Amazon 2020 Letter to Shareholders
aboutamazon.com
aboutamazon.com
Tech companies are the only inspiring institutions that remain in America today. Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.
And amidst that sole set of institutions that inspire, thrive and lead us into the future, Amazon is one of the most inspiring.
Jeff, thank you for helping prove that humans can create great things.
But even with non-charity non-profit, Bezos wouldn't be so wealthy. Still, that's not your point. Your point is that it operates in a way to advance its business activities rather than to distribute profits, and that's largely true.
Seems like you would rather drink the kool aid given to you in press releases by companies! Good going!
> Tech companies are the only inspiring institutions
Yes, I do feel inspired to hire vulnerable people and squash all their rights, make them work to the bone, violate all their privacy, and make them pee in bottles.
you will only find this level of slavish devotion to tech on HN and in the valley. Normal people do not think like this!
I'd say only tech people on HN are gung ho about Amazon's practices and in some sort of an eternal crusade against big corps. We can still criticize big corps for its workers rights and what not, but at the same time praise their technological prowess and incredible work from many thousands of people. They're orthogonal, but HN public does not know how to separate the two. Media fed and bloated minds sometimes.
Honestly, I come to HN for inspiration and motivation. Not activism. There are plenty of places to engage in productive activism on the internet if you wish, but better in person. HN is particularly not suited for it because of downvotes - activism requires people in person debating peacefully to progress and not regress into echo chambers. Activism is a joint affair, not an idealogical war. HN coalesces the worst of both - hive mind idealogical stance + echo chambering through black and grey text colors.
Love faded because Amazon removed the ability to filter search results for items shipped and sold only by Amazon.com, and they commingled inventory, so there is no guarantee of supply chain.
They made the decision to reduce their costs as a retailer, and subject their customers to supply chain risk, in order to increase their margins and sit back and earn commission as a platform.
At this point in time, I don’t see anything remarkable about Amazon’s retail operations. If anything, I would say Home Depot is more impressive, with a nice website showing me where the item is in their store, plus offering me various locations to pick it up or ship it to me. In fact, most retailers do this now (but I like Home Depot’s website the most).
Unlike Amazon, however, I don’t have to worry about resellers garbage on other websites (although Walmart is similar but I can still filter results there and I don’t think they commingle).
I think this is consensus amongst the tech elite crowd on HN including myself.
I’ve spoken to my dad who buys all kinds of stuff from Amazon in his retirement in rural area. He loves it. He is still amazed by the fact that someone delivers whatever you want by the press of a button. People of HN are myopic about their position, education and knowledge of technology and try to project that the rest of the world must be the same. I am guilty of that too.
HN is such a monumentally tiny bubble.
That the lay population does not care or is not as informed about the above issue is probably true.
Although, the lay population is very price sensitive, and Amazon’s prices are much higher than comparable in store prices at Walmart/Costco/Target/Home Depot/etc. Especially if the item is a heavy and/or liquid.
What you describe here is how the American right caricatures people who make change in the US. Civil rights activists did more than "complain"; indeed, if they had only complained, it's hard to see how they would have been able to overcome white supremacists in business, law enforcement and government.
