Earlier this year, I spent six weeks touring the world - staying in amazing properties, shopping, and dining very well in places I have wanted to visit for years. Looking back, though, it was not particularly enjoyable.

Why not? Because I didn’t have the luxury of time.

Every destination was a one or two-night affair, and I must have packed my luggage dozens of times.

By way of contrast, I have just ended a month-long stay in a small town in the north of New Zealand. It was the middle of winter, and it didn’t have the beauty of Zanzibari beaches (not at this time of year, anyway) or the refinement of Florence, but I had a wonderful time unwinding and enjoying a leisurely pace of life.

It’s often been said that time is all that we have. No matter how much material wealth we have, we’re all limited to 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Who would accept a billion dollars in return for giving up all free time for the rest of their life? Certainly not me.

Please don’t make the mistake of interpreting this as a lecture against money - far from it. Money is a wonderful resource, and comes in very handy every day. Without time, though, money can’t do much to improve quality of life. What’s the point of millions with no time to enjoy them?

Many upwardly mobile professionals - young and not so young, affluent and not so affluent - are trapped in a cycle of working long hours in order to afford possessions and experiences they don’t have time to really enjoy. Three or fours weeks of leave in a year, with the nose to the grindstone for the remainder? That doesn’t sound like much fun. This is true of people at all levels of wealth - it’s a question of the nature of one’s relationship with time and money, rather than an issue of absolute wealth.

As Rolf Potts points out in his excellent book ‘Vagabonding’, many people think of long-term travel as an unobtainable dream. Sometimes, this is based on the expense - in fact, traveling can be as cheap or expensive as we choose. It’s the time required that’s not negotiable. Love the idea of spending a month traveling around a country that interests you, but just can’t see how to make it work? I’ll wager it’s the time commitment that holds you back, not the cash required.

Thoreau commented more than 100 years ago that the middle and upper classes tend to create for themselves ‘gold and silver fetters’ - assets, financial commitments and so on that make it necessary to work almost every day of almost every week in order to sustain them.

I’m not advocating asceticism, and I haven’t given away all of my worldly possessions, but it’s definitely worth being aware of the trade-off many of us make between money and time - a truly non-renewable resource.

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