Billable Hours

Because we try, as Americans, to let everything be market-driven, the pressure is on everyone to make every minute pay. Can you figure out how to get paid for almost every waking minute? Wow, how about every sleeping minute?

Most of us can’t figure out how to make nearly every hour a billable hour. The problem is that people with little money are deemed worthless in a market-driven society. If it hasn’t happened to you, consider yourself lucky. It has happened to most of us, some more than others.

Americans are riven by conflicting forces. The union movement gained momentum in a period when the American capitalist ruling class was exploring ever more flamboyant leisure habits as industrial production methods generated unprecedented fortunes. The contrast with the life of the working stiff was too obvious to hide.

With a few concessions, the wealthy owners created – albeit grudgingly and gradually – a working class with leisure. But, by continuing to let money work its magic, the overlords and the underlings have waged a seesaw battle ever since, the privileged trying to maintain privilege and the grunts trying to retain some measure of a humane schedule and a chance at some recreation of their own.

Fortunes are not maintained simply by sitting on a stack of money. A wealthy person must either tend his own affairs or hire someone to tend them. So even the rich person has to make sure that money keeps coming in. Of course the more money you have, the easier it is. Money attracts money.

This magnetism can work in reverse for the poor schlump who doesn’t know how to corral the stuff. Look how many big lottery jackpot winners end up back in debt hell within a couple of years. Their money ran off to play with other people’s money and never came home. The adept business person knows how to separate fools from money without a single pang of conscience. In a market economy, the losers feed the winners and die off.

What makes this predation less obvious is that the losers seldom die immediately. They go somewhere else, find something else to do. Perhaps some of them even hit the mix right and prosper the second or eighth time around. But some of them end up living and dying on park benches.

Most of us do not end up with either extreme wealth or extreme poverty. Take nothing for granted, of course, but the daily grind is made of small decisions. Our need for billable hours may be the strongest driving force behind our deteriorated physical condition. It also leads to the American addiction to work.

Work is an acceptable addiction. It’s even praised. Work hard, save your money and you just might get a few years to slow down and contemplate beauty, or rebuild your battered physique before you get dumped in a grave. Maybe you’ll score big-time and get to lighten up well before old age. Whatever you do, don’t slow down before you hit that financial finish line.

No one’s paying you to exercise unless you are a professional athlete. Your school-child games have become another form of career placement. If you don’t earn the right to be fit, you’d better forget about it. We need you at work. If your work hours leave time for any other activity, you probably ought to think about a second job. Keep those hours billable. It’s not easy come, easy go. It’s hard to come by and easy to piss away. And the less you have, the faster it drains.

To choose another path in such circumstances is to die for a principle. Yet that is what you must do. All around you are people who have made that choice obvious, whether they are military personnel who have agreed to risk death as they hunt and kill the nation’s enemies or the fanatical attackers who kill themselves for the sake of killing others. What is less obvious is the constant string of losers in the marketplace who have chosen to try to spend their time a little differently, accepting the market death that comes from voluntary surrender.

Anyone who chooses a job less lucrative or a craftsmanship level higher than merely adequate has chosen market death. Basic costs spiral upwards, health care is for those who can afford it, more willing strivers shoulder their way in and bolster the company’s bottom line. The fool who chooses quality time may well discover how high a price tag it carries. Yet still some of us try.

Do we deserve the scorn, derision and neglect of the addicted workers? Do children raised by such people simply have unrealistic expectations of what is possible in life?

Good fortune is like a thunderbolt, striking a few, unexpectedly. But lightning strikes certain places more than others. People can put themselves in the way of a strike by going to where it strikes most often. Yet even in those places the electricity does not flow all the time. Let the dreamers gather in hope. They may simply live their lives in obscurity, watching the voltage illuminate others while it passes them by. When living your dream, be prepared to die chasing it.