Justin Timberlake movie reminds us time has value

Popology Lessons by Kris Fisher How much time do you have? How much do you need? No matter your answer, you probably don’t have enough.  We hear it all the time and I’ve been saying it myself a lot lately: There’s just not enough hours in the day. My brother would disagree with that statement, saying that time is a human-made construct. While he’s not wrong, this is the life we live. We all live by the rule of time.  There’s a 2011 movie starring Justin Timberlake called In Time. The movie features a group of actors who have become pretty big stars: Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy, Olivia Wilde, and Johnny Galecki, just to name a few. Big stars now but, at the time, still finding their footing in Hollywood. Time, it would seem, has served them well.  The movie itself is all about time. It is set in a world where time is currency. Not too far off from our society if you ask me. The difference is these characters actually had a countdown to how much time they have left right on their arm. You could add to or take away from that timeline depending on what you were trying to buy. A cup of coffee costs four minutes of your life, while Timberlake’s character bought a Jaguar for 59 years off his clock.  I remember first seeing the movie and thinking the premise was brilliant. The execution left a little to be desired but, it’s worth watching. It certainly puts certain things in perspective. In the movie, Timberlake’s character is perpetually time-poor, living with only one day on his lifeline at a time and desperately searching for more time. Time, he finds, is fleeting.   Time is a funny thing and can mean so much to many different people. On the day I am typing this some pretty amazing things happened, all a little longer ago than expected. For instance:   In 1988, the famous James Brown police chase took place.  In 1991, Nirvana released “Nevermind.”  In 2017, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers played their last concert, performing at the Hollywood Bowl.  I’ve always been fascinated with time and what it does to our lives. Five years ago, for instance, I was out of radio and resigned to being “retired” from the industry. Today, I’m back at the radio station I helped build - and an empty nester. If you had asked me if any of this this was in the cards, I would have probably laughed. What a difference a few years make.  Oddly enough, with my empty house and secure employment, my time feels more valuable now than ever. Available time is at a premium and what I do with that available time is carefully scheduled. I guess that makes it not really available at all. I read somewhere that the happiest people have time to be bored. I feel that. I couldn’t tell you the last time I was bored. I currently, like Timberlake in In Time, am living one day at a time, desperately searching for more time.  Of course, we don’t live in a Hollywood movie, and we certainly don’t have our life counting down on our arm. It could be another 20 years; it could be another 20 minutes. I’m not sure I would want to know. But the theme of the movie is still very real. How valuable is your time and how do you want to spend it?   I recommend In Time. It’s not the greatest movie, but still worth watching, if only to see all these big name - and high salary - actors early in their careers. Today, they would demand such a commanding price tag that the production cost would both astounding and prohibitive - maybe as much as 13 years.  Kris Fisher, Columnist