Just look at the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the lesser-known Freedom Riders. These were campaigns organized by a coalition of local folks in the South (mostly, but not entirely Black) as well as anti-racists in the North. These activists were successful because they were strategic (the Freedom Riders forced the Kennedy Administration to enforce existing anti-segregation laws on US highways...) and incredibly brave (...and they endured having their bus firebombed by white supremacists while the police stood by watching).[0]
Much like organized labor, Civil Rights activists created a power base among the disenfranchised in the face of state sanctioned violence, up to and including assassination.[1]
It's fair to say that some progressives caricature the accomplishments of Amazon, which, on a technical level, are tremendous yet difficult for a non-technical person to appreciate. But this comment comes close to saying that ordinary people have no right to criticize the great men of industry like Jeff Bezos and Henry Ford. This is particularly ironic because Ford published and distributed anti-semitic propaganda to the extent that he was personally honored by Adolph Hitler[2]; Ford also hired armed thugs to intimidate and attack union organizers.[3]
There's a particular tendency on HN to lionize successful (rich) founders and CEOs to the point of obscuring their exploitation of labor. This includes Elon Musk, who literally purchased the title of "Founder" for Tesla, and whose factories had, at one point, accumulated more OSHA fines than the next ten car manufacturers put together.[4]
I'm not saying we shouldn't appreciate the staggering achievements of companies like Amazon or Tesla; I personally think Tesla has the only big vision worth pursuing in all of Silicon Valley. But nor should we ignore the human cost of what they do. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are among the two richest men in the world right now, and they got that wealth in no small part through the exploitation and human misery of their most vulnerable employees.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Riders#:~:text=Freedom....
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Assassinated_American...
2. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryfo...
3. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...
I agree that Tesla deserves their poor reputation, but Amazon genuinely seems like they care about workers' well-being. People perceive labor to be "exploited" because automation and globalization mean that American workers no longer have a monopoly on labor. It's a simple function of supply and demand. No amount of cherry picked anti-Amazon narratives is going to change that. Increased government spending would, as it does for the Nordic countries. However, nobody cares to detangle the web of perverse incentives baked in, so Americans will always view taxes as a waste of money.
Of course that was never the case. They risked their lives and struggled for years to make progress. But that risk and struggle is minimized; to describe the people who undermined and attacked and killed them would be to indict the same groups of business people, police officers and law makers who perpetuate the same anti-civil rights agenda today. This is how Martin Luther King ends up being described as a Black Santa Claus rather than a radical organizer who was building a cross-racial, class-based movement for civil and economic rights. It's how schools across the country teach whole lessons about MLK for every grade, every year, and never talk about how the FBI harassed and targeted him and other civil rights leaders.
This seems like a stretch. Media certainly fits both of these, but it's hard to claim academia is in decay by most measures, and I have no idea how you could possibly claim American government or military are illegitimate OR in decay without resorting to completely subjective measures, such as how partisan the republic is or how few things get done (of the things you care about, no doubt).
(Note: one could construct a plausible claim that military is in decay based on what percentage of spending goes to operations instead of R&D and acquisition[0], but I'd argue this doesn't mean our military is in decay so much as entering a period of restructuring as a result of a series of unfortunate long-term planning misses)
[0] as seen on HN, https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2021/04/welcome-to-decad...
The decay of the US government is visible in the crumbling infrastructure, the homeless people on the streets and in tent cities, the trash, the shitty COVID response, the partisan bickering. It has no claim to leadership, it is not inspiring to anyone whether in the US or around the world. It is in crisis and it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix.
You're throwing a lot of things out here, but they generally fall under being either (a) subjective, (b) deliberate policy choices by a democratically elected government, or (c) emergent properties of deliberate policy choices by a democratically elected government
Ultimately, if the people of this country don't want government spending on the sick and homeless, then it's not a decaying and illegitimate government, it is a well functioning and legitimate government as decided by a cruel populace.
Not to say the the government is perfectly legitimate, I could write an essay on issues with the way our government is structured and how certain design choices diminish citizen's representation in the government (for example: gerrymandering, first past the post electoral college allocation, and the near-permanence of effectively arbitrary state lines). But even the sum of these do not make our government illegitimate.
> it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix
I can agree on that much atleast.
In the past, if you wanted to work on cool shit, government/military had plenty of projects, and research was being done in academia.
Nowdays, if you want to work on cool shit, you go to tech companies.
> Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.
If the government is in decay and losing all its legitimacy, what exactly are you doing here and why are we following laws in the first place?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
These are not "trivial stories about evil corporations". They are very real criticisms about the company and its leadership and the lives they have ruined are very real too. To wave your hand and excuse the vast amounts of ethically and morally horrendous things Amazon has done as "trivial stories" is quite frankly one of the most willfully ignorant and disgusting things I've seen posted here - let alone up-voted - in quite some time.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale
A company that benefits from forced labor camps for fucks sake... that is inspiring to you? Jesus Christ.
