours” as a way to return some balance to her life. When she is cranking on a project, she enters a deep flow state in which awareness of the clock and self and others all disappears. She can easily find that she has written all day without moving or eating, or written all night, upending her sleep schedules and leaving her exhausted and off-kilter.
Earlier in her life, this pattern of work worked well enough and satisfied her delight in a certain kind of drama, but now she is wanting to experience a new balance between her devotion to her work and her responsibilities to her physical and mental health, to the people she loves, and to the more varied and sustainable life she craves. She is testing the possibility that a ritualized clock-time schedule might help her create a healthy container around her intense creative energies, so that she can be a better steward of her whole life.
Shapshot: Advocating for Recovery Time
At 23, my daughter has been thriving in her first significant job. She loves the work she’s doing and the people she’s working with, but as a neurodivergent person with high sensory and energetic sensitivities, she was finding that a full-time schedule was not allowing her the amount of recovery time she needs to calm her nervous system and renew her energies. She was constantly feeling exhausted and depleted, and was taking more and more sick days, which made her worry that she was letting people down and becoming a “problem employee.”
So, after a year of building the trust and respect of her boss and colleagues, she recently mustered up the courage to advocate for herself and worked with her employer to create a 30-hour-a-week schedule that gives her the downtime she needs. She’s been feeling much better more of the time and has a life that feels sustainable. Accepting the responsibility for advocating for her own needs is a huge learning that I suspect will save her life again and again.
Snapshot: Living Fully With Limited Time
My father is living with a slow-moving cancer for which there is no cure. Recently, he’s been grappling with whether to stay on a medication which might (or might not) prolong his lifetime, but also comes with side effects that leave him unable to enjoy or make use of the days he has now.
The choice between more time with less life or more life with less time is intensely personal, of course. For my father, the decision comes down to the fact that he still has creative work he wants to do: projects to complete and teaching opportunities to enjoy. At the end of the day, he is finding that his joy in living is not tied to an extended quantity of time, but to as much time as he can have that includes a fullness of presence and engagement with creative challenges.
An invitation
All of us are reckoning all the time with complicated trade-offs between time, energy, income, self-sovereignty, devotion, responsibility, and creative aliveness.
This week, I invite you to consider:
Is there a decision you are confronting that involves a calculus that involves dimensions beyond the time/money binary? Is it helpful to make visible the other dimensions that are at play in your steering process, including energy, sovereignty, devotion, responsibility, and aliveness?
Is there one or more elements on this list that you are aware of wanting more of or that you are valuing more highly these days than you might have in the past? How might that shift the calculus of your current decision-making?
Is there a factor that matters a lot to you that I’ve left off of the list? What else goes into your own creative choice-making?
Upcoming Events
Saturday, May 10. “Chaos, Creativity, and High Sensitivity,” an online workshop with Melissa West. Our series exploring creativity and neurodiversity continues with this offering designed for anyone finding that the chaos of this time is leaving them frozen, fractured, or otherwise unable to function creatively. Learn more and register.
Joy must be on the list! Maybe that equates to your aliveness.
And I have an 8th criterium;
Whether it's online or offline.
I have been too quick to go for things that amp up my screen time.
Not seeing both how taxing it is, as well as that it takes me away from real connection offline, or offline connection to my work.