Freedom and Convenience
When something breaks in our home—an electronic device, a sump pump, an oven, or the washing machine—most of us lack the knowledge to fix it. Our default reaction to something ceasing to function is to simply discard it and replace it with the newest, best item we believe we can afford.
While it’s true that many people try to find a local technician and check repair costs before immediately purchasing a replacement from a big-box store or Amazon, the result is often the same. The quoted repair costs are frequently prohibitively expensive, and the most rational, pragmatic solution appears to be buying something new and throwing the old item away.
This decision cycle results in the clutter of a life lived by disposal: the garage with unused items piled on top of each other, surrounded by impulse purchases of all shapes and colors; or that one room which, to everyone's tacit agreement, has become an extension of the junk pile; or perhaps the storage unit we rent miles down the road because our home no longer has space for all the things we don't use. To buy is cheaper than to repair, and thus, we conclude, it must be the smarter choice.
In a world where wealth is largely defined by material possessions—money in the bank, real estate, expensive degrees, or cronyism—this disposable consumerism seems perfectly rational. But we must ask: Are we questioning this shallow rationality hard enough?
The modern cost of living forces us into this cycle. Land is prohibitively expensive, and the average home price continues to climb. A generation already burdened by the cost of education now faces decades of financial obligation, often before even acquiring a basic shelter.
Debt, in this context, is a form of slavery because it takes your time away from you.
This concept of time as the ultimate possession is not new. In his work Slavery and Capitalism, historian David McNally highlights that for enslaved people on Atlantic plantations—whom he terms the “chattel proletariat”—the core struggle was for Time. When they fought to control a few evening hours or Sundays, they were fighting for the autonomy to cultivate their own crops on "provision grounds."
This reclaimed time was their only path to non-commodified existence, allowing them to engage in "life-making" and build community independent of the master’s economic demands.
They were fighting for the freedom to use their time for themselves.
Today, while we are legally free, the crushing weight of consumer and structural debt achieves a similar effect: it forces us to surrender our time to the necessities of capital reproduction rather than social reproduction.
The sheer scale of our financial obligations dictates that we must work, and work intensely, simply to pay the principal and interest, leaving little time, energy, or money for genuine autonomy or skill-building. Our time is extracted, not by whips, but by interest rates.
We don't challenge this system because trying to opt out is difficult. For those who want to learn how to repair things, the first barrier is fear. We believe we could never fix a garage door, rewire an electrical plug, or take a dishwasher apart.
Then, even if we summon the audacity to try, the initial attempt often punches us back very hard. The frustrating cycle of failure—until you learn the skill, like how to wire a DC circuit or to install your solar panels—is enough to make most people stop.
This is often why we quit, add a new mess to the garage pile, and retreat to finding the cheapest replacement available online. We make our decisions by measuring the cost in dollars and seeing how the balance fits within our monthly credit card limit.
But if we were to translate that same cost into the hours of our lives required to earn that money, the image would morph into a whole other kind of thing.
Suddenly, that $500 replacement appliance isn't just a number—it's 25 to 50 hours of labor required to earn it. That's time you could have dedicated to your family, friends, learning a new skill, or simply enjoying 30 to 60 hours of true, unburdened freedom. When viewed this way, the true cost of convenience is revealed as a sacrifice of your most valuable, non-renewable asset: your time.
Consumerism promises that buying convenience will free your time. Consumerism also begets debt, a self-inflicted form of slavery that originates from defining wealth by what one possesses, not by how much time, skill, and autonomy one truly has.
