

Time and Money: Separated at Birth? - mbrubeck
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/09/09/time-and-money-separated-at-birth/

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pmichaud
Posted in the comments:

Maybe I'm exuberant in a recent life change, but I think the answer is clear.

Money is a metaphor -- as you said, it's a fabrication that's meaningful only
in the company of others who share the delusion, but on a desert island it's
just kindling. Money is a metaphor for value and we hope that the transfer of
money corresponds or at least correlates to the transfer of value, as it often
does.

So, we have this ubiquitous concept that feels like a law of nature because
we're soaked in it -- as infants, educated adults, everywhere we see the
effects of money. When our worldview is so thoroughly infected by a concept
like money, it becomes almost impossible not to apply it to things to which it
isn't fundamentally applicable.

Of course it's possible, in the sense of a "dirty hack," to apply money to
time as if time is an economic asset, but maybe that's just not true. Take our
lives for example. Only a group can make an assessment of the economic value
of a given life; for the person, that value is always infinity dollars.

But wait, you say, people choose other things over life all the time! Their
country, their friends, their family, etc. They even choose to end their lives
early in order to preserve their wealth for living relatives.

Yes! Exactly!

Clearly there are "assets" that can meaningfully compared to a human life
(like love and other lives), since people regularly trade their lives for
these things. Money, I think, is fundamentally not one of those.

Thought experiment: \---- I'm a rich guy. I'll give you access to an account
that has $1,000,000,000 in it. You may not transfer the money, but you may
spend it freely, only on yourself. In exchange for this access, I get to kill
you right now. What do you say? \----

So, I'm asserting that maybe--like money and lives-- the value of time can't
rightly be compared to the value of money, despite how often we do it and how
natural it feels, because the scale is too different. Maybe we should work
toward a system that identifies things like lives and time, and divorces those
things from money entirely.

As individuals the answer is to separate our time from income by building
valuable, cash flow positive assets. That's the "Zen Ethic": the only way to
live in a world with money that doesn't lead to misery, is to build streams of
passive income.

