The resistance was established as a vast web without a center. Haphazardly, it grew and sprawled, man to man, man to woman, woman to woman, woman to man, and all working to the same end: that daily tasks, especially urgent ones, be shared. Going to the store to buy the staples, say, or fact-checking a work proposal, or escorting an elderly relative home. Apps tracked your progress; each time you did something for someone else, you got more…time. And at the heart of the approach was the fact that the statistics worked with averages. One person might have three free hours, another only thirty minutes, and out of this disparity came the idea of sharing time and tasks, of turning tasks into credit. Modest fortunes were made, decoupled from money and tied to time—but given the mundane nature of the tasks at hand, “modest” was as far as it went.

The concept of credit wasn’t as simple as free time gained in exchange for hours of work. It meant something different for everyone. There were those who had a great deal of time left; others knew their clock was running out. Think of how many people have realized, as their life draws to an end, that the joys of life, the things they’d always longed for, will never be theirs? Then think of all the young people whose otherwise joyful lives are marred by the inescapable monotony of their workdays. Now fathers, uncles, and old men could come and drink from the young man’s cup; could sample joys whose costs the young man could bear but lacked the time to enjoy. And with their hard-won experience, they could take on the tasks that youth finds so tedious, drawing up dull reports and running numbers and spreadsheet-ing schedules, shortening the span of a working life so a younger generation might retire at least a little earlier than their parents. Experience is a comb that life gives you only after your hair’s dropped out, as the wretched proverb has it. Well, no longer. The grandmother, all alone, watching the clock and dying of boredom: so much time to kill with so many children in need of care and tenderness. She could make time for someone else, and they could swap it with others who could then swap back with her: running her errands, fixing up her house. The crowd idling at the bus stop could put their skills to use: editing, darning, chopping vegetables, whatever they were best at; they’d add to their credit and, who knows, might find someone prepared to drive them to that meeting on the other side of town.