I Miss the Version of Me That Had Time

A few weeks ago, my son asked me to come see something. I don’t remember what it was. A Lego creation perhaps, or maybe a drawing. Children create things with the urgency of people who believe nothing is more important than the moment they are currently living in. Adults are different. Adults create calendars.

I remember telling him, “Give me two minutes,” because I was replying to a message. The message wasn’t important enough for me to remember today, which is perhaps the point. My son waited.

Children are remarkably patient with the people they love. The message got sent, the conversation ended, and the world continued spinning exactly as it would have had I replied ten minutes later. But that moment stayed with me because it forced me to confront a question I had been quietly avoiding: when did I become so available to the world and so unavailable to my own life?

When I was younger, I thought success would buy freedom. I don’t know exactly where that belief came from, but it seems to be the default setting for ambitious people. You work hard, build something meaningful, earn enough money, create stability, and eventually arrive at a place where your life belongs to you. The formula sounds logical. In reality, life has a way of hiding the fine print.

What nobody tells you is that success often rents your calendar before it pays you. The very things you build to create freedom gradually begin competing for your attention. One client becomes ten. One responsibility becomes twenty. One opportunity becomes a thousand tiny obligations dressed up as progress.

I have spent most of my adult life building things. I helped grow a manpower business. I co-created a mental health venture. I wrote books. I built a speaking career. I pursued a PhD. I accepted leadership roles. I became a husband, a father, a son with ageing parents, and a professional whose phone rarely remains silent.

None of these things arrived by accident. I wanted them. That is what makes this observation uncomfortable. The pressures I carry are not evidence of victimhood. They are evidence of choices. Good choices, mostly. Meaningful choices. But life has a strange way of charging hidden fees, and one of the hidden fees of ambition is that it quietly consumes empty space.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that empty space is one of the most underrated assets in the world. When I was twenty-five, I had less money, less influence, less wisdom, and considerably less certainty about what I was doing. Yet I had something I rarely possess today: margins. I had afternoons that belonged entirely to me. I had train journeys spent staring out of windows without feeling guilty about it. I had evenings where there was nothing scheduled, nothing expected, and nothing urgent. At the time, I treated those moments as ordinary. Looking back, they may have been one of the greatest luxuries I ever possessed.

Morgan Housel once wrote about what he called the “man in the car paradox.” When we see someone driving a Ferrari, we assume we want the car. What we often want is the admiration we think the car generates. The object becomes a symbol. I think busyness works the same way. We admire busy people. We assume a packed schedule means significance. We see someone rushing between meetings and subconsciously conclude that they must be important. Yet nobody actually envies the calendar itself. Nobody wakes up wishing for more emails, more deadlines, more obligations, and more interruptions. We don’t want busyness. We want what we think busyness says about us.

A few years ago, I spent time at a wellness retreat in Bengaluru, Jindal’s. People often assume those places are about food, detoxification, or weight loss. Those things happen, but they are not the point. The real withdrawal is from stimulation. The first few days felt strangely uncomfortable. No constant notifications. No endless checking of emails. No compulsive need to know what was happening everywhere, all at once. Then something unexpected happened.

My thoughts became audible again. I realized how thoroughly I had filled every available gap in my day. Waiting in line became scrolling. Sitting in an airport became replying to messages. A quiet evening became an opportunity to catch up on work. Every empty space had been occupied before it ever had the chance to become meaningful.

As a psychotherapist, I have noticed that many people who seek help are not suffering from a lack of information. They are suffering from a lack of reflection. They know what is wrong. They know what they should do. They understand the theories, the frameworks, and the advice. What they don’t have is the time or space required to process their own lives. Anxiety often looks like overthinking, but sometimes it is simply a life moving too quickly for the mind to catch up. Burnout is not always about working too hard. Sometimes it is about living without pauses. Grief becomes heavier when there is no room to feel it. Joy becomes forgettable when there is no room to notice it.

The strange thing is that I do not miss being younger. I don’t miss uncertainty. I don’t miss financial stress. I don’t miss the mistakes that came from inexperience. What I miss is having enough unclaimed hours to belong fully to whatever I was doing. I miss reading without wondering how many unread emails were waiting for me. I miss writing without calculating deadlines. I miss conversations that wandered nowhere important. I miss afternoons that did not need to justify their existence. Most of all, I miss the version of myself that didn’t instinctively treat every free hour as an opportunity to be productive.

Age changes your understanding of wealth. In your twenties, wealth looks like money. In your thirties, it often looks like growth. Somewhere later, if you are fortunate enough to notice, wealth begins to look like attention. The ability to be present. The ability to focus on one thing without constantly thinking about the next. The ability to sit with your child, your spouse, your parents, your work, or your own thoughts without feeling pulled elsewhere. Money remains important. Achievement remains meaningful. Purpose remains necessary. But time is the currency all of them quietly spend.

Perhaps that is why the version of me that had time feels so valuable in hindsight. He had less than I do now in almost every measurable way. Yet he possessed something I am still trying to reclaim. He understood, without realizing it, that not every hour needs to be optimized. Not every silence needs to be filled. Not every opportunity deserves a yes. He understood that life is not experienced in milestones. It is experienced in moments. And moments, unlike money, cannot be earned back once spent.

Four Lines Before You Leave

I chased every mountain that stood in my view,
Built dreams out of deadlines and ambitions I knew,
Then my son asked me softly, “Can you sit for a while?”
And I learned that time leaves before money by a mile.

If this resonated with you, clap for it, share it with someone who has been too busy building a life to fully live it, and follow for more reflections on psychology, ambition, fatherhood, relationships, and the hidden emotional costs of modern success.

Dr. Sheetal Nair (DSN) is a psychotherapist, entrepreneur, author, TEDx speaker, and observer of modern life. He writes about ambition, identity, fatherhood, relationships, mental well-being, and the strange things we lose while chasing the things we think we want.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.