Time Is Money

People are always saying this. You can see how they get the two mixed up. Both time and money are abstract figments of the human imagination which can seem terribly real due to the importance we place on them. They each have a track devoted to them on Pink Floyd's hugely popular album Dark Side of the Moon, for instance. They both travel in one inexorable direction, from possibility into memory.

We are compelled to perpetually spend great quantities of each, and having spent them we never get them back. Therefore, we are always looking for ways to save or create more time and more money. In our search, we have cleverly devised ways to trade one for the other through institutions called banks. These places will sell you time for money (loans, mortgages, etc.) or pay you money for your time (bank accounts, RSPs, ...), although it's really only the money side of things they're actually interested in, trading your T&M upwards for larger quantities of M, in a nefarious worldwide pyramid scheme which is not only endorsed but heavily participated in by the world's governments. This scheme is called "interest" because it is the only way anyone has thought of to get people personally involved in such a boring system of numbers and slips of paper.

But the two concepts were invented to solve completely different problems, and I think we should try not to confuse them. Time keeps events separate which contradict each other physically. I can't be both here and not here at the same time, but give me two different times and it's the easiest trick in the world. Similarly, the only way two people can occupy the exact same place (in this dimension) is if we are checking at different moments in time. And how can that old man slumped on the park bench be the same person as that little boy playing stickball in the street with his friends? Because we have agreed to identify objects with each other which share a contiguous history through time. It is a system for distinguishing objects and events one from the other.

Money, conversely, is a system designed to equate different objects and events with each other. It allows us to evaluate everything in the world relative to everything else, based on human desire. One apple is equal to two-thirds of an orange, or three minutes of work emptying wastebaskets in an office building, or one forty-fifth of a Fifty Cent compact disc, or one four-hundred-and-fifty-millionth of Fifty Cent, or one three-billionth of Oprah.

Therefore, our desire for more money is pure desire, since money is a measure of desire itself. Although money will never fully appease this desire, it at least represents a real wish for something positive. Our apparent desire for more time, on the other hand, is really just a fear that we may lose our status as a distinct object — i.e. a fear of death — masquerading as desire. Not wanting an unknown quantity is not the same as wanting a known quantity.

The next time you find yourself irrationally anxious about one or another of life's great impossibilities, ask yourself a couple of questions: Do I want something I can't have? Then it's money you're after. Or am I afraid of something I can't avoid? Time is your guy. Let's try to keep the two abstractions straight, despite what the bankers would like us to think.

- Andrew