As for China, to sit from the comfort of your own home and demand that a company act benevolent at a cost to itself is simply ridiculous.
Go around your neighborhood and ask what do people think of Amazons products like Prime with all the shipping advantages and media that comes with it, of amazons return policy, of things like $15 an hour minimum wage, $30/hour of overtime + benefits, and you will find a different story.
In terms of things like poor worker conditions across the board, you would have a point if you actually had any concrete proof, and no, twitter threads don't count as proof. Not to mention that there is plenty of evidence to support the contrary.
I've yet to meet a single one that has anything positive to say about the company.
The point is that Amazon does a shitload of good by providing useful services to a lot of customers.
> "We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work."
That being said, if Amazon puts the same resources into this as they put into being customer-centric, it could happen, but I doubt I will be a part of that.
Amazon's "Customer Obsession" comes at the expense of their employees.
Also the hypocrisy:
> Despite what we’ve accomplished, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for our employees’ success. ...We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.
Heh this is coming from a company who refused to release the data from their internal survey about WFH and then made the decision to force everyone come back to the office 5 times/week. I am sure that makes Amazon the best and safest place!
Andy Jassy went on record during an interview at the 2020 re:Invent that hinted at this. His concerns were more around Amazon's inventiveness being lost if folks weren't in the same physical space as their peers.
Given the way Amazon operates (a lot of their processes are around "reinvent, rinse, repeat" at pace leading to "go big or go home"), I believe, the leadership concluded that it couldn't be done with a remote-first culture off the cuff. The leadership probably needs more time to figure remote-work out rather than blanket approve for all teams.
From what little I know, Amazon already has a model for "away teams" (distributed teams with some overlapping concerns across geographies) that fits processes required for remote-work within Amazon's operating model but I take it needs to be refined further for it to be applied across all of Amazon.
tldr; Amazon isn't the kind of company to resist change; and so, I am positive that for teams that can function just as well remotely would be allowed to do so eventually whilst the leadership works on improving other processes that works given Amazon's scale, culture, and needs.
Disclosure: ex-AWS.
Glossing over the "sophisticated algorithms" part, this is a welcome read and it seems to be a great way of limiting healthcare costs for new hires, but I am concerned at how "rotational" are such jobs surely manual warehouse work would be pretty similar in muscle groups used?
It's outside of our imagination to assume there are different stations? Surely some walk more, some sort more things, some may even pick up heavy things.
Edit:
> Glossing over the "sophisticated algorithms" part
I also want to point out that your quotes around sophisticated algorithms are unkind. Scheduling optimization base on N parameters isn't a trivial problem [0], definitely not something anyone would bat an eye at calling a sophisticated algorithm.
No but my naivety thought there would be more automation in place to reduce walking, sorting and picking up heavy things.
Granted I have not worked in a fulfilment center and my impressions are solely based on amazon's own material but they put out jobs for operatives that just stand there all day sorting small packets, moving from this to sorting incoming large pallets sounds like it would do more damage!
Edit: Thanks for the incorrect wikipedia page, how does compute resources come into play here? I'm not taking anything away from software that solves the nurses roster problem or applies simulated annealing, just merely quoting the source.
Amazon's expectation is that every associate will be physically capable of doing any job necessary in the FC at a moments' notice, as business needs demand. I've seen complaints by associates that being sent to new roles like picking or palettes is painful, but unless they have an actual injury and medical waiver, Amazon doesn't make exceptions. I've stowed, picked, counted, run totes, wrapped boxes, stacked palettes, done many things in an Amazon warehouse, I know how they operate. Unless you're bleeding on the ground, you're expected to suck it up and deal.
You have to remember, the purpose of automation isn't to decrease stresses on employees, it's to increase their productivity and the value that can be extracted from them per hour. When it's still cheaper and cost efficient to have a meat-robot do the work, they'll do that work.
