Perhaps the greatest economic privilege is not having a great deal of money, but having enough time to decide what to do with your own life. For decades, we have associated success with income, property, consumption and the ability to acquire things. Yet much of that money comes from exchanging our time and energy for work. We then use what we have earned to try to recover some of what we gave away: holidays, retirement, services that save us time or the possibility of stopping work altogether. There is a contradiction in this model: we spend a large part of our lives accumulating the resources that are supposedly going to allow us to enjoy life later.

Time is the one resource we can neither recover nor accumulate for the future. Having the freedom to decide how to use it, without having to make every hour produce an economic result, may represent a much deeper form of wealth than the accumulation of money. This does not mean ignoring the importance of financial security or idealising the absence of work. It means questioning why we have made productivity the centre of our existence. Perhaps we should measure our prosperity not only by what we own or earn, but also by how much of our lives truly belongs to us.