The American Dream goes something like this:
Go to college.
Get a career.
Meet a lifetime partner.
Buy an affordable home (with the picket fence.)
Raise a couple kids (with that lifetime partner.)
Save for your kids and yourselves.
Retire.
Pay off mortgage, sell home for hefty profit.
Chill and travel for 15-20 years on fixed income.
Die with dignity.
Now let’s look at every single one of those items through the lens of 2026 and tell me this: should we all just get fucked?
Seriously though: since when was it supposed to be this hard? Every single one of these items is either financially precarious or wholly unattainable for the majority of the U.S. population. Without getting into a political or financial system diatribe, was it really supposed to work like this?
Some, many even, will say yes. And that may be true. But what absolutely is true is that it’s not just money that is responsible for sending our psyches into overdrive. It is also time. Yes, they are related and operate together like an amoeba and its pseudopods: growing, morphing, dancing, and ultimately engulfing the world around them. Time is money, they say. But is that a healthy way to live life? For every moment we have a semblance of freedom we must be thinking about the financial influence or implication? That if we really do want to attain the American Dream, we must be exploiting every minute of every hour of every day for our checking accounts?
Truth is, many of us feel that way. Truly. I work for myself. That awkward dance is real for me, and it comes with real choices that do truly impact my bottom line. But sometimes it’s less the bottom line than drawing a line that matters.
I have realized that simple time management really does make a difference in creating space. While it is spectacularly unsexy to consider Google Calendar a billboard for things like “take a walk” or “have sex” or “read”, it can be deeply relieving to know that you have created a written, thirty minute home for a desire or respite. It’s different than what we consider an online calendar or a to-do list to be for: a list of all of the things that cost money, suck our willpower, or take away from anything we’d rather be doing. This act is a simple way of saying, simply, this thing does matter. It is important. I need it, just as much as something that provides me money, or costs it.
So, the next time you open your calendar to figure out where you are subjected to take the kids on your weekend morning, or errand you have to run after work, or whatever life-sucking, self-consuming activity you have to forfeit your time and energy for, considering purposing a new color for space. Thumb dragging thirty minutes, even if it’s simply for “lock myself alone in my room”, never felt so good.