Having worked in a non-Amazon fulfillment center, I’m amazed at the automation they do have.
Picking and packing product once it’s in a warehouse isn’t the difficult part. Unloading and loading the shipping containers, in my experience, is far more difficult.
To maximize space in shipping containers they can be packed floor to ceiling. I think about 22kg was the maximum weight of product I was unloading. Picture beverages stacked floor to ceiling in a 50 foot trailer. The optimal lifting position will happen for a small percentage of the boxes moved. You’re on your toes trying to pull product from above your head, then you’ll be bending over to pick product off the ground.
Palletizing the product for transportation within the warehouse also puts you in disadvantaged positions.
There will be some token training on how to lift correctly, but you will quickly be falling behind on productivity.
To achieve your targets there will be times when you’ll be lifting two boxes together. Or stacking them to be more efficient.
If you’re lucky and they see you working hard, they may give you a rest day by putting you on light duty once every two weeks. If you piss off the scheduler, enjoy your heavy rotations.
It’s probably a good thing to reduce the human element assigning this kind of work.
Also don’t forget not all product (e.g., heavy exercise equipment) arrives with intact packaging. Sometimes you’ll have to move this out by hand when a box falls apart and then repackage the material.
When you’re picking product there is often powered pallet jacks to get from point a to point b, but you end up taking short cuts and jumping off before the machine has reached a complete stop.
This work is still better than doing rebar or construction. At least you get a roof overhead and stay out of the elements.
People who are young and need a job will do dumb things to stay employed.
That would necessarily curtail consumption, and hence run counter to all the economic growth assumptions that governments have used to make various promises about expectations of future quality of life.
Bottom line is it’s politically impossible to address climate change. The solution would have been to tax fossil fuels sufficiently so that it would reduce emissions to whatever levels we could have afforded, but that would have caused a lot of pain in the short term with people having to give up a lot of niceties of modern life.
The US govt. telling all of its citizens to 'consume less', aka don't spend as much in the economy, could cause some level of danger to the country. Or more likely, to the elected officials reelection chances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Eddington#Final_years_and...
I'd be really curious to hear from the folks on HN who are so deeply critical of Amazon and Jeff: do you see that he's at least trying and putting in money and effort? Or do you really believe that he is the devil manifest on Earth? If so, please cite one example of a living corporate leader running a company of Amazon's size who you consider to be a "good" leader. I'm genuinely curious.
There are a few things Amazon is doing better than industry standard, but because of their scale the things they don't do well have a huge impact and I believe that also increases their responsibility.
I would say "We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work" is a complete 180, so I believe it, when I see it. It will take years of hard work and culture shift, if they are actually serious about it.
This makes me so sad. This shouldn’t be doing something special for your employees that you get to boast about: it should be a basic human right. Talk about setting the bar low...
Even if we assume everything written here is true, like you say, it's nothing to be proud of.
It is encouraging though that at least they are acknowledging that these are stuff employees should have.
I assume you are saying that his work was easier in some sense, but what about the benefits that accrued from that work and the life environment in general?
This is apartment rental income, not ownership class income.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/data/interactive...
It's certainly not true that a $15/hr wage at an Amazon warehouse alone can "very much" support the "extremely high standard of living in the US" mentioned upthread as a general statement of fact.
In short, you are going to need your spouse to work as well. Then things look up, so long as both of you work. Good luck if you aren't dual income, though.
Folks in the US die preventable deaths, by the way. And a lot of "third world countries" have health care in place, sometimes more fairly widespread than the US.
/sarcasm
Median family income is ~86k. [0]
Median household income, which is likely what you wanted to cite and is the more common measure, is still much more than 50k, at ~68k. [1]
Median personal income is about 36k. [2]
Median hourly wage is $20.17. [3]
So, no, a $15/hr Amazon worker isn’t making above-median wage and, even if they work 40hr weeks for a full year, isn’t making above-median income.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA646N (nb: “family” for this purpose is defined basically as a household of two or more related by blood, marriage, and/or adoption.)
