This reminds me of the book Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992.html https://

This reminds me of the book Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo363799...). Edit: of course it's mentioned in both the article and the talk, no wonder it's so relevant :) It discusses how metaphors in language fundamentally shape how we think and behave, even when we aren't aware of them. For example, in the second chapter they write about the concept "Time is money": == (this is a quote, including the italics for emphasis) TIME IS MONEY You're wasting my time. This gadget will save you hours. I don't have the time to give you. How do you spend your time these days? That flat tire cost me an hour. [...more examples omitted here for brevity] Time in our culture is a valuable commodity. It is a limited resource that we use to accomplish our goals. Because of the way that the concept of work has developed in modern Western culture, where work is typically associated with the time it takes and time is precisely quantified, it has become customary to pay people by the hour, week, or year. In our culture TIME IS MONEY in many ways: telephone message units, hourly wages, hotel room rates, yearly budgets, interest on loans, and paying your debt to society by "serving time." These practices are relatively new in the history of the human race, and by no means do they exist in all cultures. == (end quote) Reading that passage, especially the last line, by no means do they exist in all cultures, really hit me. I never really realized how common these time=money metaphors really are, and I literally can't imagine a world where time is not money myself - the metaphor is that internalized.