(This is an encore of a post first published on November 10, 2011)

What if money didn’t exist anymore? What if it was no longer the medium of exchange?

What if, instead of money, time was our currency?

This is the premise of the Justin Timberlake movie, In Time.

In the movie, everyone who is born lives to age 25; and is then allotted just one more year. A clock, ingrained on each person’s forearm, starts counting down to zero.

Zero is the moment of death.

People earn more time by working. The harder and longer they work, the more time they earn. People expend time by buying groceries – and lattes. Time is traded between friends and loved ones. And stolen by thieves.

Such a commodity has time become that it is publicly traded on world exchanges.

People who have only a little time are poor.  They live from minute to minute, day to day, barely getting by. The poor, those without time, rush about in frantic efforts to survive, hoping to scrape enough together to live another hour, or another day.

The rich have amassed great surpluses of time. They live palatial lives in walled cities, guarded carefully against the masses who threaten to overthrow their comfort and occupy their streets.

Time is controlled and manipulated. It favors the smart and the quick and those of the manner born.  It is dominated by the powerful. The rich get richer; their years accumulating into decades and centuries.

For the poor, the clock runs out.

Even for a die-hard capitalist, In Time challenges significant assumptions and raises troubling questions: Shouldn’t everyone have equal access to time? Why should the “rich” have more time than the “poor?” Shouldn’t there be a redistribution of time so that everyone has an equal amount? Why should the few live long lives at the expense of those many who are less fortunate?

Of course, there are those who have worked long and hard for the time they have saved. They are rewarded for their tenacity and creativity,their intelligence and ingenuity.

And then there are those who squander their time; and piss it away.

The movie forces us to confront the ultimate truth of our lives: money doesn’t really matter; time is our only currency.

It’s all we ever really have.

How we spend our time makes manifest our being in the world; it is our legacy.

At the end of the movie, Timberlake’s character is asked how much time he has left.  He looks at the clock counting down on his arm and says, “Just a day. But think of what we can do in a day.”

Each day, a new gift.

What can you do in a day?
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