Signs of Wealth: Time is the true luxury and sign of wealth, not money

These days, leisure time is the real sign of wealth.

I mean, if you have a good job that allows you to work from home, you save on the commute, and all the frou frou surrounding it such as having to make your lunches, prepare your outfits ahead of time, and then come home to do all your neglected housework not to mention if you have kids to care for as well.

What poor people don’t have, is time.

They are likely living far away from where their jobs actually are, their commute is a 1.5 hour train ride one-way, and likely don’t have any help at home unless they’re in a community or with a lot of family around them. Or maybe they’re working 2-3 jobs and barely making ends meet from doing so.

Time is a true intangible LUXURY these days.

So how do the rich show that they have time?

Well, for one thing, it is in activities like … making your own bread or your own yoghurt, pickles, jams, roasting things and making meals from scratch from produce grown in your garden to show that you have the time to spend hours doing all of these things you could easily go to a store and purchase these days.

In the past, you would do all of these artisanal activities because you couldn’t afford to go to a store to do so. You simply had no money to go and buy said convenience, and it was far cheaper (as it is today) to make things at home than to buy them pre-made as it had that markup.

As our economy grew stronger, the rich started outsourcing everything – who remembers TV meals as being a big thing in the past because you could afford to buy a ready-made dinner rather than having to make it yourself? Rich people back then bought and outsourced everything they could because they could buy that labour for cheaper than if they did it on their own. If you had homemade food, or homemade clothes, you were considered poor. NO ONE wanted a homemade packed lunch, they all wanted purchased ready-made lunches when I was a kid.

All of these things were done by people and subsequently, poor people since the beginning of time because out of NECESSITY, they had to do it to survive. There was no other option than to grow your own vegetables, and make your own food, but rich people these days, have flipped the script so to speak, to make it their ethos to have a sustainable, eco-friendly garden where they can go and get a fresh heirloom tomato off a vine for instance, rather than going to a grocery store for some generic one.

And what are they showcasing by doing so? It is not just ‘hard work’ in being able to be self-sustaining, but it is that it takes TIME to do all of these things and still have a ‘life’ where you see your kids and family, go to the gym, have hobbies and sleep 8-9 hours a night, while also being able to go on vacation. Oh .. and work at your job.

All of these extra add-on activities take up time you may not have because you have a family, a job that makes you drive back and forth all the time, and any little leisure you have left, is taken up with trying to deal with life (maybe your car needs to be brought to the mechanic), go to the gym, spend it with your kids and/or doing housework or any other life admin chores but not necessarily spending it on IG-ready bread and pickles.

To be able to do all of these things, makes you part of another level of leisure class.