January 28, 2026
Filed under: General
At Omega, we spend a lot of time talking about wealth (obviously). But not all wealth is financial. Lately, as the year begins, I’ve been thinking about another kind that might matter just as much: time and memory wealth.
John Steinbeck captured something deeply true about this in East of Eden:
“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind… It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever… A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory… From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
Intuitively, you would think time moves slowly when life feels boring or repetitive. In reality, it’s the opposite. Those stretches disappear. Our memory has nothing to grab onto. That’s when we say things like, “Can you believe it’s already March?” or “Where did this year go?”
Time feels longer in our memories when it’s filled with meaning. When we’re doing things we love with people we love. When we’re stretched by challenge, shaped by hardship, or changed by joy. Those moments leave imprints on us. They create depth. They give texture to our lives. That’s what I mean by time and memory wealth.
At its core, Omega’s philosophy has always been to help clients use their financial resources in service of that kind of wealth. Money is not the goal. It’s a tool. A way to buy flexibility, presence, and freedom. A way to reduce regret and increase the number of meaningful moments that actually make it into our memory.
January is a natural time for goal-setting and resolutions. But beyond performance goals or financial benchmarks, we like to ask a deeper question: How are you intentionally using your resources to build a life that feels full when you look back on it?
Many of you answered some version of that question in your very first conversation with Omega. We borrowed from financial life planner George Kinder, who asks three deceptively simple but powerful questions. January is a wonderful time to revisit them:
- If you had all the money you needed for the rest of your life, how would you live? What would you do? Who would you be?
- If you had only 5–10 years left to live, how would your life change? What would matter more? What would fall away?
- If you had only 24 hours left, what regrets would surface? Who would you wish you had been?
These questions are meant to be clarifying. They strip away noise and force us to notice what actually shapes our time and our memories.
As your wealth managers, our job is to help you use your wealth, all of it, intentionally so your life feels rich in the ways that matter most.
This January, we encourage you to sit with these questions again. See what’s changed. See what feels clearer. And if your answers are different than they were years ago, that’s not a problem.
We’d love to hear what comes up for you.
jared