Freedom, My Time Is Valuable and My Smartphone Helps Me Keep It
Anton Kreil says time is the most valuable thing you've got, and on that we're completely aligned. Money can disappear and come back. I've watched it do both. Time is different. Once Tuesday afternoon has fucked off, Tuesday afternoon is gone. There's no customer service number. Nobody's sending a replacement.
Which is why I've never understood people who guard twenty quid like it's the Crown Jewels but throw entire years of their lives into the furnace without blinking.
They'll drive forty minutes across town because petrol is three pence cheaper, then spend two hours that evening watching some prick on YouTube unbox a toaster. They'll spend a week comparing car insurance to save sixty quid, then commute ten hours every week for thirty years because apparently that's just what adults do. We have somehow produced a society where losing a tenner is a tragedy but losing Thursday is administration.
I learned this in Britain.
Before I left in 2006, I was living the normal arrangement. Work, commute, bills, property, repeat. Nothing particularly dramatic was happening. That was the problem. The machine didn't need to crush you. It just needed to keep turning.
Salary went into my bank account and within minutes everybody arrived carrying a bucket.
Bank. Council. Utilities. Insurance. Transport. Whoever else had managed to get a pipe connected to the account.
I was basically a human cashpoint with a commute.
And the really clever bit was that I was supposed to consider this security.
Keep working. Keep paying. Keep commuting. Keep feeding the machine. Do it for another thirty or forty years and eventually somebody might hand your life back when you're old enough to make a noise every time you get out of a chair.
What a fucking deal.
I sold my flat in South London and left Britain at twenty eight. I've never regretted it. People occasionally point out what London property did afterwards as though I accidentally sold Apple shares for a packet of crisps.
Yes, the flat would be worth more now.
I would also have spent another twenty years attached to a completely different life.
You can't put that on Rightmove.
Since leaving, I've lived and worked in Spain, Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. I built my GIS company in Seoul. That company became the infrastructure underneath everything else.
That's where Kreil's ideas make enormous sense to me.
Build your own infrastructure.
Don't spend your entire life as a sausage being pushed through somebody else's machine.
My business makes money, obviously. I'm quite fond of that feature. A company that doesn't make money is basically a hobby wearing a tie.
But money isn't the best thing the company gives me.
It gives me control.
I can live near the beach in Vietnam. I can spend part of the year in Kuala Lumpur. I can return to Seoul when something requires me there. I can go back to Britain to see my family. The business doesn't require me to sit in one chair under fluorescent lighting for forty hours a week so everybody can reassure themselves that I'm working.
That chair is one of the most expensive objects on earth.
People sit in it for thirty years.
That's where my definition of wealth changed. When I was younger, money mattered because I didn't have much of it. That's what money does when there isn't enough. It stands in the middle of the room wearing a flashing hat.
Once there's enough, time becomes much louder.
I can always make another pound.
I can't make another Wednesday.
So far Anton and I are getting along beautifully.
Then he says ditch the smartphone.
No.
Absolutely fucking not.
My Samsung S26 Ultra is one of the reasons I can sit near a beach in Vietnam while running a company in Seoul.
Why would I throw that away.
That's like buying a washing machine and smashing it with a hammer because somebody else spends too much time watching the drum go round.
The phone isn't the problem.
The idiot holding it might be.
There's this fashionable idea that smartphones are digital heroin and we're all helpless laboratory rats pressing the Instagram lever until our brains leak out through our ears. For some people, perhaps that's true. I've seen them.
They're everywhere.
Two people go to dinner together and spend the evening staring into separate screens. Occasionally one shows the other a video, presumably to confirm that both are still alive.
People walk down pavements staring at phones with the navigational awareness of a wardrobe falling downstairs.
I've watched people scroll through hundreds of photographs of complete strangers while sitting beside actual human beings.
That's not a smartphone problem.
That's a fucking discipline problem.
My phone is a tool.
A very useful one.
From Vietnam I can communicate with people in Seoul, access information, deal with business issues, check documents and keep the machinery moving. From Kuala Lumpur I can do the same thing. If something needs my attention, the office is in my pocket.
Twenty years ago, running a company from another country would have involved laptops, hotel internet, international phone calls, piles of paper and some bastard fax machine making noises like a goat being strangled.
Now I can do half of it while drinking coffee.
And I'm supposed to replace that with a Nokia 3210 because Dave from accounts can't stop watching TikTok on the toilet.
Fuck off.
My smartphone doesn't steal my freedom.
It helps finance it.
It also keeps me connected with my family back in the depressing little cesspit island that is the UK. I can be thousands of miles away and speak to them face to face. That's extraordinary when I think about how international communication worked when I first started travelling.
The problem comes when the tool becomes the landlord.
That's when the rent starts getting expensive.
If every buzz makes your hand dive into your pocket like Pavlov's dog has been issued a debit card, the phone owns you.
If you wake up and immediately ask Instagram what everybody else had for breakfast, the phone owns you.
If you can't sit through a meal, conversation, train journey or bowel movement without checking notifications, you've basically paid a thousand pounds for an electronic shepherd and volunteered to become the sheep.
But throwing the phone away doesn't make somebody free.
That's treating the symptom by setting fire to the patient.
Freedom is deciding what gets access to my time.
That's the bit of Kreil's argument I care about.
My business gets some.
My family gets some.
My friends get some.
Things I enjoy get some.
And sometimes I waste some because I'm a human being, not a fucking productivity robot. I don't believe every waking minute needs to be invested in building an empire. Sometimes I want a beer. Sometimes I want to watch rubbish. Sometimes I want to sit beside the sea doing absolutely nothing.
That's not wasting my life.
That's what I built the bloody infrastructure for.
This is where some of the financial freedom stuff disappears up its own backside. People escape employment so they can become their own prison governor. Every hour must be productive. Every hobby needs monetising. Every book needs improving them. Every conversation needs networking potential.
Christ.
Imagine achieving financial independence and then turning yourself into a branch manager.
I wanted control of my time so I could decide when it was worth doing absolutely fuck all.
That's freedom.
The smartphone fits into that arrangement because it removes geography from a lot of my work. Seoul doesn't need my physical arse sitting on a chair for the company to function. If there's something I can deal with from Vietnam, I deal with it from Vietnam. If there's something I can deal with from Kuala Lumpur, I deal with it from Kuala Lumpur.
If something requires me in Seoul, I get on a plane.
That's infrastructure.
The phone is one pipe in it.
Kreil is right that time is capital. Where I disagree is the idea that protecting time means getting rid of one of the most powerful time saving devices ever invented.
A smartphone can be a leash.
Mine is closer to a very long extension cable.
It lets me plug my business into wherever I happen to be.
The important thing is knowing when to unplug it.
Right now mine is sitting beside my coffee. Seoul can reach me if something catches fire. My family can reach me if they need me. The rest of the internet can survive without my attention for an hour.