If time is money then that implies that money is time. Now this is obviously false in several fashions. I could with enough money probably contrive some way to stop just about any clock in the world but I couldn't prevent a radioactive isotope from decaying. Money can't stop people from aging (yet) but it can do a lot of things to make it less apparent and less unpleasant. Money can't let you go back in time. The most important way to understand money as time is as people's time. We trade the hours of our lives for money and in a round about fashion we trade our money for other peoples time. The copper in the wires that are running electricity to the screen you are reading this on was mined by people who would probably have rather been doing other things. Same with the plastic around the screen, the electricity running through it, the development of flat screens, and the deployment of all of the technological infrastructure that got us to this moment where I make this point hundreds of years after Adam Smith first noted it.

Maybe this is a new thought to you or maybe you're confused that I think this even needs to be explained. I find this to be a useful way to think about money because it grounds big numbers in the daily grind of human existence. I haven't lived a billion dollars worth of economic value generation as measured by my pay and I'm not expecting to but I can kind of grasp at what is meant by it with some math. It's considered pretty gauche to put a price tag on a human life but you actually can't budget for a hospital without literally doing just that. If that feels aberrant to you then I'm sorry to say that it's implicitly everywhere. If you spend time working in a soup kitchen in your community you aren't using that time to campaign for online privacy. If you give to animal welfare charities then that money doesn't go to help educate children in the developing world. Time is money and money is time. They are exchanged for each other constantly. Time and effort are the basic resources for accomplishing anything. Money is the way that people incentivize others to do anything. This can be as important as a heart transplant, as frivolous as an artisan sundae, as banal as cleaning a toilet, or as transcendent as funding the greatest movie of all time. Spend your money how you see fit but please remember that somewhere in it's past or future that's somebody's late shift or on the job injury.

IRON NODER XVI: MORE STUBBORN-HARD THAN HAMMER'D IRON