Recently Citibank issued a new credit card, Citi Clear Card. No minimum income needed, targeted at students and young adults. While those students above 18 may be happy to be able to get a credit card of their own, even if the credit limit is just $500, and the interest rate is so high they'd die if they defaulted on their payments, there have also been parents complaining about how that would encourage irresponsible spending and how students with no income would have to rely on their parents to foot the bill at the end of the day.

However, I think that the new credit card is nothing compared to the invisible and intangible one that all students already have. It allows us to borrow time so that we can do whatever we feel like doing while leaving whatever has to be done for some other time. Also, no minimum "time wealth" is needed and there's no maximum credit limit - you can borrow time whenever you want it, anywhere you need it, as much as you feel like having. The wonderful mechanism behind it is commonly known as procrastination.

While you borrow money from the bank when u use a credit card, you actually borrow time from yourself when you procrastinate. But you don't return time just like you pay your bills. You actually can't. You'd have to sacrifice something else, and according to the Law of Equivalent Exchange, in order to gain something, an equivalent price must be paid. And since time is such a scarce commodity, you got to sacrifice something really valuable. Usually, students procrastinate by putting off their school work so that they can indulge in temporary pleasures. In this case, the bill showing how much time they "borrowed" would come in the form of a result slip that shows how badly they have done and the price would be their grades compared to what they could have achieved had they been studying.

The absence of a maximum limit can be lethal as one can still procrastinate even on the eve of a major paper when there is literally no more time to spare, and since time would be REALLY VALUABLE then, it will also end up costing a lot. But the most dangerous thing is that you don't have to actively borrow time. You're constantly borrowing it, rate of one second per second, whenever you are not doing that which you should be doing.

The best thing you can do for yourself would be to cancel that card since you just know that you cannot afford to use it, at all. Maybe you might even want to reward yourself by getting that new credit card. After all, time is money, but money can't buy you time.

Procrastination is like masturbation. At first it feels good, but in the end you're only screwing yourself.

-A

...penned by mysteriou at 11:19 PM

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