We all have twenty-four hours in a day and some of us get more days than others. What is the dollar amount you collect for your time? Knowing these are hours you will never get back, is it worth it to you? Who determines how much your time is worth? So few of us have the luxury of deciding for ourselves how much our time is really worth in monetary terms.
While I find myself consuming, I ask myself: is this book (or movie, or fancy dinner, or tank of gas) worth an hour of my life? Or two, or five? Essentially, that’s what we do. We get paid X per hour of our lives and with a relatively small fraction, we get to choose how to spend the currency that has been assigned to our time on this planet. When I started measuring things in this way, something in my brain shifted. Now imagine a world where time has become the exclusive currency.
It is an equally fascinating and frightening concept. Writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca and The Truman Show) provides plenty of food for thought in his new film, In Time. The poor (the people who have less time), do everything quickly, racing against the clock before their time runs out. The rich can afford to do things slowly and enjoy their lives. Though this story set in a future where humans have been genetically modified, the concept of time as currency is nothing more than a magnification of the dynamic that already exists.
