Time poverty, life inequality

As every year, last October 17, on the occasion of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the data once again reminded us of a reality that we should not normalize. In the Barcelona metropolitan area, 660,000 people, 19.4% of the population, are at risk of poverty. Among children under 16, the proportion reaches 31.4%. 9.3% of the population suffers from severe material and social deprivation and 23.1% report difficulties making ends meet. The same data also explain something important: social benefits reduce the risk of poverty from 41.6% to 19.4%. However, as the Social Third Sector Table pointed out in its last Catalonia Social Debate, non-take-up, people who are entitled and do not access, continues to be a difficulty that questions us about the accessibility of these aids. 

But figures only acquire their full meaning when we are able to see beyond the numbers and connect with the lives they contain. We are talking about families who calculate what they can buy before entering the supermarket, about people who postpone a visit to the dentist, about children whose opportunities are still too linked to the home where they were born, about women who accumulate paid work and care, about people who work and, nevertheless, live in permanent insecurity. And we are talking, inevitably, about housing. In the metropolis, the burden of housing costs affects 10.8% of the population, but reaches 29.1% among people who live in rented accommodation. 

Housing is not just another expense in the family budget. It is the place from which life is organized. When a disproportionate part of income is simply used to guarantee a place to live, the margin to face the rest of the needs and opportunities that make a full life possible is reduced. But when affordable housing is increasingly far from work, school, family or community networks, residential inequality also leaves another bill: hours of travel, difficulties in caring, less neighborhood life, or less rest, among others. The housing crisis is an income crisis, but it is also a crisis of security, ties and time.

“The housing crisis is an income crisis, but it is also a crisis of security, ties and time”

This October 17 we talked about income, housing, child poverty, job insecurity, basic food and social protection. But taking a broader view of poverty does not mean dematerializing it. On the contrary, it means taking seriously everything that the lack of resources entails. And it is precisely from here that we should incorporate a question that still occupies little space in public debate: is it enough to know how much a person has to know what life they can live? The AROPE index allows us to broaden this view but it is possibly not enough, we want to go further.

Time poverty helps us formulate this question. It does not simply mean having a lot of work or living stressed. We speak of time poverty when, after paid work, care, domestic tasks and basic needs, the time a person can freely dispose of is reduced to a minimum. In Barcelona, 32.3% of women are in this situation, compared to 24.6% of men. 59.6% of women report feeling constant anxiety about not having enough time to do all daily tasks, ten points above men. And between 35 and 54 years old, when work and family responsibilities tend to accumulate, women dedicate an average of 8.5 hours a day to care, compared to 6.2 for men.  

These data do not only describe an unequal distribution of tasks. They speak to us of an unequal distribution of the capacity to dispose of oneself.

Formally, few things seem as egalitarian as time. We all have twenty-four hours a day. But socially these hours do not have the same value nor are they subject to the same obligations. Economic resources allow us to buy proximity, care, help, mobility or services, they allow us to live closer to work or absorb an unforeseen event without having to reorganize a whole week. When these resources are not there, many needs that some solve with money others pay for with hours of their life, with stress or with a feeling of permanent frustration.

“Many needs that some solve with money others pay for with hours of their life”

That is why it is important to also understand time poverty as a mechanism through which material inequality becomes vital inequality.

It is evident that the issue of time does not exclusively affect people in poverty. In an accelerated and unpredictable context, it constitutes one of the discomforts of our era, but, as in many other situations, it is exacerbated in situations of inequality.

Hartmut Rosa has dedicated a good part of his work to explaining this paradox of late modernity. Technological development has allowed us to accelerate communication, travel, and production, but this acceleration has not necessarily translated into greater time availability. On the contrary, the increase in possibilities, demands, and expectations generates permanent pressure to do more things in less time. The speed that was supposed to allow us to gain time ends up contributing to the feeling that we never have enough.

Time poverty allows us to add a decisive political dimension to this diagnosis: acceleration can be a shared experience, but the ability to protect oneself from it is deeply intertwined with inequality. Fragmented schedules, chained jobs, housing far from work due to income issues; the conditions of precariousness lead to a life without margin, a full agenda but without capacity for change. Haste becomes a vital condition for survival.

Precariousness is not just earning little or having an unstable contract. It is not knowing far enough in advance when you will work the following week, not being able to change a shift, depending on overtime, dedicating a growing part of the day to commuting, or not having anyone with whom to share care responsibilities. It is living without an economic cushion, but also without a temporal cushion. Any unforeseen event, a sick child, a medical appointment, a transport delay, an elderly person who needs more attention, can undo the fragile balance on which the whole week rests.

This lack of margin has consequences for subjective well-being. Data from Barcelona show the association between time poverty, daily anxiety, and negative effects on physical and mental health. It is not just tiredness. When existence is permanently organized around what is urgent, the capacity to plan, to decide, and even to imagine alternatives decreases.

In the face of alienation processes linked to acceleration, Rosa proposes the idea of resonance: a relationship with others, with work, with things and with the world in which these do not simply appear as a succession of demands that we must manage, but as something with which we can establish a meaningful relationship and to which we can respond with our own voice. Thought from here, time poverty poses a deeper question than conciliation: what relationship with the world can a person build when almost all their energy is dedicated to responding to immediate needs? 

