Time is money
You’re wasting my time.
This gadget will save you hours.
I don’t have the time to give you.
How do you spend your time these days?
That flat tire cost me an hour.
I’ve invested a lot of time in her.
I don’t have enough time to spare for that.
You’re running out of time.
You need to budget your time.
Put aside some time for ping pong.
Is that worth your while?
Do you have much time left?
He’s living on borrowed time.
You don’t use your time profitably.
I lost a lot of time when I got sick.
Thank you for your time.
Time in our culture is a valuable commodity. It is a limited resource that we use to accomplish our goals. Because of the way that the concept of work developed in modern Western culture, where work is typically associated with the time it takes and time is precisely quantified, it has become customary to pay people by the hour, week, or year. In our culture time is money in many ways: telephone message units, hourly wages, hotel room rates, yearly budgets, interest on loans, and paying your debt to society by “serving time.” These practices are relatively new in the history of the human race, and by no means do they exist in all cultures. They have arisen in modern industrialized societies and structure our basic everyday activities in a very profound way. Corresponding to the fact that we act as if time is a valuable commodity — a limited resource, even money — we conceive of time that way. Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered.
time is money, time is a limited resource, and time is a valuable commodity are all metaphorical concepts. They are metaphorical since we are using our everyday experiences with money, limited resources, and valuable commodities to conceptualize time. This isn’t a necessary way for human beings to conceptualize time; it is tied to our culture. There are cultures where time is none of these things.
Will wrote:
Very true. I’ll pass on some relevant parental advice: Getting paid according to how long you work on something means you get what it cost you to produce, plus a little. (The food, rent, etc you need to be living in the city where you work and working.) Whereas getting paid what the work is worth to the buyer, as a retailer or consultant or large company does, means you get what it was would have cost them not to buy, minus a little. And that’s usually MUCH more money!
Incidentally “paying your debt to society” and “serving time” are entirely misguided concepts with no relevance to today’s prisons, which are about control, power, and violence. /Good/ prisons would be about forced rehabilitation and fixing the problems that led to the crime, or else simply keeping the hopeless cases locked up where they can’t cause trouble.
Not only treating time as a commodity with a price, but “money” itself is a very new, strange, and abstract thing in the history of human culture. For most of the time homo sapiens have been on this planet, they’ve done barely any trading, most of that was with relatives, and they had no concept of money. Same for “investing,” or the general concept of a “commodity.” Personally I’m gung-ho in favor of all these abstractions, and of pushing them farther and creating new ones, such as “information” in units of bits or “bandwidth”, an even slipperier concept that deals with things like lag, reliability, and privacy, as well as bits per second.
Posted 08 Aug 2006 at 7:55 am ¶