I like this idea from Jenny Odell that time as a gift is not a zero-zum game. Me giving you time is not, necessarily, a subtraction from my life.
"I’m more sensitive to asking for other people’s time, but at the same time, I feel like I have gotten less selfish about my time. There’s this hoarding mentality that you can get if you subscribe to the idea of time as money: You have your time and I have my time. That’s actually quite isolating and lonely in my experience. People also associate time with energy. Like, “I don’t have time for that” means “I don’t have energy for that.” But I have found recently that sometimes I actually need to give my time to someone else to feel that I have some energy. I had COVID over New Year’s, and I was quarantined in my room and my boyfriend did everything. He cooked, he did all the dishes. And then he just got really sick last week. So we switched. He kept being like, “I feel so bad, I wanna help.” I didn’t know how to convey that I’m happy to do this. It’s not a zero-sum game. This is not a subtraction from my life. We were talking about how that transactional view of time—'you have your time and I have my time—' makes it harder for you to accept the gift that someone is giving you when you are sick."