“Time is one of the invisible conditions of these capacities”

This question leads us to the field of justice. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have decisively contributed to shifting the debate on inequality from the simple possession of resources to the effective capabilities of people. What matters, from this perspective, is not only what goods or income we have, but what real possibilities we have to do and to be, to build a life that we can consider valuable.

Time is one of the invisible conditions of these capacities. We can formally recognize the right to education, but education needs time. We can demand more community participation, but participating requires hours that are not absorbed by subsistence. We can talk about upbringing, culture, career advancement, healthy living or democracy, but all these possibilities presuppose a certain degree of sovereignty over one's own time.

And here Hannah Arendt introduces an even more political dimension. Her distinction between activities linked to the need to sustain life and the space of action, of speech and of the shared world allows us to see what is at stake when necessity ends up occupying almost all of existence. A democratic society needs a citizenry that can, at least for part of its time, escape the urgency of survival. It needs time to meet, talk, associate, create, care for bonds. To participate socially and politically.

This perspective is especially important because it moves us away from a paternalistic conception of poverty. It is not just about protecting people in vulnerable situations or guaranteeing minimums so they can sustain themselves. It is about generating the conditions that allow for an autonomous life. The fundamental question is not only how many resources we redistribute, but how much effective freedom this redistribution generates.

It is here that Barcelona has an experience worth highlighting, with the development of time policies that have allowed something that for too long had been considered a strictly private matter to become a public issue. The city has developed time policies, periodically studies time use, and has incorporated this perspective into policies linked to care, work-life balance, and the fight against the feminization of poverty and precariousness. The reduction of the burden of unpaid work, support for care, and awareness of time use are essential aspects of its policies. The analysis is carried out periodically, incorporating its impact on time use. In fact, this very month of October, the thirteenth edition of the Time Use Week was held, an international event that promotes knowledge, debate, and the exchange of good practices in time policies among citizens, professionals, and elected officials from public administrations, companies and organizations, researchers, social entities, and an international public. Precisely this year the motto is Social acceleration and the right to time: policies for sustainable well-being.

“A public nursery school, a care service, or efficient public transport redistribute time”

Placing this issue on our citizen and political agenda means precisely this. Sharing the reflection broadly and not turning time policies into a new specialized sector of the administration. The great power of the temporal perspective is that it forces us to rethink urban policy as a whole from the concrete experience of daily life, in an integrated and also transversal way.

A public nursery school, a care service or efficient public transport redistribute time. And so does debureaucratization and administrative simplification. Local administration, from proximity, plays a key role in the development of these actions, and also challenges, especially in the field of housing. Living close to work, school, family networks and community ties is also a time policy.

And conversely, when the increase in housing prices expels a family from the neighborhood and adds an hour of travel to each day, residential inequality also acquires a temporal dimension. When a service is only accessible after a succession of procedures or journeys, its cost is not only economic. And this cost is not distributed equally either.

That is why Barcelona can make a relevant contribution to the debate on poverty and inequality. The tradition of a compact city, of neighborhoods, with services, commerce, facilities and close community life contains a political intuition of the first magnitude: proximity is also redistribution of time.

Defending this city against urban segregation, the housing crisis or the commodification of care is not just a certain urbanistic option. It is defending that the place where we live does not so unequally determine the time we have left to live. In this sense, the right to the city is also the right to time.

“Proximity is also redistribution of time”

Talking about time poverty does not, therefore, mean diluting material poverty into a generic idea of contemporary malaise. Poverty remains brutally concrete: it is not being able to pay the rent, having to reduce food expenditure, not being able to keep the home at an adequate temperature or not having the capacity to face an unforeseen event. In Catalonia, 24.8% of the population was at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2025, 18.9% was at risk of poverty and 8.9% suffered severe material and social deprivation. 

The question is another. If we take material poverty seriously, we must take seriously all the ways in which it conditions a life and understand that poverty not only reduces what we can buy. It also conditions our possibilities of choice and projection towards the future to the extent that we have to dedicate an enormous amount of time and energy to sustain and sustain ourselves in the present. Time poverty helps us to see this territory where economic inequality becomes life inequality.

That is why perhaps we should define the objective of an anti-poverty policy more ambitiously. Social protection must aspire precisely to expand its real possibilities of existence, social and cultural promotion, and autonomy. Being able to have a home without living only to pay for it. Being able to work without dedicating almost the entire day to work and commuting. Being able to care without disappearing within care. Being able to rest, train, participate, establish ties, enjoy the city and imagine a different future.

This requires income, housing, dignified employment and social protection. But it also requires care, proximity, community and time.

Perhaps this is one of the new frontiers in the fight against inequality. We have learned to ask ourselves how income is distributed and, progressively, how care is distributed. The time has come to also ask ourselves how time is distributed and who really has the capacity to decide about it.

Barcelona has begun to make this inequality visible, to measure it and to build policies around it. The challenge is to take this intuition to its ultimate consequences and understand that a city that redistributes time is redistributing something deeper than hours: it is redistributing autonomy, well-being and the capacity to participate in community life. 

Because perhaps the most radical inequality does not consist solely of having less. It consists of having less control over one's own life. And an anti-poverty policy that wants to be up to the challenges of our time should aspire, precisely, to return this possibility to people.