Six hours. It's a long time when you live it minute by minute. Long enough to float down a river. Long enough to tk. Long enough to miss your children.

The six hours spent going down the river were the longest I had been away from my kids in their remembered lives. 

And it was an exceedingly strange experience for all of us. Neither of us could understand why we were not together for those six hours. Olivia stood looking out the door continually asking why I was gone so long. She had no frame of reference to even come up with the idea that I could be gone so long, let alone why I was.

I spent a lot of time on the river wishing my family was with me. I did have fun on the river, I also spent a lot of time in that canoe missing my children and thinking about how horrible it is that most parents in western culture do that every day. Except that they would still be gone at least two more hours after I was already home, children in my lap.

That seems like a horrible way to live. Time poor. 

I much prefer to be money poor. I'm pretty sure my family would qualify for food stamps (we don't need them) and I have no idea how much money I'll make next month. We don't have a ton of stuff. And what stuff we do have was almost all acquired second hand. 

So while I suppose some people would call us poor, I've never thought of us that way. We just prefer to build wealth in time. That way I don't have to work much and I can spend more time with my family instead of working.

The secret to not working much is having an exceedingly low overhead. The less you need the less you need to work. 


I'm not sure how or why, but I very early on came to conclusion that time was the most valuable thing in existence. Once you realize that wealth is in time the value of time becomes self-evident. 

Once that value has been established it follows that you need to spend your time the way you want and for me at least that means with my family. Some people actually like working, I don't.

Or rather I enjoy writing (which is what I do for a living), but I'd still rather be with my wife and kids than write. I write things like this late at night when everyone is asleep. So I make it a point to work as little as possible.




I have the near perfect set of currently most desired privileges. I am white, male, cis gendered, sound body and mind, tech savvy and gainfully employed. I'm so privileged I'm honestly not even sure I have accounted for all my privileges. 

At the same time I get to spend more time with my children than even my equally privileged white maile cis gendered tech savvy peers because I am will to sacrifice a lot of stuff to maintain control over my time. And I mean that literally. I do not buy stuff, which means I do not have to trade as much of my time for money to buy stuff. 





There are I'm sure plenty of people who knew me earlier in life who'd be shocked to know that I have children, let alone three of them. I refused to even discuss children with a long string of girlfriends. It wasn't that I "did not want children" (as if that were an abstract thing you could decide with any certainty), it was that I did not want children at that particular point in my life. 

There were various reasons for this at various points in my life, but the overarching one was I did not see the point of having children if all you did was work all day. Why have children if you were never going to see them? I still think that. 

It took me 10 years of continuous effort to get to a position in life where I never had to be anywhere specific at any specific time. It took a lot of hard work and yes, some luck, as long as by luck you mean editors. And as long as by editors you mean friends. 

I have not yet achieved my dream of financial independence (still working hard on it though), but I at least have no spatio-temporal commitments that take me away from my children. 

Just last week I realized how odd it is for me to be away from them at all, ever. I do not ever have to be. I sometimes am. When I have deadlines to meet sometimes I go to a library or coffee shop and write because I can get done in a few hours what would take a few more if I stayed at home. I have decided over the years that this is generally worth it because it allows me to spend the rest of the day fully present with my kids rather than half working half playing. But even on those days I leave it's rarely more than 3 hours. Never more than five. 

When I went down the river last week I was gone over six, which is longer than I have been apart from them since I went to a weekend conference back when they were six months old and vowed never to do that again. 

In other words those six hours down the river were the longest I had been away from my kids in their remembered lives. 

And it was an exceedingly strange experience for all of us. Neither of us could understand why we were not together for those six hours. Olivia stood looking out the door continually asking why I was gone so long. She had no frame of reference to even come up with the idea that I could be gone so long, let alone why I was.