What time wears.

We spend our time making money

and our money chasing happiness.

But in the time spent trying to buy happiness,

it is lost in the investment of time.

I have a watch. It doesn’t keep time.

It’s a nice watch, but the battery is dead.

The watch is flashy and brings many compliments,

but the hands never leave 1:02 p.m.

I wear the watch, but sometimes I believe

the watch wears me.

I pick it up and put it on because

even though it does not tell time,

it gives the appearance of importance.

It cannot measure my life,

but it convinces others that my life is being measured.

If time stands still and money is void of happiness,

why are our lives spent chasing time and money?

We chase possessions

and call it progress.

Losing time means losing money.

Losing money means working more.

Working more means losing time.

Our neighbor buys a boat.

We want a boat —

but ours must be larger.

A larger boat costs more money.

More money costs more time.

More time costs more life.

We lose our days earning the thing

that proves we have no days to spare.

We finally buy the boat,

dock it like a trophy,

polish it on Sundays

between workweeks.

But we cannot enjoy the boat.

We are too busy paying for it.

The water waits.

The sun waits.

Our lives do not.

Why do we spend our years

chasing possessions

to impress others

with money

we sacrificed our time to earn —

when time

was the only wealth

we ever truly owned?

My co-worker bought a new house

in the country club.

My house is just fine,

but it isn’t in the country club.

All the important people live there.

I want to live there too.

So we buy a house we cannot afford

to impress neighbors we do not like.

Thirty years of payments

for rooms that feel too small,

too staged,

too careful to be lived in.

We mow lawns we never sit on.

We wave at strangers

whose names we never learn.

We measure worth in square footage

and silence in monthly installments.

We live like guests

in our own lives.

All to belong

to a place

where we do not belong —

to impress people

we do not even like.

We spend our time

earning money

to buy things

meant to impress people

who are not thinking about us

at all.

Our lives become receipts.

Proof of purchase.

Evidence of worth

displayed in driveways,

wrapped around wrists,

mortgaged into silence.

We trade hours for objects,

objects for approval,

approval for a feeling

that never quite arrives.

In the end,

our lives are summed up

not by what we loved

or whom we held,

but by what we hoped

others might think

when they looked our way.

And even then,

they are only

thinking of themselves.

In the end, we will look around at the lives we built —

the houses too large to feel like home, the boats that rarely touched water,

the watches that measured everything but what mattered—and we will

wonder when living became something we scheduled instead of something

we did. We will realize we spent years performing success for an audience

equally exhausted, each of us trapped in our own quiet competition,

mistaking admiration for connection and status for belonging.

And when the noise fades — when the payments stop, when the neighbors

move, when the things we chased become things our children must sort

through — what will remain is not the square footage, the brand names, or

the applause we imagined in other people’s minds.

What will remain is the time we traded away.

The dinners we rushed.

The sunsets we missed.

The laughter postponed.

The moments we assumed would wait.

They did not wait.

And in that silence, we will finally understand:

we were never poor in possessions —

only in presence.