If you are already very rich, can you buy more time? Can you use your money to exchange for more time? What if you have no assets now? Will the amount of time you possess be affected? What is the actual relationship between money and time?
On my flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong, I had the chance to watch the movie In Time starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. The movie setting is based in a future where people are engineered to stop aging at 25. After the age of 25, they will only be able to live one more year. Time becomes the only currency, where every meal, work, rent, and even gamble is counted in terms of time. In shorter terms, people can buy time.
If you think hard enough about the message conveyed through the movie, there is somehow a lot of similarity to the situation we face in this capitalist world. We trade things using money. But how do you get money if you inherit nothing from your ancestors? Without money already sitting in your bank, you have to make an effort to earn money. It is a fact that for most people, time is indeed money.
Buying Time
If you are already very rich, can you buy more time? Can you use your money to exchange for more time? What if you have no assets now? Will the amount of time you possess be affected? What is the actual relationship between money and time?
Since time is a limited resource no matter how rich or how poor you are, you only have 24 hours a day. An average person may live up to 75 years old. We all have more or less the same amount of limited time living on this planet regardless of how much assets we own.
Technically, money cannot buy you more time but it can certainly let you reserve your time to do whatever is important and meaningful to you. To some extent, however, I do think that money can buy time. If not, lots of money can at least reserve your own time for your own use. You get to decide what to do with your time because survival and basic necessity are no longer an issue.
There is a big difference in how a rich person uses his time and money versus a poor person. If you are rich, you can hire a driver so that you can do something else on the road and save time looking for a parking space. For poor people, on the other hand, paying for a bus ticket may even be a burden therefore the only choice they have is to walk to the desired destination. In other words, a poor person may take many years to complete a task that a rich person can do in just a day.
Does that mean the richer you are, the more time you actually have?
Selling Time
If you are not born rich, it is almost inescapable to trade your time for money. That will be the most significant action you will be doing in your entire life; selling time.
After equipping yourself with some skills and knowledge. you work for someone or a corporation in exchange for money, which the money is going to take care of your daily expenses. Would you not call that as an activity of “selling time”?
That is the other side of the story. While rich people can buy more time and reserve their own, poor people have to worry about getting by, selling more of their personal time. One very real example is when you work overtime for the extra wages; you have just traded a valuable part of life.
Selling time or not, it also depends on how you perceive the work you are doing. If you are enjoying the work. if you find yourself doing meaningful things at your workplace if you are getting satisfaction out of it. then it is not bad at all to get paid at the same time.
Instead of calling the activity “selling time”, you are in fact making good use of your time. That is why it is so important to work on your passion. That is why you want to get out of the rat race as soon as possible.
Time as a Currency
What if time is the only currency?
There are some communities that practice the time exchange programme. They talk about exchanging services in time and not in money terms. That creates a fair and equal society because, in that community, everyone’s time is equal no matter what the service is.
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