How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

Bennett opens with a piece of gossip you have probably said yourself. A man with a good job and a regular income, not extravagant, and yet always in difficulties. Excellent flat, half empty. New suit, old hat. He asks you to dinner and it's cut glass with bad mutton.

Everyone can see his problem at a glance: he fritters his income away. Give me half his salary, says the critic, and I'd show him how it's done.

We are all confident chancellors of the exchequer when it's someone else's money. Bennett lets you enjoy that superior feeling for exactly one paragraph. Then he turns it around and points it at the one income you have never really learned to manage.

The newspapers of his day were full of advice on living on a given sum. Readers fought in the letters pages over whether a woman could live nicely in the country on eighty-five pounds a year. Bennett had even seen an essay on how to live on eight shillings a week.

Nobody had written the essay on how to live on twenty-four hours a day. That struck him as odd, because the old proverb that time is money understates the case.

With time you can usually get money. With all the money in the world you cannot buy one minute more than anyone else has, or than the cat asleep by the fire has. Money turns into almost anything. Nothing turns into time.

Why does Bennett say the proverb "time is money" understates the case?

• Money loses its value over the years, but time never does
• Time can usually get you money, but money never buys time✓Correct answer
• Wasted hours cost far more in lost wages than people think
• Hours spent working earn more than money saved by thrift

The conversion only runs one way: time can usually be turned into money, but no fortune buys a single extra minute. The wage-based answers still treat time as a route to income, which is exactly the thinking he says doesn't go far enough.

Then comes the image the whole book rests on. You wake up, and "lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life!"

He means that last phrase almost literally. Philosophers have explained space, he says, but not time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything: with it, all is possible; without it, nothing.

And you did nothing to earn it. Your wages are paid for work already done. This arrives before you have done anything at all, every single morning. That is why Bennett calls the supply of time a daily miracle, and he means the word: something genuinely astonishing that we have simply stopped noticing.

Look closely at the terms of this income and it gets stranger. No one can take it from you; it is unstealable. And no one receives more or less than you do.

Bennett calls it an ideal democracy. In time there is no aristocracy of wealth and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius, he notes, is never rewarded with even one extra hour a day.

Nor is there any punishment. Waste the whole day and tomorrow's supply still arrives in full. No mysterious power decides you're a fool who doesn't deserve time and cuts you off at the meter. It pays out more reliably than government bonds, and it doesn't skip Sundays.

According to Bennett, a person who keeps wasting time will find that the daily supply given to them slowly shrinks.

False✓Correct answer

Bennett insists there is no punishment in the realm of time: waste as much as you like and the full twenty-four hours still arrive next morning. Nobody gets cut off at the meter.