Time is a trap. This is overtly true for the billions of people who, owing to the present arrangement of things – an arrangement that is surely just and wise and not just a continuing handshake agreement between the stupidest of the powers and the meanest of the principalities – must spend nearly every second surviving. The gig worker, like the peasant farmer, wriggles in time as in a giant’s grip.

It is also true, in a far subtler way, for the few billion whose circumstances allow them some illusion of control over their own lives. For this second set of people, time can easily be mistaken for a resource. You can strategize about it. You can say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell.”

The trap is that this is true, to a point, but the location of that point never stops moving. I keep missing it.