Blog
Maya thought it would be simple. After six years at her company — covering shifts, staying late, doing the work no one else wanted — she asked for two hours off. Just two. Enough to walk across the stage at her college graduation.
Her manager said no. That was the moment it hit her: her time wasn’t hers. That shock — the sudden heat in her chest — wasn’t anger. It was life reminding her she wasn’t meant to be owned. It belonged to the company. So she quit on the spot (Ask a Manager).
Half a world away, workers in India were told something even harder. A proposal in Karnataka state sought to stretch the workday to twelve hours, making it normal for a person’s waking life to be parceled and sold (India Today). Around the same time, the global digital company Genpact rolled out a 10-hour workday mandate, warning employees that “non-compliance” would hurt performance reviews (Times of India). To keep a job, people were expected to surrender their time — as if life itself were on lease.
Different places, same story. Once hours are treated like property, people start to feel owned.
In Part II, we are tracing the fictions that hold the Story Lens in place. First came property: land divided, fenced, sold.
This next fiction cuts even closer — not just land, but life itself, divided into blocks of time.
“They pay me for 40 hours.”
“I don’t have time.”
“Time is money.”
We think they’re neutral. But every phrase carries the same distortion: time treated as a possession, something that can be bought, sold, and owned.
Through the Story Lens, time belongs not to life but to the clock.
Counted. Measured. Traded like currency.
To be employed is to slice your life into pieces — forty hours here, fifty there — and hand them over. For those hours, you disappear into someone else’s rhythm. For that stretch of time, you’re not yours. You’re theirs.
That’s the hidden fiction of employment: your presence turned into units of labor, units that can be owned by an organization. You stop being a person and start being a tool on lease.
Why did this story take hold?
At its root is the story of necessary control. The idea that without schedules, contracts, and supervision, people would waste their lives.
Those first clocks weren’t built for curiosity — they were built for control. Bells told monks when to pray, factory whistles told workers when to move. Bit by bit, the rhythms of life were replaced by the rhythms of the clock.
Later, factory owners used clocks to enforce shifts, breaking village rhythms into industrial hours. By the 20th century, the 40-hour workweek was set in stone. Not because life flows in 40-hour blocks. Because control demanded it.
The impact is everywhere. Alarms drag us awake. Lunch bells tell us when to eat. The best hours of the day are sold to structures that buy our time.
Freedom becomes leftovers: evenings, weekends, holidays.
But time itself is not a possession. It cannot be owned or sold.
Time isn’t ticking. It’s breathing — energy moving, attention shifting, and relationships forming.
Flip the lens, and time stops being currency. It becomes flow.
Through the Life Lens, a job isn’t a block of hours — it’s a place of contribution. What matters isn’t filling slots on a calendar, but serving life. Bringing creativity, care, and energy alive.
To give your time is not to surrender it, but to enter into relationship, to co-create something with others. Through that flow, life’s real needs are met — being, meaning, impact, belonging, becoming. Not by clocking hours, but by living them.
That knot in your stomach when someone says you “owe” time? That’s not confusion. That’s life resisting being carved away from you.
And we can live that resistance now:
Each act of resistance is more than defiance. It’s a way of reclaiming time to meet life’s needs — to rest, to create, to connect, to grow.
Every time we refuse to treat hours as currency, we flip the lens back — from time as commodity to time as life unfolding.
The story we inherited casts time as something to be owned and sold. The story we need is to remember it as rhythm, presence, and flow.
Each time we resist the fiction that our hours can belong to someone else, we return to the truth: time is life itself — not owned. Lived.
Time is only the second layer. First, land was divided into property. Then our lives were divided into hours that could be bought and sold. Out of these fictions emerged something stranger still: organizations themselves — companies, institutions, corporations — granted the status of “persons.”
In law, they became more real than the living beings who created them.
That’s where we turn next.
If you’re fine with your hours belonging to someone else — if the story of “time is money” still works for you — then have at it.
But if you feel the weight of imposed alarms and schedules grinding you down, if you know in your gut that your hours are life itself, not blocks to be rented out — then here’s the call: flip it.
Because when we reclaim our time, we reclaim our lives. Not alone, but together. The collaborative economy is about that shift — moving from rented hours to shared rhythms. From selling time to creating life.
What would it mean to give our best hours not to coping or escaping, but to building systems that actually serve us? To invest our time in each other — in housing, food, care, creativity, community?
The clock won’t do it for us. Markets won’t either. It starts when we stop selling the hours that keep us alive and start dedicating them to what makes life thrive.
The question was never whether we have time. We do. The question is — will we keep trading it away, or will we spend it on what keeps us alive, together?