What if our currency was time?

Favorite quotations, etc.
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RightClawSouth
Posts: 123
Joined: Wed Jul 28, 2010 3:15 am

Post by RightClawSouth »

In this movie called "Now", everybody wears watches that say how long they have to live and when they get to zero, you die. You pay for things with minutes of your life eg a bus ride might cost 1 hour. Super rich people have thousands of years.
That said, I want to make an iphone app that lets you put in your age, life expectancy, salary, net worth, % of the year working, investment return rate, etc and have it tell you how long you have to live. It will also let you put in a price and convert it into minutes of your life that you're sacrificing to buy the item.
Would that be weird? :)


NYC ERE
Posts: 433
Joined: Mon Aug 02, 2010 8:03 pm

Post by NYC ERE »

I think this is a very motivating way to think about one's life decisions. After all, money is time... is money. In this vein, I've been easing up on exchanging money for time lately--moving house by hand truck was an interesting and useful exercise for me, but ultimately I gave up a whole workday to the exercise, as well as giving up my good health for a full week afterwards, due to over-exertion. Because I pretty much work the maximum number of hours while still getting enough sleep and feeling good, exchanging my free time for saving money on various errands--for example, if I made my own bike trailer or grew my own food in NYC--basically means exchanging sleep time for errand time.
Quantifying one's (hopeful) remaining time on earth could be a good exercise, so long as you don't look at it too often; it might be kind of anxiety-provoking. That said, I think it's useful to meditate on the inevitability of death regularly to help prioritize things...


AlexOliver
Posts: 461
Joined: Tue Aug 03, 2010 7:25 pm

Post by AlexOliver »

There are a couple alternative currencies that go off hours instead of dollars, so everyone's time is equal. The only downside I can see is you can't game the system ala ERE because there's an upward limit on how much you can earn, no inflation or growth of the economy, etc.


JohnnyH
Posts: 2005
Joined: Thu Jul 22, 2010 6:00 pm
Location: Rockies

Post by JohnnyH »

Too hurried to comment on the money ≈ time thing (IMO time [much] > money), hopefully later... But I'm really excited by another Nicol SciFi, Gattaca was excellent.


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