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=249&eid=25956...
$31.5k is a middle class income there and certainly not poverty level.
House prices aren't telling you anything: Poor folks have trouble saving up for a down payment and have more issues keeping credit good enough for a house, due to lack of funds to pay things. House prices matter little if you can't actually qualify to buy them.
This is also pretty much at the poverty line if relative poverty is calculated like in most other OECD countries - as 60% of median income. That would be about $3100/month for two adults.
That’s Amazon’s minimum, not average. That is, every Amazon worker makes more than that.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Amazon-Warehouse-Worker....
What you're seeing here is a large section of the population that likes the idea of coal mining, and willing to spend a lot of tax money to keep that idea alive.
The only reason we hear so much about it is because the states with coal industry hold some swing Senate and Electoral College votes.
But there's a catch... the social mobility you get here in the US comes with a higher reward but also a higher risk. If you play your cards well, you'll skip quite a few levels and can go from a poor immigrant to a decamillionaire within a single generation. But if you play them poorly, you might not only be left with nothing and become homeless, but you might literally get killed by disease or the police (yes, that happens elsewhere as well, but not within the runner up countries).
So there you have it - what kind of a risk-to-reward ratio do you want? If you're shooting for the moon, come to the US, get a shitty laptop, start learning to code, and get a job in tech (no, you don't have to go to Harvard to get a 6-digit job as a developer). If you'd rather make sure that the chances of the worst case scenario are as low as possible, I'd recommend a socialist democracy like Austria where the government will never let you to drop below a certain level of comfort.
> I'd recommend a socialist democracy like Austria
The vast majority of people can't just "chose" to live where you recommend them to go.
You're basically describing the proverbial american dream, it concerns an unbelievably small portion of the people living in the US, imho it's not too far from straight up propaganda to keep the gears turning, ie "I might have to work 2 full time jobs now but I'll work harder and in 5 years I'll make it". It even is a double edged sword, companies like Amazon or Uber made it _because_ they're allowed to stomp on bottom feeders, it's a game with a minority of extreme winner and a majority of losers.
People don't want "social mobility", they want a decent life and access to basic things like medicine, affordable housing, toilet breaks no matter where they are on the social ladder... for every sociopathic wantrepreneur who wants to make it big you have thousands of family who just want to not be treated like cattle
> If we were able to make those decisions, why is it that other people can’t?
Because we all come from widely different backgrounds, families, education, get different opportunities, make different choices, &c. It's easy to compare people's lives to our own stories but you can't sum up everything with "if I made it everyone can make it", there are so many variables, the majority of which we can't understand before going through them ourselves.
Regardless of that, if I was part of the 10% or 15% of American below the poverty threshold and you told me "just move to Austria, anyone can make it" I don't think I would take it well
Of course you'll always find people who manage to drastically change their lives, but I'm personally not really interested in the edge case. Btw I started searching about social mobility and found this, which supports social mobility in the US is pretty poor https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
Society is meant to be hierarchical, bottom feeders are supposed to serve the small percentile of elites.
This is the natural order of things.
Social support systems for the bottom feeders makes the bottom feeders entitled. Democratic government focus inevitably moves towards social programs which must be pushed back hard by the elite.
Most elites inherit their elite status. We must ignore this and talk about anecdotes of how some software engineer made a lot of money in Silicon valley. Buying bitcoin and TSLA a few years ago is also an undeniable marker of extraordinarily elite thinking, which society must reward.
We must never bluntly state our beliefs but cloak it in other acceptable words, so you don't get canceled by the SJWs and bottom feeders.
The naturally superior and their offspring will and must be allowed to ascend the social hierarchy.
BTW, conservatives have larger amygdala. Anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals.
