What is time wealth?

There's a question I've been sitting with lately:

What does it actually mean to be wealthy?

We tend to have a default answer. Money. Assets. Net worth. The number in the account. We read books about billionaires, study their habits, and admire their achievements. We're told, implicitly and explicitly, that financial success is the finish line. Get there, and you've won.

But here's something that shifted my thinking completely.

Sahil Bloom, in his book The 5 Types of Wealth, asks a simple question that I haven't been able to shake:

Would you trade lives with Warren Buffett?

Think about it for a second. He's worth over $130 billion. He has access to absolutely anyone in the world. He reads and learns for a living. He flies around on a Boeing business jet. By every traditional metric, he's won the game.

And yet, would you actually trade places with him?

Most people, when they really sit with this question, say no. Not because Buffett isn't admirable. But because he's 95 years old. No matter how much money he has, his time is running out. And no amount of wealth can buy that back.

Here's the part that really got me: Buffett would probably give up every single dollar he has to be back where you are today. To have the amount of time that you have left. To be young again, or at least younger.

Bloom calls this being a "time billionaire."

When you're young, you're rich with time. You have decades ahead of you. You have options, possibilities, runway. That's a form of wealth that no bank account can match. And yet, we spend it carelessly, as if it's infinite, as if there's always more where that came from.

There isn't.

This is what Bloom means by Time Wealth: the freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, and when you trade it for other things.

Read that again.

Not how much time you have. But how much control you have over the time you have.

This distinction matters. Because you can be financially rich and time-poor, chained to a calendar that owns you, unable to say no, constantly reactive. Or you can have modest means but deep sovereignty over your hours, your attention, your days.

Oliver Burkeman takes this even further in Four Thousand Weeks. The title comes from a brutal bit of math: if you live to 80, you get roughly 4,000 weeks on this planet. That's it. Not a practice run. Not a dress rehearsal. Just 4,000 weeks to do everything you'll ever do.

His argument isn't that we need to optimize harder. It's the opposite. We need to accept our finitude, and stop pretending we can somehow "get on top of everything" if we just find the right system.

The efficiency trap, he calls it. The more efficient you become, the more demands rush in to fill the space. You're not winning. You're just running faster on the same treadmill.

So what's the alternative?

Intention.

Not doing more. Doing what matters. And protecting the space to do it.

The ancient Stoics understood this. Seneca wrote, nearly two thousand years ago: "We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it."

We waste time not because we don't have enough, but because we act as if we have unlimited amounts of it.

"The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end, that's all there is." — Mr. Carson (Downton Abbey)