Win with the Time Money Equation!You don’t own possessions----they own you!---- Gerard O’Donovan ………possessions exhaust us------Bruce Chatwin In my experience, the main reason parents give for not cooking for, or eating with their children, is that they don’t have enough time. Time is money, that crass quip we used to say in jest, is now the tyranny that rules our lives. We work to get money for all the things we need to live and all the things our children need and it all takes up so much time, that we have none left for home-activities like cooking. So we calculate it is more time-economical to buy a take-away, or some ready-food, or take the children to a cheap fast-food place (I refuse to call them restaurants!) We figure that in the hour we would spend cooking, depending on our wages, we could earn between twice, to ten times the cost of paying someone else to prepare our food. But not everything can be measured in money and when we start thinking like that, we ourselves become as crass as the time is money quip. It is self-evidently a false calculation as it does not factor in all the financially unquantifiable benefits of cooking for our family. But we are in a bind and only try to rationalise our situation because we feel we have no choice. Many things that affect us financially are not within our control. We have to run faster and faster, on the rat-race treadmill, just to keep afloat. It takes more and more time to earn the money we need. But some things we can change. The time-money equation has two sides and we can look to the side of the equation that is within our control. It figures that, according to mathematical logic, if we are the victims on one side of the equation, we must hold the power on the other side. I wrote above ‘we work to get money for all the things we need to live and the things our children need.’ I wrote it this way because this is the diktat by which we all think we must live. However, as Mick Jagger once pointed out, most of the things we say we ‘need’ are not needs at all, but ‘wants’. We don’t need two cars per family, three holidays, four televisions, designer clothes for the children, the latest mobile phone upgrade and a house makeover, just because everybody else is getting one. If having any of these things means you don’t have the time to cook for and eat with your children, then the time you spend earning that money is wasted. However, if you reduce your wants and only spend money on your needs, you give yourself the gift of time. Make time work for you! Do the maths and turn the time-money equation on its head! Time = Money If we decide we need less things and have to spend less money to keep everything going, then we create more time for the really important things, like our children, like cooking for them, eating with them, spending time with them, knowing them, things that are so valuable they are priceless. The chef Jean Christophe Novelli once said “I come from a family, we were very rich, we had everything but money.” It was a witty remark containing a profound truth. Novelli’s background was very humble, but his mother always managed to cook lovely food with what she had and as a result, he never felt deprived. He speaks very fondly of his mother and like most of the world’s great chefs, it was Maman who inspired him to take up the trade. If we do some ‘lifestyle accounting’ perhaps we could work out a better balance sheet and like Novelli, as if by magic, manage to feel richer with less money! To do this, we need to understand the profit and loss concept in terms of our quality of life, rather than in monetary terms and our power to consume. Instead, we should ask the following pertinent question: What is a gain to our lives and what is a drain? We tend to think about buying things for ourselves as a gain, getting something new that will satisfy a desire we have. But we could equally think of every purchase as a loss to ourselves. The loss of the time it took to earn the money to buy that shiny new thing----that actual chunk of our life, our energy, our freedom, the possible time we might have spent with our children. Just considering the price and not the overall cost to our lives, distorts our thinking and makes us slaves of consumer-desire. Ask yourself how many hours away from your children is a new car going to cost, for example? So, is it really a gain, or a loss to you, when you finally get to park it in your driveway? If you train yourself to think like this about every expenditure, I am certain you will question the wisdom of some of your spending habits. Instead of thinking what advertising has trained you to think, namely, I'm worth it! you will start to ask Is it worth it? every time you feel tempted to satisfy a transient desire for something else you don’t actually need. And instead of chasing the runaway train of your children’s transient desires for unnecessary things, you can take back control of what you spend on them too. You can set boundaries and teach them the difference between what they need and what they want. What they probably need is to have you around more and not another expensive technological toy. Chasing the train of their every desire just trains them how to become consumer-fodder as adults, the wage-slave mugs who chase every fad with their hard-earned cash, making smarter people rich. In a world where advertising is so powerful and pervasive and the corporate culture rules so relentlessly, children need to learn that we don’t really spend money when we buy something, we spend life, our life, our time that it took to earn that money. To have some autonomy over their own lives, they need to know the difference between wants and needs, when to spend and when not to, and when to just say No! So, set a good example and improve your own life by doing a thorough lifestyle inventory. Make a list of all your family spending and think deeply about each item. Ask whether it is a necessity and if not, is it worth spending time away from your children for? Is it worth being too exhausted to cook for them, or too long at work to eat dinner with them? Some people do their lifestyle inventory and make very dramatic changes----‘down-shifting’ or ‘opting out’ of the rat-race. Often it involves