What Is a Time Billionaire? Chances Are You Are One.

The app 1 Second Everyday came out a decade ago this year, and reached its heyday right around 2016. Its premise was pretty simple — users recorded a video every single day, and upload it into its dated slot in the app. At the end of the year, 1SE would splice together a six-minute-ish video, featuring a second from every day of the year prior.

You’d think people would be hard-pressed to remember to film each day, but millions managed to make it all 365 days (or retroactively added credible videos to days they’d missed), and posted their creations online. Before the trend got too played out and fizzled away, these videos were oddly beautiful to watch.

Trust fund kids did trust fund things, of course, stringing together as many helipads as possible. But most of the internet alternated videos at concerts with commutes, with birthdays, with dinners eaten alone. The visual mosaic was fascinating, and I appreciated the quick jolts of audio even more.

The app proved a worthy reminder that a second can pack a punch. On certain days during my 1SE project, I remember struggling to decide when to film — there were too many seconds to choose from. Those were good days.

I thought of that old app recently, while reading about the term “time billionaire” on a Substack bender. The phrase refers to the fact that one billion seconds is equal to about 31 years. The average 50-year-old adult likely has one billion seconds left on the planet, while the average 20-year-old has two billion seconds.

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What is a “time billionaire”?

This term is typically bandied about by self-professed investment superstars — the sort who preach Buffetian patience in LinkedIn posts. There’s a reason for this: the concept of “time billionaires” was actually coined by Graham Duncan, co-founder of East Rock Capital, during an interview on The Tim Ferriss Show in 2019.

It’s fair to say that those who’ve latched onto the phrase are hoping to one day become conventional billionaires themselves. They’re choosing to view their abundance of seconds as a chance to accrue wisdom and compound interest, whatever market declines may arise along the way.

Why we like the concept

If embracing your time billionaire status helps you make a lot of money, that’s great. Do you. But the knowledge is useful in so many other ways, too.

Consider: having a billion of anything is too much for our brains to process. But the average person can make it all the way into middle-age…and still have one billion seconds left to live. Most people I’ve chatted with about this concept had no clue how rich they were in time. We’re used to processing years — we imagine closing in our next decade, we make long-term plans, we worry about how much longer our oldest loved ones have to live. The years seem to fly by. But our supply of seconds — taken as a sum — takes forever. It’s not in our nature to imagine hundreds of millions of grains of sand falling one by one by one.

And those seconds, as observed in a campaign like 1SE, aren’t nothing. They can be extremely memorable, in highly individual ways. Can the same be said for each dollar?

How to use your wealth

It might seem like the most inspired (or most “correct”) way to approach your time fortune is to spend as much of it as possible as well as possible. And there’s some truth in that.

After all, why burn millions of seconds on your couch or on your phone when you could be spending time with family, exercising, reading, cooking or traveling? And why waste some of those seconds sleeping in, when you could be up and at it before sunrise? (This mentality undergirds the cult of the early riser, which we’ve previously discussed.) It becomes easy for enlightened types to look around and surmise that everyone else is wasting the gift of time. In certain cases, they’re right. You can’t get even a second back.

But at its core, the time billionaire philosophy isn’t about fearmongering. It’s about opportunity. It’s about second chances. It’s about understanding that you are rich in something. This isn’t a point of view. It’s a fact — even if you’re deep into retirement age, you’re still a time multi-millionaire.

Sorting socks

Embracing your time billionaire status could help you unravel some stories you’ve long told yourself: about what you’re capable of, or where you’re supposed to live, or who you no longer talk to. If you’re rich in time, how limited can you really be? With a billion seconds in the bank, can you really not learn Spanish, or move to Toronto, or call a sibling?

Recognizing how many seconds you have can make a surprising impact — you’ll learn to treat that lion’s share with more care. A few times in each 86,400-second day, we’d encourage you to recognize the seconds well-spent. Try to invest your seconds in creating more of those moments. By the end of your life, hopefully, you’ll be poor…and fulfilled.

Inevitably, a not-insignificant chunk of these seconds will be spent sorting socks. That’s totally okay. It helps to have a fresh pair of socks when you’re walking your dog, interviewing for a new job or watching your kids graduate.