A tornado recently swept through my town, leaving a path of destruction in its wake. As with many people in the area, my car was severely damaged by hail. As I look at my damaged car, I feel embarrassment. I feel like I am somehow less of a person today than I was the day before the storm. I’m driving a functional, but visibly damaged car, and that fact alone makes me feel sick to my stomach. Why? Capitalism and the limited amount of time we have to live. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah…I can already feel you groaning about this framing. If you know me in person, you know that everything I complain about always comes back to these two concepts, but it’s an accurate conceptual framework! I feel physical pain at the idea of driving a damaged vehicle because I spent so many hours of my time to buy it.

Time is the one currency that we can never replenish. If I spend dollars, I can get those back. If I use the gas in my car’s tank, I can refill my tank with gas. If my iPad runs low on power, I can recharge it. The ebb and flow of these different resources are part of life. Time doesn’t work like that. While it might feel like you give up some time from one day and then can just go to bed and replenish your stock of time, you can’t. You will never be 10,778 days old again (the current age I am at the time of this writing). You can wake up the next day and have a different day, but you can never get back a day that was already spent. That’s the brutal part about capitalism. Every single day, we trade the most valuable resource we have for the “privilege” to simply exist. When I worked for that car, I was giving up so much incredibly valuable time, and now, I feel like I don’t have anything to show for it. 

I bought my Camry when I was in my early 20s. I saved up for a good down payment, set up a car loan for the lowest possible amount of time to reduce interest, and paid it off early! Anytime I would get a little extra money in my account, I would dump it into my Capital One car loan app. I watched the “amount owed” bar tick down and down until one day, after a long day of work, I sat down and clicked “submit” on the final payment on my car. I had done it. At such a young age, I had purchased the newest car that had ever been in my family (only 5 years old at the time of purchase). I felt like I had put my foot on the next rung on the ladder of upward mobility. As with any large purchase, it came at a great cost.

During that time, I was making between $8.5 and $11 an hour. Factoring in taxes, it took (very roughly) 1,063 hours of my life to pay off that car. That’s 44 FULL days (24 hours) off my life that I can never get back. 44 full days of labor for a car might seem like a great deal, but let’s put that into context. If you were to go to a person on their deathbed and ask them what they would do for another 44 full days with their family, the answer is likely, “anything”. I can’t get that time back now, but at least I USED to have a nice car to show for it.

Let’s talk about the importance we place on the looks of the car that we drive. When we see a nice-looking car, we’re automatically trained to start making assumptions about the person. If you see a person in a brand-new sports car drive up, what do you think about them? You think they have a lot of money. You think they have all their basic needs met to a point where they can afford to splurge on something cool. Above all else, you think their time is worth more money than yours is. This is at the heart of why I am embarrassed to be seen with my car so beat up. When someone drives around an incredibly damaged car, you assume that they don’t have the free money to fix it. That’s true! I don’t have the free money to fix my car. The next assumption that you make is that their time isn’t worth enough to anyone to pay them enough to fix it. You assume that they are less valuable of a person. 

These feelings are baked into us at a young age and serve the people who have the wealth to manufacture and sell cars. If people feel more validated by having a nice car, companies that sell nice cars are going to be doing more business. I recognize that I have fallen for a marketing trap; even knowing this, the sting it leaves me with doesn’t go away. I still feel less valuable and less of a “serious person”. I feel delegitimized in a really foundational way that is hard to put into words. All the upward momentum I was gaining in society feels like it was taken away from me. I got kicked back down where I belong, poverty.

For years, I have taken my car on little photo shoots around town. I would park it in historical downtown, a campus parking lot under a full moon, or next to the Mississippi River. I took my car on these little photo shoots, knowing that this day would come. I knew there would be a day where “life would happen” and my precious car would be damaged in a way that made me this upset. I’m going to miss those photo shoots. I’m going to miss walking out to the parking lot and feeling a sense of pride when I see my car waiting for me. The car is still functional, but it just isn’t the same. 

I know this is all pretty bleak, but I had to vent it somewhere. I hope my reflection helped you think about your own relationship with money, time, and the things you own. This moment has made me rethink the value of labor, the meaning of visual indicators of wealth, and also examine why I’m so scared to “look poor”. Soon, I plan on writing about my obsession with looking more wealthy than I really am and what that could say about my view of the lower class (the class I came from and still belong to).