Posted in the comments: Maybe I'm exuberant in a recent life change, but I think the answer is clear. Money is a metaphor -- as you said, it's a fabrication t

Posted in the comments: Maybe I'm exuberant in a recent life change, but I think the answer is clear. Money is a metaphor -- as you said, it's a fabrication that's meaningful only in the company of others who share the delusion, but on a desert island it's just kindling. Money is a metaphor for value and we hope that the transfer of money corresponds or at least correlates to the transfer of value, as it often does. So, we have this ubiquitous concept that feels like a law of nature because we're soaked in it -- as infants, educated adults, everywhere we see the effects of money. When our worldview is so thoroughly infected by a concept like money, it becomes almost impossible not to apply it to things to which it isn't fundamentally applicable. Of course it's possible, in the sense of a "dirty hack," to apply money to time as if time is an economic asset, but maybe that's just not true. Take our lives for example. Only a group can make an assessment of the economic value of a given life; for the person, that value is always infinity dollars. But wait, you say, people choose other things over life all the time! Their country, their friends, their family, etc. They even choose to end their lives early in order to preserve their wealth for living relatives. Yes! Exactly! Clearly there are "assets" that can meaningfully compared to a human life (like love and other lives), since people regularly trade their lives for these things. Money, I think, is fundamentally not one of those. Thought experiment: ---- I'm a rich guy. I'll give you access to an account that has $1,000,000,000 in it. You may not transfer the money, but you may spend it freely, only on yourself. In exchange for this access, I get to kill you right now. What do you say? ---- So, I'm asserting that maybe--like money and lives-- the value of time can't rightly be compared to the value of money, despite how often we do it and how natural it feels, because the scale is too different. Maybe we should work toward a system that identifies things like lives and time, and divorces those things from money entirely. As individuals the answer is to separate our time from income by building valuable, cash flow positive assets. That's the "Zen Ethic": the only way to live in a world with money that doesn't lead to misery, is to build streams of passive income.