On Time

The only thing you truly possess is time.

Money, property, and reputation can be lost, stolen, or given away and recovered. Time flows in one direction only. It cannot be stored, and once spent, no amount of wealth or cleverness buys it back.

We say time is money, as though time were merely an instrument for producing something more valuable. We have it backwards. Money is what other people give you in exchange for your time. When you work for money, you are selling irreplaceable fragments of your life for a token that society has agreed to accept as a store of value.

Long before salaries or stock options, people spent part of their finite existence hunting, planting, or hauling stone to secure the conditions that made the rest of life possible. The forms of work and payment have changed, but the need to give some of our time to supporting the rest of our lives remains.

Money makes that exchange more abstract. In direct barter, you can exchange goods or labor only for something the other party has and is willing to trade. Money relaxes that constraint. It is fungible: the hours you sold to one person can be redeemed from another person, for something else, at another time. Earning and spending need not coincide, nor must each party want what the other has to offer. Money is a remarkable abstraction.

People often say money is the root of all evil. In the King James translation, 1 Timothy 6:10 says that the love of money is the root of all evil. Money is neutral; it is the venality of those who pursue it as an end rather than a means that corrupts.

When you buy something with money you have earned, you are spending the portion of your life you exchanged to earn it. The price is denominated in your hours, taken from the only life you have. Whether that trade is worth making deserves thought.

How you spend your time is the most consequential decision you make, because it is your life, not a preparation for it. Money is what remains after the transaction, useful and fungible, but it cannot restore the time you spent to get it. What you do with the hours that no one has yet bought from you matters.

Time is not money. Money is the shadow that time casts when it passes through the economy. Spend it accordingly.