Time Is Money and Why We Give It Away

For a long time, the phrase "time is money" sounded to me like a simple piece of advice, the kind repeated so often that it no longer invites scrutiny. Use your time well. Do not waste it. Make it productive. When I came across the topic "Time is money—but whose?", I found myself thinking not about economics textbooks, but about a film I had watched recently: Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru. It is a quiet, black-and-white film from 1952, set in postwar Japan, and on the surface, it seems far removed from contemporary debates about overwork. Yet few works I have encountered linger so insistently on what it means to give one's time to work, and what remains when that time is gone.

Using Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru as a case study, in this essay I will argue that the power struggle behind overwork lies not in overt coercion, but in how social and institutional systems define work as the primary source of moral worth—encouraging individuals to surrender their time willingly in exchange for financial security, while obscuring who ultimately benefits from that exchange.

I didn't finish Ikiru feeling sad. I finished it feeling accused. The film ends with a man dead and a playground built in his place, but the moment that stayed with me comes later: a group of bureaucrats sitting around a table after his funeral, speaking earnestly about change while papers continue to move quietly from desk to desk. Nothing stops. Nothing breaks. The office absorbs the interruption with ease. Watching that scene, I realised why the phrase "time is money" suddenly felt insufficient. Time, the film suggests, is not taken from us. It is given—patiently, proudly, and often in the name of responsibility. The question is not whether time becomes money, but why we are so willing to hand it over.

Ikiru follows Kanji Watanabe, a lifelong civil servant in postwar Japan. For decades, Watanabe has worked in the same municipal office, performing tasks so routine that even he cannot remember what they achieve. Early in the film, a group of women come to the office asking for help to clean up a polluted neighbourhood. They are passed from department to department, from one desk to another, until the request dissolves into procedure. No one refuses them outright. No one raises their voice. And yet nothing happens. Time disappears—not dramatically, but efficiently.

Watanabe is not portrayed as overworked in the modern sense. He is not frantic or visibly exhausted. His overwork is quieter than that. It takes the form of decades surrendered to a job that demands presence rather than thought. When asked about his life, Watanabe explains it simply: he worked for his son. He provided. He did what was expected. The explanation lands without challenge, because it sounds right. And that is precisely what makes it dangerous.

Overwork, Ikiru suggests, does not survive because people are forced to work. It survives because it feels moral. Watanabe is never threatened into obedience. He is rewarded with legitimacy. The system offers him a clear script for what a good life looks like: stability, endurance, provision. To deviate from this script would not merely be risky; it would feel irresponsible. In such a world, giving one's time to work is not experienced as loss. It is experienced as care.

From an economic point of view, this is a remarkably effective arrangement. Watanabe's time is steadily converted into salary, pension, and eventual inheritance. The transaction appears fair, even generous. He is compensated. He is secure. And yet, when he is told that he is dying, he realises something unsettling: he cannot remember a single piece of work that felt necessary. His time has been fully accounted for—and yet his life feels largely unclaimed.

This is the moment where "time is money" begins to reveal its limits. Money can be stored, transferred, and inherited. Time cannot. And yet the system behaves as though converting time into money is enough. Watanabe's years become savings. His presence becomes provision. Even his family relates to him largely through what he will leave behind. The film does not present this as villainy. It presents it as logic. When a life is defined through work, it becomes legible mainly in financial terms.

Only after confronting death does Watanabe begin to spend time differently. He chooses to push through the same bureaucracy he once served in order to build a children's playground on neglected land. The project offers no promotion, no security, and no future reward. It exists entirely outside the logic that governed his life. That is why it matters. For the first time, his time is not being stored for later. It is being used now.

This act is not heroic in the conventional sense. It is slow, frustrating, and largely thankless. But it exposes something important: meaningful action appears disruptive precisely because it cannot be easily absorbed by institutional routines. The playground resists being turned into paper, procedure, or deferred value. It demands presence.

And then Watanabe dies.

The film's most honest moment comes after. His colleagues gather, speak solemnly about his determination, and briefly promise to change. For a moment, it seems possible that something has shifted. Then the meeting ends. The papers resume their movement. Responsibility circulates. The office returns to itself. The system does not need to oppose Watanabe's example.

This is where Ikiru becomes more than a story about one man. It becomes an uncomfortable study of how overwork maintains itself. The problem is not that people fail to see its cost. The problem is that the cost arrives too late and too privately to challenge the system that benefits from it. Overwork succeeds because it disguises itself as care—for family, for duty, for the future. By the time that disguise wears thin, most of the time has already been spent.

So, when we say "time is money," we should be more careful than the phrase allows. Time may become money, but money does not give time back. And the exchange is rarely neutral. Ikiru leaves us with a question that refuses resolution: if a life can be given away so completely without ever feeling stolen, then whose time was it, really?