The True Value Is Time: Why Your French Progress Can't Be Bought

Introduction

I recently found myself trying to understand why learning languages has become so important to me. The answer I landed on wasn’t about talent, or discovering the right method, or any single breakthrough moment. It was simpler and a little more uncomfortable than that: language learning matters to me because I’ve spent an enormous amount of time on it. That realization led me somewhere I didn’t expect — to a broader question about what actually gives anything value at all.

Why We Default to Money as “the” Value

When we think about value, we think about money first, almost automatically. It’s understandable — whatever a country’s political system, money is the one universal currency of value everyone shares. Everything has a price tag, everything is measurable in a common unit, and that measurability is genuinely reassuring. When you’re comparing two cameras, the price tells you something immediately, even if imperfectly: this one costs more, so it’s probably better.

The same logic quietly extends to how we measure our own lives. Happiness is famously hard to measure. Income isn’t. So when we’re looking for a reassuring number to hold onto, we gravitate toward salary, subscriber counts, streaming numbers — anything countable — because uncountable things like fulfillment resist that kind of easy comparison.

Does Money Buy Happiness?

France has a complicated, slightly guarded relationship with money — very different from the more openly transactional culture around wealth in the US — and “does money buy happiness?” is a question we like to debate. My honest answer: not automatically. If it did, wealthy people wouldn’t experience depression, and clearly some do. What money genuinely buys is freedom — the ability to make choices without financial constraint — and what you do with that freedom is a separate question entirely. There’s research suggesting happiness rises with income only up to a certain threshold, after which the effect essentially disappears. Being able to grocery shop without checking prices removes real stress; a private jet doesn’t add much beyond that.

I say this while also being honest that money made my own path possible — I could only afford a year-long sabbatical in Japan because I’d saved enough during my previous career. So this isn’t an argument that money doesn’t matter. It’s an argument that it isn’t the whole story.

The Performance Trap on Social Media

There’s a second, related trap that shows up constantly on social media: an obsession with visible results rather than the process behind them. Scroll through language-learning content and you’ll see claims like “I learned 14 languages in 3 days” or “from A1 to B2 in 4 months” — pure outcome, with the actual work behind it barely mentioned. This isn’t unique to language learning; it shows up in music (“this song hit a million streams”), business (“I made $1 million in my first month”), anywhere a number can be extracted and displayed.

This is understandable marketing — when you want to learn something, a promised result naturally catches your attention. And having visible progress isn’t inherently bad; it’s genuinely motivating, and I use it myself, tracking my study streak and vocabulary count daily. The problem is specifically when the pursuit of a measurable outcome becomes the only reason you’re doing something, crowding out any question of whether you actually enjoy the process itself. When that happens, you lose track of why you started in the first place.

Why the Real Value Is Time

Here’s the idea I keep coming back to: the value something has for you is determined by the time you spend on it, not by what you paid for it. I’ve bought things impulsively that ended up meaning nothing to me, regardless of the price. I own Japanese grammar books I’ve genuinely never opened — they have essentially zero value to me, however much they cost. Meanwhile, an app I used daily for years to learn Japanese characters — something I paid for, but far less — became something that was, quite literally, part of my life. That daily use is what gave it value, not the transaction.

The same logic applies beyond objects. A childhood bicycle kept for decades carries emotional value that has nothing to do with what it cost. And I think this is exactly why language learning feels so meaningful to me: it’s genuinely something you cannot buy. You could spend millions of euros and still not purchase your level of French. If you’re wealthy enough to hire a private tutor for two hours daily, that certainly accelerates things — but without the time you personally invest, nothing happens. No amount of money removes that requirement.

The Matrix Fantasy

There’s a scene in The Matrix where the character Neo learns kung fu instantly by having a program downloaded directly into his brain. Anyone who’s felt the frustration of slow language progress has probably wished, at some point, for exactly that shortcut — a USB drive for French, plugged in overnight.

But if that shortcut actually existed, I think it would strip the achievement of everything that makes it meaningful. The reason speaking French, or understanding Japanese, feels genuinely valuable to me isn’t despite the difficulty — it’s because of it. You can’t wire-transfer your way to fluency the way you might buy better sports equipment. What you can do is spend the time, and that time is precisely what creates the value at the end of it.

Time as Identity

There’s a deeper implication here, connected to how James Clear frames habits in Atomic Habits: over time, a habit becomes part of your identity. Your identity isn’t shaped by what you own — it’s shaped by what you consistently spend your time doing. If you run daily, you become a runner. If you study French daily, you become someone genuinely interested in French culture, someone curious enough to keep showing up. That identity isn’t purchasable at any price; it’s built exclusively through accumulated time.

The same principle extends to how we value other people, incidentally. An expensive gift given without any accompanying time spent together tends to feel hollow in a way that time itself never does. Value, in the end, seems to trace back to the same underlying currency almost everywhere you look — not money, but attention sustained over time.

Conclusion

Money is the value we can measure most easily, which is exactly why we reach for it first — and why performance-driven content, showing results without process, spreads so effectively online. But the real value behind anything worth having, French included, comes from the time you actually spend on it, not the price of any tool, book, or app you buy along the way. That’s frustrating if you’re hoping for a shortcut. It’s also, I think, exactly what makes the eventual progress feel worth something real.