Time Is Currency: Choose Moments Over Money
I sold forty hours of my life for money I spent in twenty minutes, traded irreplaceable moments for replaceable things, exchanged the currency that can never be earned back for currencies that flow in endless cycles of acquisition and loss. The mathematics finally became clear: I was getting the exchange rate wrong.
Time is the only currency where you cannot check your balance, cannot earn more through effort, cannot inherit from others or leave to heirs. You get an unknown amount deposited at birth, spend it automatically whether you’re paying attention or not, and receive no statements showing how much remains.
Yet I had been treating time like the least valuable thing I owned. I hoarded money while spending time carelessly, budgeted dollars while squandering hours, worried about financial poverty while creating temporal bankruptcy. I saved pennies and spent minutes as if minutes were infinite and pennies were scarce.
The revelation came during a meeting I didn’t want to attend, discussing projects I didn’t care about, with people I barely knew, while my son was at home learning to ride a bicycle without me. The hourly rate looked good on paper, but the real calculation was devastating: I was trading the unrepeatable experience of witnessing his childhood for money that would be forgotten long after the missed moments became irretrievable.
Money can buy many things, but it cannot buy yesterday. It cannot purchase your child’s first word twice, cannot acquire another sunset with someone you love after they’re gone, cannot pay for a second chance at conversations you were too busy to have the first time.
The wealthy understand this exchange rate intuitively—they use money to buy time, hiring others to handle tasks so they can focus on experiences that matter. The poor in spirit (regardless of bank balance) do the opposite: they spend time to save money, choosing the free activity over the meaningful one, the economical option over the memorable one.
Maybe real wealth is measured not in what you can afford to buy but in what you can afford to choose—choosing presence over productivity, choosing relationships over revenue, choosing moments that matter over moments that pay.
Tonight I want to calculate my real net worth: not assets minus liabilities, but meaningful moments minus meaningless hours, time spent on what matters minus time wasted on what doesn’t.