It’s common American folk wisdom, apparently started by Benjamin Franklin, that “time is money”. You would expect a capitalist country, focused on finance, to worship the dollar and define time in terms of cash. It gives people a reason for working as much as possible, producing as much as possible, to make as much money as possible.
In this dream, or perhaps nightmare, of living on an ever turning treadmill of financial production, the winner is the one who dies with the most money.
Perhaps there is a time in one’s life when it’s a good idea to dedicate one’s time to money. The more money you can make through work when you are young, the more money can work for you when you get old.
However, there is more to life than making money. At least, there should be, especially after you have enough money to live on.
When you think about it, time is life. We all have our own lifetime, and we spend that time, like we spend money. In this sense, time is like money. We can invest our time, or our money, to obtain something else. In this sense, time and money are means to an end.
But money can be made again, while time spent is time lost. As we age, money increases and accumulates (hopefully), while time decreases and depletes.
Here’s is another big difference between time and money — you know how much money you have left.
The uncertainty of when time runs out should make us value each moment, as though it might be near our last. But many people take their time for granted, assuming that they will continue to rise in the morning along with the sun. So they squander their time, wasting it like there will always be a tomorrow.
The problem here is that, unlike money, you don’t need to earn time. You just get it at birth, like some government entitlement program. This makes time valueless, since there is so much of it.
Of course, once you realize that you are running out of time, each minute becomes extremely valuable.
This means that young people, who assume they have all the time in the world, are willing to spend lots of time making little money, while older people, who are aware that the clock is running down, are willing to spend lots of money making a little more time.
Sometimes, you have too much time on your hands, and that apparently can get you into trouble. But you never hear anyone having too much money on their hands. People also get bored with too much time, and don’t know how to spend it. But most people do know how to spend money.
Money is not good or bad, but money can buy you a good or bad time. That’s because money is just a quantity of purchasing power, which can be spent on quality time. Quantity and quality are different things.
However, there are cases where the quantity of money is used to determine the quality of the person. Since we live in a society where our time is used to make money, we can now calculate how much a person’s lifetime is worth. After all, if time is money, the more you can make per hour the more valuable will be your lifetime. This is why some people have a greater “worth” than others, and why we value rich people more than poor people.
Money also can be transferred between people, with the same dollar going through innumerable hands. But time is personal, nontransferable, and there are no refunds.
You can live on borrowed money, and pay it back another day. But when you live on borrowed time, there is no pay back. At the end, you’re just done.
Clearly, time is a means to lots of things that money cannot buy. Time can help you develop your ideas and personality. Time allows you to explore the intangible aspects of life. Of course, you need time to do this, and if you spend your time making money, then there may not be much time left for other activities.
This is why equating time and money is bad. It makes it seem as though the only good use of time is to create money. Time is the means, and money is the end. This leads to a life devoid of quality and focused solely on quantity. But is the goal of life to convert time into money? Are we all just money-making machines?
The answer is yes, if you are an employer. Workers are paid by the hour to make money for the employer. Both worker and boss share the same goal — making money. But what is the cost to society of our obsession with making money at the expense of time? Is there more to life than just increasing the quantity of money you have? In our money-obsessed culture, the rich are on top of the pile. It doesn’t matter what they do with their money. Being rich buys respect and privilege. Quantity is valued over quality, so we judge people by how much money they own, not by how much good they have shown.
All this leads to a culture that is devoid of value and virtue, apart from the virtues of thrift and hard work. We have become a quantitative society, with everyone having a price tag reflecting their monetary worth. But when you lose quality and virtue you lose morality and connection. We make money, instead of making friends. We see the world as ours to exploit for money. We see others as ours to exploit, to make money. Money is the ends that justifies the means. People will lie, cheat, steal, and kill for money. And when they become rich, they are respected for their wealth, regardless of how they spent their time generating that money.
That’s not the way to have a mentally healthy, socially integrated, happy society. Wealth does not equal health. Often, it is healthier to focus on the intangible things of life. Beauty, love, friendship, communing with nature, the search for truth and meaning in life – these are all intangible aspects of living that impart quality to life. Spending time to make yourself a better human being may not make you money, but it will make you a better person.
Does it pay spending your time to increase your quality of life? Or should you spend your time to increase your quantity of money? That choice is something people rarely consider in our culture. We are brainwashed into believing time is money. Breaking away from that thinking will destabilize our culture. Employers, who are the ones with the money, need people to make them more money. We need money-makers, not people who want to spend their lives exploring the possibilities of what it means to be human. We are treated like the machines and robots they are wanting to use to replace human workers. The human element in society is disappearing. If robots can make more money for employers than humans workers, it’s a simple calculation to see where the future is headed.
Note that this is not an attack on capitalism, or a promotion of socialism. It is recognition that we are all born with time on our hands, and a culture that uses our hands to make money. We serve the machine. It’s time for that to stop, and for people to start looking for the qualities of life that money cannot buy. These are the things that make life worth living, even if it does not make your life worth more money.