Time is Our True Currency

Everything we do, every second we experience, every dime we spend, are the same currency that we use when we pay for rent, buy luxury items, or spend with our loved ones.

Tashawn B. – brzksmly

This post can also be listened to!
Narrated by Marcus A.

We are powered by our desires. We have goals and ambitions to follow them. We have dreams that we want to turn into reality, ranging from being one of the wealthiest people to becoming the best dancer on TikTok; we all have determinations and desires that we want to fulfill. We desire more than anything, and that desire is the starting point of human fulfillment. We live in a time where we can attain just about anything we want. I mean, we worked hard for it, well most of us anyway. Why not go all out? Why not buy that PS5, a pair of Red Bottoms, or that members-only bomber you had your eye on since January? It’s only money, and besides, money comes and goes. What better way to spend your time than doing something you want to do and going places you want to see? Right? Sure, but wait. Let’s ponder deeper about what we’re really doing when we spend our money. With our time, we make sacrifices without quite knowing just how great they are.

Look around you for a second. What do you see? Most likely a lot of different tangible items, like clothing, cars, houses, and sure enough, the phone in your hand. How did we get them? We purchased them with money, right? Well yeah, but how did they get here? ..like on earth or in the stores? iPhones don’t just fall from the sky every year with new features, well fewer features if we consider the newer iPhones. Someone created them; seemingly out of nothing, too. But of course, it’s not that simple. We rarely realize the work it takes to create the luxuries that we’re able to enjoy today. We only see a finished product. If we take the time to think about how these things became, we’ll see that it took great effort, creative minds, and time. As our minds grow, so does our economy. This begs the question, what are we really buying when we buy anything? We are buying time.

Ben Franklin, the $100 man himself, once said “Time is money”. Maybe he meant it literally. Most would stress that time is the most valuable thing we have access to and can give. Considering this, that’s quite possible. When we buy an iPhone, we buy the research it took for those new features to develop, years of optimizing the OS, and the hardware it takes to run the OS. This process could’ve taken millions of people and billions of hours, and all we see is a device. To simplify further, when we buy a sandwich from Jersey Mike’s, we’re not just paying for the meat, veggies, bread, and labor of the sandwich making. Considering the meat alone, we’re buying the farmer’s time for raising and feeding the turkey, the butcher’s time for skinning and cutting it, the transportation time and fuel for transporting it, and the delicatessen worker for slicing it. The grain for bread and vegetables has to grow and then be harvested, and during those times you have to keep a careful eye on them so insects and rodents won’t devour your efforts. That $15 for that foot-long, that if we’re being honest, not even really a foot-long, doesn’t seem like much now. But wait, what did you have to do to get that $15?

If you’re like most of the world with a constant income, you worked for it. I mean, what is $15 anyway? It’s a form of currency, probably, a $10 and a $5 bill; unless you’re attending Kings of Diamond, then it’s 15 Big Ones. Wait, is that sandwich worth 8 minutes of satisfaction and less of an appetite when I can, if I’m being frank, pay the entrance fee and divide that $5 with 3 strippers? Let’s say I make $30 an hour cleaning garbage trucks. That $15 was half an hour of my time, which is really $22.50 because taxes take about 25% of that, but whatever. Is a sandwich worth 30 minutes or 2% of my day? Well, I mean I enjoyed it and I’m not as hungry as I was before, so I would say yes. Do you see what I just did there? I traded my time for other people’s time. That is really all we’re doing when we purchase things, we trade time. Before the dollar, goods were traded, people would trade things like chickens for vegetable seeds, gold for silk, and people on ships for various goods, but that’s another story for another day. The trades were almost always services that involved time and a bit of effort.

Knowing just how valuable our time could be, we would naturally want to make our time more valuable; this is a powerful realization. The truth is we should always try to get the most of our time. We shouldn’t settle for jobs or careers that are not willing to value our worth. We are literally trading time and we all have the same 24 hours. Everything we do, every second we experience, every dime we spend, is the same currency that we use when we pay for rent, buy luxury items, or spend with our loved ones. Elon Musk could buy a house within an hour of his time; meanwhile we’re here just getting by. Elon Musk wasn’t born with a silver spoon, but he provided a service that was so great that he was able to increase the value of his time and also increase other people’s time by employing them. We have to be willing to improve ourselves to be worthy of the additional value that is in all of us.