I sold my Monday morning for $200, traded my Tuesday afternoon for $150, exchanged my Wednesday evening for $175. By the end of the week, I had accumulated money but depleted the only currency that truly matters—time, which cannot be earned back, inherited, or saved for later use.
This is reverse alchemy: converting gold into lead, transforming the precious into the practical, trading the irreplaceable for the renewable. Money can be made again, but this specific Monday morning—with its particular quality of light, its unique configuration of possibilities—will never return. Once sold, it joins the vast archive of moments I’ve exchanged for numbers in a bank account.
The mathematics are stark: I have approximately 4,000 weeks of life, give or take, and I’m selling them in 40-hour installments to people who value my time more than I do. They buy my mornings, my afternoons, my attention, my presence, leaving me with evenings too tired to appreciate and weekends too short to matter.
But here’s what haunts me: I’m not trading time for money—I’m trading life for money. Each hour at work is an hour not spent with my son while he’s still young enough to want my company, not spent with my aging parents while they’re still here to enjoy it, not spent pursuing interests that might never monetize but always energize.
The reverse alchemy convinces us that time is abundant and money is scarce, when the opposite is true. Money circulates endlessly through the economy, but time moves in only one direction—away from us, irretrievably, whether we’re paying attention or not.
I watch wealthy people buy back time—hiring others to handle tasks so they can focus on what matters to them. They understand the exchange rate: money for time is a good trade, but time for money is usually a terrible one. They’ve learned that the goal isn’t to make money but to make money work for you so your time can remain your own.
Maybe the question isn’t how much money I can make with my time, but how little money I actually need to live the life I want. Maybe wealth isn’t about accumulating currency but about spending time deliberately, investing hours in experiences that matter rather than trading them for paychecks that fund a lifestyle too expensive to enjoy.
Tonight I calculate my real hourly wage: not what I earn per hour worked, but what I earn per hour lived, factoring in the time spent preparing for work, recovering from work, thinking about work, commuting to work. The number is smaller than I want to admit, the exchange rate worse than I’ve been pretending.