There was a time when poverty was easy to identify. It was the empty plate at dinner, the torn school uniform, the leaking roof that surrendered to every rainfall, and the impossible decision between paying rent or buying food.
Today, poverty has evolved. It now wears expensive suits, carries smartphones, and smiles in office meetings. It drives through traffic with one eye on the road and the other on a growing list of unanswered emails. It looks successful from a distance, yet quietly suffers from a deprivation that money alone cannot cure. The poverty of time.
It is the kind of poverty that leaves your wallet full but your life empty.
Some people leave home before their children wake up and return long after they have fallen asleep. Parents watch their children grow through photographs and school reports because work demands everything else.
Friends become strangers, not because love has disappeared, but because nobody can find a date that works. Relationships slowly wither under the weight of postponed conversations, cancelled plans, and constant exhaustion.
We have become a generation that schedules life around work instead of work around life.
Somewhere along the journey, being busy became a status symbol.
We proudly announce that we have “not rested in weeks” as though fatigue were proof of ambition. We apologise for taking breaks, feel guilty for sleeping in, and measure productivity by how little time we have left for ourselves.
Rest has become something we believe must be earned. But when did simply being alive stop being enough reason to pause? In Nigeria, this poverty is impossible to ignore.
A worker spends hours in traffic every day, arriving home with barely enough energy to eat before preparing for another morning.
A trader wakes before dawn to secure customers and closes long after sunset, only to discover that rising prices have swallowed most of the day’s profit.
Students sacrifice sleep to balance lectures, assignments, and side hustles because education alone no longer guarantees opportunity. Even the simplest tasks often become battles against inefficiency.
What should take an hour consumes an entire day. Time disappears in queues, traffic, power outages, delayed appointments, and systems that demand patience without rewarding it. The tragedy is that we have normalised it.
We joke about sleeping only four hours. We laugh about never taking holidays. We congratulate people who are “always on the grind,” rarely asking what that grind has cost them. Because every hour spent merely surviving is an hour taken away from living.
The cruel thing about time is that it never refunds itself. Money can return.
Businesses can recover.
Homes can be rebuilt.
But yesterday remains exactly where it was left.
No amount of wealth can buy back the bedtime story you never read, the friend you meant to call, the family dinner you missed, or the quiet evening you promised yourself after “things get better.” Life is happening while we are making plans to start living it.
This is not an argument against hard work. Hard work has built dreams, fed families, and opened doors that once seemed permanently shut. But there is a difference between working to build a life and working until life quietly slips away.
A society should not only be judged by how much wealth it creates but also by how much time its people have to actually enjoy being human; to laugh without checking the time; to sit with loved ones without watching the clock; to pursue passions that generate joy instead of income and to rest without guilt.
Because perhaps the greatest measure of wealth is not what sits in our bank accounts but what remains in our days after the work is done. We often say that time is money. Perhaps we have been wrong all along.
Time is life.
And a society that constantly robs its people of time is creating a poverty that no salary can ever truly erase.
Leave a Reply