---
title: If you didn't need money, what would you do with your time?
description: Interview · About Me · Question 10
section: mind
tags: [interview, about-me]
genre: reference
stability: stable
lastUpdated: 2026-04-17
url: https://fardiniqbal.com/docs/mind/interview/about-me/if-you-didnt-need-money-what-would-you-do-with-your-time
---


I've thought about this question so seriously that I wrote a ten-page essay about it at two in the morning.

I would train jiu-jitsu every day. Not to compete, though I would. To be on the mat, in my body, solving the puzzle of another person's weight and leverage, where there's no phone, no screen, no existential dread. Just the immediate physical problem.

I would read the Western Canon. All of it. Plato, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Nietzsche. I'm already reading Plato's Trial and Death of Socrates and Steinbeck's East of Eden. I'd do it properly, with a pen, in a chair, with no screen anywhere near me.

I would play guitar in a band. Write songs. Perform live. I'm learning Romance de Amour right now. Music is one of the purest creative desires I have, collaborative creation with other human beings making something beautiful and audible.

I would write essays. I have two sitting in my head that I haven't written yet: "An Attempt to Find the Axioms of Jiu-Jitsu," which applies first-principles philosophical thinking to grappling, and "On Why Love Needs No Reason," which is about the irrationality of love and the failure of explanation.

And I would grow food. Cook for people. Have long dinners where nobody checks their phone. Throw parties where people come because they want to be in the room, not because they're networking. I want the solar punk life. A farm, a family, nature, books, honest conversation.

Everything I build professionally is scaffolding for that life. I use the machine with my eyes open, for a finite campaign, with the intention of walking away when the scaffolding is no longer needed.