Rob Fraser
March 2, 2026
I woke up in a Vancouver hotel room to a text from my friend Rajiv. A link and four words: “You’re trending on Reddit.”
I don’t use Reddit. Why would I be trending?
I clicked the link and saw a screenshot of a tweet I’d posted the day before. The title: “Local entrepreneurs take on BC Ferries.”
Hundreds of comments. All of them ripping me apart.
I opened Twitter and it was even worse. Thousands of replies and quote tweets, tearing me to shreds. For 48 hours I was trending on the platform. The post racked up over five million views.
Let’s back it up. What’s the context here?
I live on Vancouver Island and there are only two ways off: by air or by boat.
The ferry is the default. But it’s a 45-minute drive out of town, you have to arrive early, the crossing takes 90 minutes, and then you’re still an hour from downtown Vancouver, assuming there’s no traffic.
Commercial flights aren’t much better. You’re driving to the airport, going through security, flying, landing at YVR, then getting into the city.
The seaplane is different. Downtown Victoria to downtown Vancouver in 35 minutes. It’s not cheap, but it’s substantially more convenient.
I was headed to Vancouver for my first TED conference and had paid a lot for the ticket. The opening session and welcome party were that evening, and I’d been looking forward to it for months.
I booked an afternoon seaplane, but my flight got cancelled due to weather.
No other planes were going out, so my only option was to cab to the ferry terminal, take the boat, and cab into Vancouver on the other side.
I ended up missing the opening session as a result.
The ferry ticket and cab rides were technically cheaper than the seaplane, but it took 6x longer.
That’s what inspired the tweet.
Did taking the ferry actually cost me $10,000? No, of course not.
It was a hook designed to get engagement.
But in an attempt to articulate my thoughts on the value of time, I used an extreme example. I claimed I value my time at $5,000 per hour.
If only I knew what was coming.
I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on why that post struck a nerve. Why it invoked such a visceral response. Why it went viral for all the wrong reasons.
Here’s what I was trying to say.
We’ve all heard the quotes. “Time is money.” “The only thing you can’t buy is more time.” We’ve all read the deathbed stories about regret over wasted hours.
So yes, you should value your time. And that value will be different for everyone based on circumstances, priorities, and beliefs.
If someone spends an extra hour trekking across town because groceries are 25% cheaper and their budget demands it, I understand. I lived that life for the majority of my adult years.
But as circumstances change, so should how you value your time. You don’t get it back.
So why did the post go viral?
The easy answer is that I came across as an out of touch CEO flexing on the internet. Fair enough. I can see how it read that way.
But I don’t think that fully explains the intensity of the response. People don’t leave thousands of comments and view something five million times because they disagree with a stranger. That level of reaction comes from something deeper.
I think the tweet poked at a wound.
Most people, if they’re honest with themselves, suspect they’re not spending their time well. They feel it in the Sunday scaries. In the years that blur together. In the quiet dread of another week doing something that doesn’t feel like it matters.
But that feeling is painful to sit with. So they push it down. They rationalize. They tell themselves that someday things will be different. That they don’t have a choice right now.
And then some guy on Twitter starts talking about how he values his time at $5,000 an hour.
It doesn’t inspire. It irritates. Because it’s a mirror they didn’t ask for.
I became a symbol. A stand-in for every “hustle culture bro” who ever made someone feel behind. Every founder who talks about optimization while other people are just trying to survive. Every person who seems to have figured out something they haven’t.
The comments weren’t responding to Rob Fraser. They were responding to a character they’d already written in their heads.
The calculus I was describing, assigning a value to your time and making decisions accordingly, is uncomfortable. Not because it’s complicated. Because of what it reveals.
If you actually run the numbers on how you spend your hours, you might not like what you find.
You might realize you’ve spent years in a job that was “safe” but slowly hollowed you out. You might realize you’ve been saying yes to things that don’t matter and no to things that do. You might realize the life you’re living isn’t the one you would have chosen if you’d been paying attention.
That’s a hard thing to face. It’s easier to mock the guy who brought it up.
This isn’t a new idea. Philosophers have been writing about the value of time for millennia.
Two thousand years ago, Seneca wrote a letter called “On the Shortness of Life.” His argument was simple: life isn’t actually short. We just waste most of it.
He observed how people guard their money obsessively but let their time be taken by anyone who asks. How they’ll fight to protect their property but hand over their hours without a second thought. How they spend their entire lives preparing to live, and then run out of time before they start.
“We are not given a short life but we make it short,” he wrote. “And we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.”
Here’s a number that puts it in perspective.
The average human life is about 4,000 weeks. Not 4,000 months. Weeks.
If you’re 30, you have roughly 2,500 left. If you’re 40, you’re down to around 2,000. And that’s if everything goes well. No illness. No accident. No bad luck.
When you see it that way, the abstraction becomes concrete. Time stops being something you “spend” and starts being something you’re running out of.
And suddenly the question of how you value it isn’t philosophical. It’s urgent.
I read every comment. Every quote tweet. I sat with all of it.
Some of it was noise. People projecting, venting, performing for their followers. But some of it was signal.
Deleting it would have been the easy way out. A way to avoid sitting with the discomfort of being misunderstood in public.
Three years later, I’m finishing the thought.
The question of how you value your time isn’t about dollars per hour. It’s about awareness. It’s about making trades with your eyes open instead of drifting through your weeks like you have an infinite supply.
I got publicly roasted. And then I did the work. I examined my thinking. I sharpened it.
So if you were one of the people who tore me apart three years ago, I have a question for you.
Will you do the same?
I’m not asking you to agree with how I said it. I’m asking you to sit with what I was trying to say.
You have 4,000 weeks. Maybe less.
How are you spending them?