Last week, we talked about The Lazy Tax (or the tax of idleness) in Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth. This week we’ll talk a little more about wasting time. Here is today’s quote:

       But dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of, as Poor Richard says. … If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be, as Poor Richard says, the greatest prodigality, since, as he elsewhere tells us, lost time is never found again …

The Way to Wealth – Benjamin Franklin

Love Life? Then Don’t Waste It!

       If we truly love life, then we’ll quickly realize that when we waste time we are wasting our lives. What counts as wasted time? I can’t answer that question for all people as we’ll all value our time differently. But I think we can safely say any time that passes by when we don’t derive some value from it (however you define that value) is wasted.

       Once we waste time it’s gone. There’s no way to get it back. The average human in the world has a little over 578,500 hours in a lifetime (over 657,400 if you’re American). Waste one of those hours and you can’t really get it back. Sure, you can do things to try to make up for that wasted time. But in truth, there’s no way to recapture the value of the time you have wasted.

       Franklin’s admonishment to us is that we should never waste time—because wasted time is wasted life. If we really want to live a purposeful life and live it to its fullest, we must be on guard against wasting time.

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