When you only have three minutes to deliver an idea worth spreading on a stage as big as TED, every word matters. Especially for a wordy gal like me.

It takes roughly six months of prep to refine your speech before delivering the final version standing on the red circle. As you rehearse, you find which adjectives don’t matter or where you repeat the same idea in two different ways. You wonder whether statistics or human stories will work better to prove your point. You mull and edit, and delete, and rewrite.

You return to the original idea from your application and ask: What is the one thing I need the audience to remember?

My answer? Time.

(Which…is kind of ironic, given that I only had three minutes.)

I submitted “Time is a Civil Right” as my original idea, inspired by the infamous “pursuit of happiness” line in the Declaration of Independence.

I hoped to convey that people’s access to time has never been distributed equally or equitably. But it’s the one thing we all have in common.

I wanted to reframe time scarcity–that suffocating feeling that you’re falling behind–into what it actually is: time poverty.

Time poverty is the condition of not having enough free time for rest, personal care, or enjoyable activities because too many hours are consumed by work, chores, and daily duties.

In other words, not having enough free time to simply live.

Feelings of time poverty has a stronger negative effect on well-being than being unemployed.

Most of us feel like we’re falling behind, and we blame ourselves for a problem that isn’t about personal discipline.

For millions just trying to make ends meet, there literally aren’t enough hours in the day. 

My TED Talk was part of TED Democracy Philadelphia in collaboration with Visit Philly. Their theme was ‘Founding Futures’ to celebrate the 250th anniversary of democracy—so I wanted listeners to feel the historical significance as well.

People have fought for more time before in this country, and they won. The 8-hour day wasn’t a kind gesture. It took over 70 years of organizing to successfully advocate for change.

When you strip away the professional and political platitudes about “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” you’re left with the cold, hard truth.

The Math Doesn’t Math

The federal minimum wage remains frozen at $7.25 per hour since 2009. Minimum wage was never meant to be a “starter wage” for teenagers scooping ice cream over the summer or working at fast food restaurants. It was established during the Great Depression as a baseline living wage to protect workers (including children) from exploitation.

Working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year at that rate equals a gross annual income of $15,080 before taxes.

Even when you zoom out to national medians–around $65,000 a year ($31 per hour) for full-time salaried staff and $48,000 a year ($23 per hour) for all wage earners (part-time, seasonal, and gig work)–the math is still bleak.

The MIT Living Wage Calculator shows that a single adult with no children needs at least $25 per hour to cover basic necessities nationally. That includes housing, food, healthcare, transportation, and taxes. In major metropolitan areas, that baseline easily stretches to $30-35 per hour.

Average rent in the U.S. hovers around $1,700 a month, and the median sale price for an existing home in the U.S. exceeds $400,000.

If you work a minimum wage job, you could work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and still not have enough to cover basic rent for a one-bedroom. If you make the median wage, you’re one flat tire or medical bill away from credit card debt, bankruptcy, and even homelessness.

You cannot budget, discipline, or side-hustle your way out of a widening structural deficit between what a job pays and the cost of living (what a wild phrase to normalize, by the way).

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 10% of households own over 90% of the U.S. stock market wealth. As reported by the AFL-CIO:

S&P 500 CEOs make 268 times more than their average employee. It would take a worker five full career lifetimes to earn what their CEO makes in twelve months.

How Hustle and Convenience Culture Drains Capacity

When a single job can no longer pay for basic survival, the only solution is to work more.

Over 8.6 million Americans currently hold multiple jobs. We glorify this as “hustle culture” and rebrand it as the gig economy.

But trading your health to work 70 hours a week across multiple employers isn’t something to encourage or celebrate.

The reality looks like clocking out of a 9-to-5 desk job or grueling retail shift, scarfing dinner out of a plastic container in a parking lot, and switching on a rideshare or delivery app until midnight. It looks like missing bedtime stories with your kids, skipping doctor appointments because you can’t afford a missed shift, not moving your body for hours, and running on four hours of sleep. Day after day after day.

We are not machines. Our biology demands circadian sleep, nervous system recovery, regular movement, and periods of stillness. When we treat our bodies like industrial equipment engineered for optimal output, we will eventually reach a biological breaking point.

And it isn’t just the hours. It’s the pace. We’ve convenienced our way out of moments of genuine human connection, and our ability to understand and empathize with one another. We put productivity on a pedestal, desperately trying to access just a few more minutes.

But we cannot rely on a “later” that isn’t guaranteed. Time is the one thing we cannot make more of.

The Time Amendment

Millennials and Gen Zs grew up in a fundamentally different economic reality than previous generations. 

We’re staring down a rising retirement age while paying massive chunks of our paychecks into “safety nets” like Social Security that we’ll be lucky to ever see.

The pursuit of happiness inherently requires unstructured, unencumbered time. It requires the freedom to choose how you spend your days.

To reclaim our time, we all need to slow down. We need structural reform. This includes modernizing living wage floors, capping housing costs, and guaranteeing paid leave. This is about restoring human dignity.

And we need a Time Amendment, built on three resolves:

• Time is a Universal Human Right: Access to rest and free time should never be determined by your tax bracket, background, or economic status.
• Joy is the Goal of a Functioning Society: Art, play, and connection aren’t rewards; they are the entire point of existing.
• Rest is Essential Infrastructure: It provides the mental, emotional, and physical capacity to imagine and participate in our shared democratic future.

The pursuit of happiness is a promissory note in gorgeous penmanship. But a promissory note is only worth something if somebody pays up.

Inside an organization, the same holds for productivity. A promise of time back is only worth something when somebody designs the work to protect capacity.

It’s time we stop expecting people to manage their time better and start redesigning the systems that decide how much of our time is actually ours.

Missed my TED Talk? Watch it here 👇