Time Is Not Money – Time Is Money Debunked
I have been getting really tired of hearing people say the phrase “Time is Money” to me recently. Though I can understand the merit of the phrase when spoken during business hours, since rent, hourly wages, and other time based payments are factored in, each time I hear it outside of work, I just want to shout to the speaker at the top of my lungs “No it’s not, stop spreading stupidity!”
When I was a toddler, I used to play with a very simple puzzle, the goal of the puzzle was to fit various shapes into similar shaped holes, the triangular shape into the triangular shaped hole, the pentagon into the pentagon hole, square into the square hole, however the circular piece on my version of this puzzle, was a little bit special, since all the pieces were designed with the exact same width, the circular piece would not only fit into the circular shaped hole, but also into the square shaped hole. However even in my toddler years I was already smart enough to realize that this did not make a circle equal to a square, because the square would not fit through the circular hole. The phrase “circle is square” makes about as much sense to me as “time is money”.
Although money is something you can rent people’s time with, and with more money you can indeed rent more people’s time, one thing that you can never do with money, is buy more time for yourself, and neither can anyone else. Time is limited, and the only real thing that any of us have here on earth, it is the most valuable thing we ever possess, and most everyone would give up any amount of money to have more. Although you’re always free to sell your own time as much as you wish, you can never buy it back.
In a social situation, two people are sharing their time with each other, nobody is paying one another, and therefore the value of both people’s time is completely equal, in fact you could use the phrase “time is time” or “time = time” and nobody could ever bring a valid argument against it.
Sometimes I feel that a good part of society has things a little bit mixed up about money and time, that some of the rich people, and also some of the poor, feel that the value of a wealthy people’s time is greater, but again, in a social situation, where money is not involved, time has no monetary value, and we all make the same wage of absolutely nothing.
Obviously time is not money.
