you pay with time

I found this quotation this morning and it really struck me:

“You don’t really pay for things with money, you pay for them with time. ‘In five years, I’ll have put enough away to buy that vacation house we want. Then I’ll slow down.’ That means the house will cost you five years; one-twelfth of your adult life. Translate the dollar value of the house, car, or anything else into time, and then see if it’s still worth it. Sometimes you can’t do what you want and have what you want at once because each requires a different expenditure of time. The phrase ’spending your time’ is not a metaphor. It’s how life works.” -Charles Spezzano

Several months ago, during the height of the first gas crisis, I wrote a blog entry about how you should consider how much money your trip will cost you, not how much gas or how many miles. Now that gas is below $2 (at least, it is where I live), people are a little less worried about how much it costs to drive somewhere.

That quote above may be even more telling.

Science fiction plays with currency a lot. From Star Trek’s gold-pressed latinum to Walter Jon Williams’s use of calories as money in The Green Leopard Plague (a really interesting novella, by the way), as a sci-fi fan I’ve seen a lot of alternative currencies and ways of measuring costs. But I think, in the end, that time is probably the best one. I’m a busy person — this job, plus exercise, plus my child, plus writing, plus cooking, plus cleaning, plus time to relax… how much am I spending by doing everything that I need and want to do? How much time do I spend just sitting around paging through RSS feeds? What should I be spending my time on instead?

Probably not writing a blog entry lamenting about the time I’m spending.