Yesterday I went to see the movie, “In Time” with Justin Timberlake. I’m not a big movie theater person (costs are nuts), but I thought the concept of this movie was interesting and I needed to get away from looking at pictures of me. LOL! I have to find a picture for the back cover of my book and the publisher’s website…of course one where I don’t look like I’m harboring a week’s worth of food in my cheeks, my aging skin isn’t drooping in too many places and my nose isn’t taking up most of the picture. But that’s another problem for another day—back to “In Time”.
The movie is about people living off time instead of money. Time is the currency. When you’re born, your clock is set to zero until you hit your 25th birthday and then the one-year clock (given to everyone) starts up. No one ages after 25 years, but you have to earn time in order to live (when your clock runs out, you immediately die). The rich are immortal while the poor die young.
You pay with time. If you want a car, it could cost you 5-years of your life. In the movie, timekeepers make sure the poor remain poor and the rich continue to live. The rich raise taxes and time costs whenever they feel like it. Each social class is in a particular time zone, and when you attempt to cross to the next time zone, you have to pay extensively to prove you belong there.
When we got out of the movie, we talked about how it isn’t that much different from the struggles in the world today. The corporations buy enough minutes to live long, greedy lives while the poor to middle class struggle to survive each day. Zip codes divide our economic status and taxes and costs are raised whenever, many times without reason.
It’s scary to think that technology and government control could make our seconds, minutes, hours and days our currency. We then started thinking about how government and corporations could control (more than they do now) what we eat and do in life. What if a beer costs a day of your life? Or a cigarette costs you a week of your life? What if a cheeseburger costs five days of your life?
If you wore the seconds, minutes, hours and days on your arm, and saw it decrease with every purchase, would you think twice about what you do in life, and if so, what would you stop doing?
Tick tock and ageless,
Bea
