I disagree with this premise and real world application of this but let’s talk about it another time. Value can never be strictly equal to price as everything involves non-zero transaction costs.

Even the most minor of purchases requires action to be taken. If you ever had to convince a teenager to stand up from the dinner table and go grab ketchup from the fridge to put on their french fries, you’ll understand that any amount of effort is going to be a detractor for some people. By the way, the tennager in question loves ketchup… just not as much as they love doing nothing. But I digress.

Action has a time and energy cost that is non-zero, but I digress.

For this time, let’s assume it’s true. Let’s assume that value=price.

Now, let’s imagine (god forbid) that we are dying of a mysterious illness that doesn’t affect anything else but we have one day left to live–just one day. Twenty-four hours. After that it’s hasta la vista.

How much money would we pay to have an extra day thus doubling the amount of net days we have left?

The answer is probably “all we have and all we can borrow,” provided we find anyone to lend money to a dying person (looking at your life insurance companies).

So then, it follows that time has a value that is infinite compared to money.

Because time is perishable, money is not. 

Also, time has the property that no healthy person has 1 million times more time than another healthy person. You can have 1 million times more money than another healthy person, or even billions of times more money than other people. You can’t have 1 million times more time, or even just 10x more time.

The average healthy person lives about 30,000 days (roughly). Nobody has had 300,000 days, and I don’t think it will happen anytime soon.

Yet, in some sense, money is valuable because it allows you to “buy time.” 

You can pay kids to mow your lawn (and you should not rob kids of the $10 an hour it takes to mow lawns and wash cars or clean windows). You can pay people to read your emails. You can pay people to write your emails. You can pay people to cook your food (highly advisable). You can also pay people to open and read your letters, and so on.

To me, and this is quite personal, you don’t need to agree; the other things that money acquires that are not directly related to increasing the time you can consume doing the things you want to do are just little trinkets used to mask the anxiety of existence. 

It’s tricky to see. But once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.

In some sense, we all know that we’re going to die sooner than we’d like and that it won’t take long until we are forgotten. And because we know it, we try to mask the inevitable end and the very real fact that, given enough time, nobody will remember us with little trinkets. Somehow these goods and services are supposed to make us feel important and relevant.

I know.

Sounds brutal. But how many of your great grand-parents do you remember? What about their first names? That’s my point. That wasn’t that long ago. 

You might think this is a merciless and colorless way to see life. I don’t think it is. It’s really freeing: you can try anything because nothing matters. You can fail as many times as necessary. Because nothing matters.

To get back to time: the use of money that is not linked with time increase is, for me, void of meaning (and I’d argue it should be to you too).

If I look at where I spend money.

There are two huge allocations. The first one is supplements, sports, and general health and performance–big surprise. This also included everything related to sports and work from standing desk to max-specced Macbooks)!

The second one is, as we discussed, buying “time” in the sense that if there’s a task that I can employ and train someone else to do in my stead, then I would do it.

But they won’t do it as well as you do it? Arguably. Some might do it better, and some might do it worse. Does it matter how well letters are opened or how precisely the lawn is mowed? Are there more important things you would like your attention to be committed to? This is for you to know.

Here’s the same question again: how much is an extra day of life worth at the end of the journey?

Why is today not as valuable? Are we all just using a way too high discount rate to compute the present value of time?

These are tough questions. I know. I also think you should guard your time as fiercely as a dragon guards a treasure.

You simply cannot multiply it. Gone is gone.