What’s Your Net Worth? — 17,520 days
Money makes the world go round, or so they say, but if money makes the world spin what makes the money sing?
There are numerous (maybe infinite) ways in which this question can be addressed but there is only one answer that truly matters,
MONEY = TIME
The only currency we have as individuals to barter for money is our TIME.
What we do and how we do it may be vastly different but in essence we all exchange our time for money.
However, while money is arguably an infinite resource, time is finite. The kicker is none of us know exactly how much we have to begin with. We cannot barter to gain time or exchange time with someone else. Admittedly, we can partake in activities that increase or decrease the likelihood of us maximising our time but in the end we only have so much.
When it comes down to it, time is undeniably the most valuable commodity on earth.
However, when basic needs are met, humans have the uncanny ability to view money as the worlds most valuable commodity and often equate it with happiness.
MONEY = HAPPINESS
This belief seems to resolve itself into a perfect positive correlation of r = 1.0 > For those of you who have never seen Pearsons r, a 1.0 means that for every unit increase in money their is also a one unit rise in happiness (whatever a unit of happiness looks like).
…………………………... $1 = 1 H ………………………………….
Despite this, when asked about what we as individuals value most the common response is HAPPINESS.
A 2010 study revealed that we value happiness over, intelligence, knowledge, maturity, wisdom, relationships, wealth and meaning in life.
However, research into happiness and money revealed that,
MONEY = HAPPINESS but only up to a certain point, after which …..
It doesn’t make much of a difference at all. You might think this magical number must be quite a handsome sum but neither is this the case.
The amount of money at which you find this inflection point is approximately $75,000 USD, according to Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (2010).
So, if money brings us happiness, to a point, and in order to obtain this money we must exchange our time for it, it follows that,
TIME = MONEY ( ≤ $75k USD ) = HAPPINESS
So how much money is our time truly worth?
The average lifespan for humans globally according to WHO (2015) is 72 years, granted this varies greatly depending on which part of the world you live in but it’s as good a place to start as any.
If you live for 72 years that’s 26,280 days or 630,720 hours, which may seem like a lot. However, when you consider that we spend 210,240 of those hours sleeping (assuming 8 hours) or 8,760 days.
So we have approximately 17,520 days or 2,500 weeks of which we will spend 548 at work (18 to 67 years at 39.2 hours per week).
That’s 22% of our entire lives at work.
Considering 39 of 112 waking hours in an average week are spent at work it becomes glaringly apparent that we need to think long and hard about the time we barter for money each and every day.
This is certainly not to say that all work is lost time or that a desire to obtain more money at the cost of time is fruitless. There is no one size fits all answer to the question. What your time worth is only answerable by you.
Perhaps we should start thinking about our minutes, hours and days as carefully as we count our money. Because unlike money, we cannot accumulate time we can only spend it.
Despite the fact that we can turn our heads and look backwards the only direction we can move is forward. What can we take forward from this message,
Moving forward,
- Spend time thinking about what brings you the most joy and why. Remembering that what makes you happy may change as you grow and that’s ok.
- Think ahead but live in the present. It is important to enjoy the now but it’s also essential to plan for the future. Too many of us think a year or two ahead at most when we should be thinking decades into the future.
- Plan for a future of happiness. Have a flexible future plan in mind that is centred around happiness and not money, even if that happiness involves financial freedom the underlying motivation should be happiness.
- Happiness doesn’t equate to easy. Obtaining happiness will, at times, be hard work. Don’t confuse happiness with easy, the moments we value most commonly involve overcoming a challenge.
- Revisit and revise. The only thing in life that is certain is change. Remain open to revising your assumptions, plans and goals as you go along.
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