Let’s stop chasing time freedom. Time liberation is available to us now.
A human-centered reckoning with the clock, capitalism, and the pace of our lives
Welcome to Liberating Time ⏳ A place to examine and repair our f*cked up relationship with time — for humans done waking up behind, rushing through their days, and feeling guilty for moving at their own pace.
When you think of time freedom, what do you picture?
For many, they imagine floating on a yacht, waking up whenever they want to, and never having to worry about anything ever again.
Notice how quickly the conversation steers towards wealth.
This kind of time freedom requires making as much money in as little hours as possible. Escaping the 9–5 job market. Establishing passive income. Retiring early.
That is not accidental. Under capitalism, we’re taught that time is money, thus making time a resource to measure, manage, and optimize with hypervigilance.
In this model, freedom is always deferred. Work hard now, earn freedom later. Push through, delay rest, postpone joy. It becomes a reward for surviving extraction, only achieved by becoming more efficient, disciplined, productive.
This keeps us all cogs in the machine. Under current systems, this type of time freedom appears as the only way. With creative imagination, it’s a mirage.
We assume that once survival pressure is gone, time will stop feeling scarce and stressful. But survival pressure doesn’t disappear.
Even extraordinary wealth does not dissolve urgency, aging, mortality, or the internalized need to produce. Time pressure often just changes form.
This why I’m not interested in chasing time freedom.
I’m interested in time liberation.
Time liberation is not about denying or escaping time. It is about transforming our relationship to it.
How we think about it, feel inside it, and live within it. Where we have leverage, and how we change the circumstances and structures around us that distort it.
Time liberation is a shift away from viewing the clock as a controlling violent authority figure and punitive judge that triggers our most vulnerable self-beliefs. And returns us to the origins of the clock as a tool, a relational reference point, and a container for life.
Liberating time is about saying: “Wait a second… what if I get to decide how I use my time?” And “How might I spend it in a way that works for my body and life?”
While an accessible, liberated vision of time is not a lifestyle template, specific morning routine, or productivity system with better branding, here’s how it might look:
Mind
Liberating our time means we protect ourselves from the harmful stories we’ve bought into about productivity, worth, success, laziness, ambition. We heal the internalized voice that says we are behind. We no longer let a list or tardiness tell us we’re good or bad.
Instead we move through our days with a steady sense of enoughness and peace. And measure our lives by meaning, contribution, and depth. We slow down time through our perception and presence.
We think and plan in seasons, chapters, and generations, instead of reacting to constant urgency. We allow ourselves to be beginners, experiment, and not be perfect the first go.
Emotions
Time liberation is refusing the guilt we feel when we rest, the anxiety of slowing down, the shame of not keeping up with unrealistic expectations, or the grief over time ‘lost.’ Instead, we generally feel enough, content, and at peace.
We allow ourselves to pause, feel, and process our emotions, no matter how long it may take. We celebrate and feel proud of ourselves for what we do. We trust our focus, motivation, and creativity to naturally ebb and flow. We let our excitement and aliveness to lead us.
Body
Time liberation is about coming back to our bodies as our primary clock.
We do the work to check in with self and let our energy and capacity guide our plans, commitments, and day-to-day. Physical care and nourishment (rest, movement, and food) are integrated into the structure of our lives. We acknowledge that our rhythms and needs change as we age.
We release our nervous systems from constantly being in fight-or-flight. We reduce the conditions that create chronic fatigue and burnout.
Spirit
Time liberation offers the space to cultivate practices that anchor us in something larger… art, prayer, play, silence, music, storytelling, dreaming, and experiencing nature without having to earn, monetize, or be ‘good’ at them.
We honor meaningful rites of passage and transitions. And acknowledge we are all mortal and have finite time on this planet.
We see lifecycles of growth, harvest, dormancy, and renewal all around us. We can trust in divine, or natural, timing and allow life to unfold with patience and peace.
Relationships
Time liberation gives us the space to be (imperfectly, but whole heartedly) present with the people we care about. We show up and support each other the best we can through the good, bad, and everything in between moments.
We redistribute labor more equitably. We communicate and respect our different capacities and timelines. We refuse to reduce connection to obligation.
We remember that one person’s hour is not more valuable than another’s. We make space for disabled, neurodivergent, and nonconforming experiences of time, rather than forcing everyone into one narrow standard.
We can volunteer, give back, and participate in our wider communities. And we acknowledge our ancestors that fought and worked hard for the life and time we do have.
Above is a version of time liberation is more or less an individualistic and non linear unearthing that touches all parts of our being – our minds, emotions, body, heart, and relationships.
But when I sit with the vision, and ask where does all this scarcity, shame, guilt, pressure around time originate? And what’s preventing this vision from realizing in our lives?
I for one don’t believe most of us would consciously choose this relationship with time.
It’s the result of having to survive the world we live in.
Capitalism has made many of the of the things that make us human appear to be appear to be luxuries, reserved only for the privileged. However, rest, presence, feeling, play, and community are not luxuries. They are essential to being well. To being alive.
Liberating our time requires us to confront that generations ago, we were forced into into this dysfunctional linear, dominant, extractive relationship with time when we were disconnected from each other, the land, ancestors.
Capitalism has stolen our lives and sense of self, through the clock.
Time liberation requires us to resist decades of man-made pressure, urgency, and time propaganda and reorient trust back to ourselves and each other.
We reclaim our attention from technologies and norms designed to exhaust us. We redefine enoughness and move away from endless growth as a culture.
And to imagine and build alternatives, however imperfect and small. We redesign and bring humanity back into workplaces, schools, policies, and structures.
This is the more attainable liberation we’re imagining and working towards, every day. Not perfectly or all at once. But incrementally across all layers of life. Because while some of these may require money, many do not.
May we remember the agency we have. May we remember that we are active participants who are the stewards of this great resource.
May we remember that time is actually not money. It’s our lives and our lives are ours. And while jobs, systems, and expectations can shape our days, they cannot fully own our spirit and aliveness.
I believe that changing our relationship with time can spark a radical internal and cultural healing. Bringing us back into, or deepening, our relationship and trust with self, others, and the greater collective.
This is what we’ll be doing here at liberating time – examining and imagining new ways of being in relationship with time.
JOURNAL PROMPTS
What does time liberation mean to you?
Time liberation at its core asks: Given your actual life, body, responsibilities, resources, constraints, history, and desires, what would a more humane relationship to time look like for you?
We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
COMMUNITY ACTION 💗
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