Time Is Equal for Everyone, but Never Fair

Did half the year just disappear? Wasn’t it New Year’s a minute ago? I touched on that feeling before in Janet’s Law — How to Counter Time Feeling Shorter as You Age — the idea that a year feels shorter as you accumulate more of them. Today isn’t about that law itself. It’s about a different angle I landed on after sitting with it for a while.

Time is equal, but it’s not fair

Every one of us gets the same 24 hours a day. In that sense, time is equal. But I don’t think it’s fair.

The same 24 hours becomes an investment in someone’s future and gets simply consumed by someone else. For one person it’s a stretch of challenge; for another, it just drifts by on autopilot. Depending on age and circumstance, the weight those 24 hours carry changes too. Everyone is handed the same quantity of time, but its value, density, and meaning vary completely from person to person. That’s why I think of time as equal, but not fair.

Time is also an invisible deadline

This one’s a heavier way to put it, but I think it’s genuinely true. We live 24 hours a day — and at the same time, we’re spending down 24 hours of however much life we have left. Time, in that sense, is an invisible deadline.

I don’t think you need to spend your days anxious about this. But forget that time is finite, and it’s easy to slide into “someday.” When will you actually start that thing you keep meaning to learn? When will you take that leap? When will you reach out to the person you keep meaning to see? “Someday” is a convenient word, and a genuinely dangerous one in the face of a limited amount of time.

Maybe it’s not that you have no time — it’s low resolution

Lately I’ve started to wonder whether “I have no time” often really means the resolution on how I’m spending it is too low. Not knowing where the time went, priorities staying vague, aimless phone scrolling creeping in, dragging through something out of sheer momentum while exhausted — in that state, time just dissolves.

The opposite state — a clear sense of what to do now, a clear reason for resting, and a clear decision about what not to do — makes the exact same 24 hours feel completely different in density. You can’t manufacture more time, but you can raise the precision of how you use it. That connects to what I wrote in Anything But Absolute Yes Is a No — Essentialism in Practice: deciding what to cut, before deciding what to keep. That’s the first move toward raising your resolution on time.

The busier you are, the more worth writing down how you spend it

If you want to treat time as something worth protecting, putting it into words helps. What am I doing today? What am I deliberately not doing today? Which single hour today matters most? Writing even that much down changes how time looks to you.

Time is abstract, and abstract things slip past unmanaged unless you pay deliberate attention. So write it down — turn it into something visible. That’s almost the inverse of the “write it and forget it” pattern I described in Why Your Retrospectives (KPT) Don’t Stick — Fixing “Write It and Forget It”: logging how you actually spend your days, consistently, leaves you something concrete to look back on when you ask “what did I even do this year?” Things that stay vague in your head gain an outline the moment you put them into writing. That’s true of technical learning, and it turns out to be just as true of time itself.

Closing thoughts

Janet’s Law explains why a year feels shorter as you age. But instead of just accepting that feeling, turning your attention to how you actually spend your 24 hours changes your relationship with time a little.

Time arrives in equal amounts for everyone, but its weight is something only you can create. When you feel like you don’t have enough time, don’t reach for a way to get more of it — reach for a way to raise the resolution on how you’re using it. Decide what you won’t do. Put today’s use of time into words. Just that shifts how you face the invisible deadline underneath it all.