Time is Money – Or the Blindness of Paradigms

Time is Money

Time is money. We might not even realize how deeply these universal truths shape our lives and decisions. We’re filled with phrases we heard as kids, believed in, and now have carried for so long that we don’t even think to question them. Maybe we can’t question them because we can’t see beyond our paradigms.

For me, this “time is money” idea has always been there. It implies that we sell our time, that we charge money for our time. An hour, a day, a month. That’s how we get our salaries, how we work for our clients—based on time.

And here’s my dilemma: our time is finite. Which means the money we can earn is finite too. And we know that only time moves on its own, so if time is money, then money also just flows on its own. Right? Of course!

Easy come, easy go. (Even this, fck!)

My mother always used to say: “Those who work don’t have time to make money.” And also: “What’s yours is what you’ve worked for.” (The classics.) So, if I want money, I have to find it, not work for it? Which means I can’t work, because otherwise, I wouldn’t have time to find it. But if I only search and don’t work, and I find something, then it can’t really be mine?

Aaaa, this is complicated.

Back to basics: if time is money and our time is finite, then is our money also finite? How can we make more money if we can’t get more time—especially when we don’t even know how much time we have?

Let’s take this further… We must do something more efficiently! What does efficiency mean in the context of time? I think it’s money/time because that shows how much money I can make/earn/find in a unit of time. But if time = money, and efficiency = money/time, then efficiency equals 1 and is constant.

Or is it?

So, we know how much money we’ll have—it’s as much as the time we have. And no matter what we do, that won’t change. The only catch is, we don’t know how much time we’ll have. So, we don’t know how much money we’ll have either.

And we wonder why so many of us have such a “difficult” relationship with time and money when the ideas we heard as kids are such a tangled mess buried deep inside us.

And all of this happens without us even realizing what’s going on inside.

The article was originally published on the vendler.hu blog.

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Time is Money – Or the Blindness of Paradigms