Time, Money, Death and Other Trivialities

He said to the crowd: “When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘It’s going to rain,’ and it does. And when the south wind blows, you say, ‘It’s going to be hot,’ and it is. Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time?

– Luke 12:54-56

We are reasonably good at understanding the past, decent at predicting the immediate future, ever getting worse with an increasing time horizon, but the worst at understanding the present. Our concept of time has become so inculcated in mapping the past to the future and interpreting the past in light of the future that the relative importance of the present is relegated in our understanding of time. The average human does not only spend more time thinking about time than a few generations ago but also does so ever more in sync with the rest of the world. Only relatively recently by historical standards, around the end of the 19th century, was it considered necessary to have clock towers showing the same time as in the neighboring village. Before, it was simply not of relevance to align the metrum of our lives according to a standard time. The advent of communication technology changed this drastically; allowing information to bridge thousands of kilometers within milliseconds. It led to a world in which traders pay billions of dollars in order to reduce the time at which their algorithms receive the hottest news by microseconds (one millionth of a second). At the same time, productivity gurus are preaching how to schedule your calendar down to 5-minute intervals in order to squeeze the last bit of utility out of every second. Although we have more time to spare than ever before, wasting it arose to be the cardinal sin of the Western ethos. Why are we so obsessed with time? And of what value is it?

First and foremost, time is scarce. Not only that but unlike other resources, we have not yet found a method to overcome each of us running out of it. How scarce your remaining time is shows to be highly unpredictable despite time progressing in the most predictable way imaginable: On average you are expected to have 72.9 – your age years to feed on but this means nothing to you, if you become one of the about 3400 unlucky people dying everyday from road accidents. No matter how much time you personally have left until the grim reaper knocks on your door, coping with one’s impending demise has been shown to be a fundamental motivational force in humans. As far as we know, we are the only species aware of this inevitability.The prospect of death changes our outlook on life and how we spend it. Having grown to realize that our time is finite, we design societies predicated on this knowledge.

That is why it is not surprising that the notion of monetary value is so intertwined with time: Time is not only the ultimate scarce resource but also the only sound currency on which all other economic constructs rest. It is the only currency with “solid fundamentals”: Its distribution is more equitable than any other system of monetary value, its issuance is so predictable that you can literally set your watch by it, and most importantly: No fiscal policy or other intervention can alter or corrupt its algorithm. All man-made currencies exist only as a function of time.

Yet, we exchange our time against money in the optimism of a more promising future. There is some basic arithmetic we can apply to figure out what our time is worth on the free market beyond hourly wages: If you spend an hour browsing the web for this one product of your dreams in order to save 10 bucks, that is the hourly wage you pay yourself for scouting the best deal. If you can rent out your time and labour for anything above that, this would fall into the category “irrational”. In order to escape the gravitation of lousy valuations of your time, raising your aspirational hourly wage to x-hundreds of dollars an hour, is what billionaire and life-guru Naval Ravikant would recommend. Throw away your brand new microwave instead of sending it back, cause that does not reimburse you with enough money to exceed your imaginary wage. This rationale becomes a bit ludicrous, if you have e.g. 4 mouths to feed on minimum wage; You will not be well-advised to put your time on a scale with such lofty counterweights.

What makes it seem so ridiculous is that your time is priced at a lower value than e.g. Naval Ravikant’s, despite everybody living by the same cadence of the clock. What does it mean that his time is a manifold more valuable than yours, according to sober market logic? Bluntly put: Are his 5 minutes on the toilet really more valuable than your 5 minutes on the toilet?

Yes, and no. Yes, insofar as they are more valuable in the eyes of the market, i.e. in the eyes of others. After all, the monetary value of one’s time is not determined by oneself but by the value to the gears of the economic machine, with its pivotal gear wheels composed of individuals. This is not to be confused with the value of one’s time to oneself. These different measures are closely related but not the same: It might be of the greatest pleasure for you to cut hedges into the shape of the Mandelbrot set, but the market might price it at 0. However, there is a good chance that what you deem to be truly well-spent time ends up also being of value to others. Playing football with your kids in the garden is surely of great value to you and others (surely for your kids but also to everyone, as the value to society of having caring parents is certainly greater than null).

Anyhow, this is the point where the attempt of quantifying time and value, with which the modern age is obsessed with, disintegrates. Not only become our metrics in measuring what activity X is “really” worth murky, but by trying to do so, we may devoid the very same activities of their value. Put differently, we do not just have a hard time figuring out what an hour of football with the kids is worth but the attempt to do so will make a father feel beyond off-put.

While some things really do seem invaluable in the truest sense of the word, our prefrontal cortex will not stop acting as if that would not be a comforting delusion: To our current understanding, it will try to maximise our utility (also goes under the name “happiness”) aggregated over time. This calculating strategian behind our forehead will keep on trying to decode the signals of value we receive through our sensory systems. At the same time, the collective of prefrontal computers, .. ehm – excuse me – cortices, i.e. society, will keep on trying to quantify what we do not dare to explicitly quantify. Time is an indispensable variable in this strange attempt to fuse past, future and present value into a single unit of account, called money.

You can easily make the case that we humans have been becoming ever freer over the course of time: Slavery, the absolute external control over one’s time, is largely banished, most of us do not have to live at the mercy of our feudal overlords and today’s children have more degrees of freedom than ever in deciding how they fancy to spend their lives. At the same time, we run the danger of elevating Chronos, the god of time, to our master and numbers to our angels.

We are all familiar in one way or another with Chronos, the Greek god and word for linear, steady, physical time, mercilessly trimming the time each of us have left through its unstoppable progression. However, few have heard of Kairos, the lesser-known Greek word for time, referring to the qualitative aspect of the opportune moment, i.e. the “right time”. To solve the conundrum of the initial bible quote, the original Greek translation of Luke 12:54-56 used the word “kairon”, which ended up being translated to “this present time”. Instead of treating our time merely like a commodity, chronological chunks to be traded, we might want to ponder why the ancient Greek society deemed it necessary to endow the qualitative aspect of time with its own term, which was lost in translation over – you guessed it – time.