March 9
There is no wealth but life. Rich is the land that nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy people.
Unto This Last (freely rendered)
Listening mode
There is no wealth but life. Rich is the land that nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy people.
Money has a property that life lacks: it can be deferred. What you earn today you can spend in ten years, and by then it has often lost little. An hour, by contrast, exists only now. If you skimp on it, you don't get it back later with interest.
A large part of your effort goes into converting time into something durable. That isn't foolish. The future is uncertain, and a reserve makes it somewhat less threatening. But you rarely check the exchange rate. You know fairly precisely what an hour of work brings in. What the same hour would have been had you not traded it, you hardly know.
It gets harder with what cannot be converted at all. A conversation after which someone goes home relieved leaves nothing in stock. You can't invest it, show it off or bequeath it. Yet something in another life has shifted.
It appears on no balance sheet. Not even your own, when at the end of the year you ask yourself whether it was a good year.