a move to the countryside, where they can grow their own food, put a halt on the consumer lifestyle and buy some time with their children. But this is not for everybody. Some of us have city jobs and city lives and don’t want to give them up. We don't want to go to a total self-sufficiency extreme, admirable as it may be. We just want a bit more time. We can improve the quality of our lives quite substantially without dramatic change. If we want time though, we have to create it, and it is possible to do this if we down-shift, in smaller ways, by rewriting the time-money equation of our lives. And down-shifting doesn’t have to be forever. When our children are born, it seems like our lives will be fixed with all the constraints of child-rearing forever, but it won't and even after the first few years, things get easier. We only have young children for a very short time. They only need us to be there for them during those short fly-by years and when our job is done, we can go back, full-tilt into the rat-race, if we want to. As well as doing the right thing for our children, we may well be benefiting ourselves and paradoxically, our careers, when we down-shift. According to a new study, it may actually be more cost-effective and better for our careers, if we pace ourselves better and spend more time with our families. ‘Stockbroker Syndrome’ is the phrase that has been coined to describe the increasing numbers of people who are suffering complete burn-out as a result of working too hard and denying themselves the natural balance in life that we all need. Many people today, not just high-earners like stockbrokers, have no time for their children, or their spouse. They fall in front of the TV in the evenings with a pizza, or TV-dinner and recover from the demands of their working life by zoning out. They are not able to have any meaningful interaction with their children, who are left to their own devices, playing computer games, or watching other TVs in their bedrooms. In the long term, this is unsustainable for individual careerists and is not economic for society. While the corporate workplace gets its worth, squeezing every bit of profitability out of the worker, the state eventually picks up the bill in long term sickness benefit when the worker literally burns out, or becomes ill, in one of many ways that can be traced back to exhaustion and stress. A better-paced career with a better work-life balance is more sustainable and will help you keep your career going for longer. Over your possible working lifetime, you may actually earn more, by cutting down on the hours you work while you have the demands of a young family to cope with. Cooking and eating with your children is a way of healing the imbalance that may have crept into your life and warding off the possibility of your becoming a casualty of Stockbroker Syndrome. If you are in this category, think yourself lucky---at least you have the choice to down shift. My real sympathy is for those millions of low-paid workers, mainly across the U.S., who are not stockbrokers, but are most in danger of Stockbroker Syndrome----the double-jobbing minimum-wage, unskilled workers, who staff Walmarts, fast-food chains, and cleaning agencies, whose desperate predicament was so well documented by Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Nickled and Dimed. These workers, many of them lone parents, are so badly paid they need to work up to 16 hours a day just to subsist. For them there is no good side to the Time-Money equation. They are snookered whatever they do. They have no hope of having any family life, never mind providing home-cooked food for their unfortunate children. This is a problem which requires political will and a human rights solution, because none of the individuals involved have any power to change the lives they are trapped in. In many parts of the civilised, Western world, the children of the poor can only dream about regular, home-cooked family meals and there is nowhere further down for their parents to down shift to. A new organisation in the U.S. called 'Take Back Your Time' is now beginning the long hard fight for basic rights that, thankfully, Europeans still enjoy, like paid maternity leave, holidays and sick days. Its members want their government to take the example of the Scandanavian countries, which are the most economically productive in the world, while at the same time, providing the best social infrastructure and worker's entitlements----proof that a workforce that is rested, is creative and is therefore productive. The general health of Scandanavian society would also suggest that workers who are not stressed to their limits by the problems of juggling work and family life, are better able to fulfil their parental responsibilities and bring up happy functional children who can grow into adults who contribute to society. In the last congressional elections in the U.S., some election candidates agreed with the objectives of the Take Back Your Time campaign, but according to John de Graff, its spokesman, were afraid to support them publicly because they would lose the financial support their campaigns got from the business sector, which was opposed to even the most basic family-friendly entitlements. It could be a long time before the children of America's double-jobbing minimum wage workers, get to sit down for a hot family meal at the end of the day. By that time, they may already be causing havoc on the streets, getting in trouble, getting in gaol. We have a choice to make----we can have a society which respects the needs of children and the duties of parents, like in Scandinavia, where the civilising meal at the end of the day is something which children, across all classes, have the right to expect, or we can have a society where we ride roughshod over children's needs and parents' responsibilities and where children in the margins shoot each other when they go to school. © Copyright.2008. Your-Healthy-Eating-Helper.com. All rights reserved. For enquiries about reprinting this article, please use the contact form by clicking 'Contact' on the Navigation Bar.
Return to Healthy Eating Library
Remember, healthy eating is enjoyable! Blessings on your table! The Good Food Angel.
|