I think a lot of white collar workers (ie. journalists and people reading certain papers) are shocked to find out that warehouse/blue collar jobs are hard and not paid great. It says more about the reader than anything else.. I'd wager that conditions are a lot better at Amazon than at some random warehouse where people are working out of the media spotlight.
Also, if you have over 1 million employees, you can always find plenty of stories of things that went wrong, kind of like in a 1-million population city there's always plenty of stuff going on.
1st world countries should not boast about basic human rights.That should be the standard.
For guys it may be $10 per hour, but for women who enjoy shopping this may be indeed negative!
I’ll never understand this.
Unless your time can be directly traded for money, it has no monetary value. I think it’s just a trick people use to talk themselves into spending money.
So, in the context of this rah-rah Amazon email, maybe I do get it.
Every so often I think about buying some thingy or other, then get lost in a rabbit hole comparing all the options and sifting through fake reviews.
Sometimes I'll "come to", having wasted 45 minutes, close all the tabs, realising I never actually needed the thing anyway.
As a metaphor an "opportunity costs" is helpful for thinking about the value of time but it becomes an ideology in itself if you take it literally.
I think we do that implicitly. You would probably love to play with your kid all day but you chose to make some sales calls so you have money to support the family. But you don't make all the sales calls you could make so that you have family time.
So while sure we don't put a monetary number on our hours explicitly, we do have points at which selling our time is and isn't worth it.
I agree that the convenience of Amazon does create value for customers and that it makes sense to try to quantify that somehow; otoh that convenience also manifests negatively in things like unneeded purchases and comparison shopping paralysis. So I think the math on it is indeed a bit suspect.
Though I suppose as big box and discount retail has eaten the lunch of specialty stores, malls, and so on, many of those other benefits (discovery, browsing a curated selection of products, trying things out/on, conversing with a knowledgeable salesperson, etc) have faded somewhat. But on the far end of all this, I'd expect the only brick & mortar stores who are going to "make it" against online retail will be those who can not just promise and deliver on these extras, but also persuade their customers that the extras are worth paying for, whether that's via higher prices, a direct patronage model, or the ability to offer an exclusive paid product not available online.
I believe the common name for this transaction is "work".
Maybe get on Uber?
Specific results are tradeable for money. I get paid far too much for what I do most of the time, with small windows of specialized action that justifies the waste. It's sloth and inefficacy (due to an inability to measure efficacy) that makes it look like time for money, when it's largely an accounting trick that is more like a payment schedule than a time-for-money.
Would you want in an hour long line outside McDonald’s for example if they offered a free burger? If yes, then it means you think your time is worth the cost of that burger $3 per hour.
I'm sure there's a dozen more creative explanations for your proposed situation. Just because I'm willing to spend time on something doesn't mean I think my time is worth less than the cost of paying not to spend it.
What I think my time is worth and what someone is willing to pay me for that time are 2 separate things.
These people work 9-5 and are paid a salary. I don't get it. Do it after work? Or on a day off. Or weekend...
You have to be making a very high income for DIY to not make sense. Paying someone skilled to do my brakes costs over $80/hr. And paying someone unskilled leads to showing up on /r/justrolledintotheshop later. Meanwhile with $600 or so of tools you can do all the basic maintenance for the rest of the car's lifetime (and re-use those tools for home improvement and other jobs). Something simple like brakes is a couple of hours and you can listen to a podcast or audiobook.
Of course, the professional shops invariably overtorque the lug nuts on reassembly and cause damage/issues for the next service...
But I prefer to invert this thought experiment - my time isn't worth $x because I intend to use that time for something I can invoice, it's the amount you'd _have_ to pay for my time in order to incentivize me not to spend it walking around the park, watching a movie or whatever but rather do some marketable work.
So yes, I kind of know the value of my time, I'm willing to pay $x not to be bothered with some things, e.g. a washing machine. I don't care about spending +10 minutes when buying some item.
Yes but that’s an arbitrary value you’re assigning to your time not the the value someone else is willing to give you for your time.
I totally get why they did in this letter, and I also think it's a laughable reach to talk about $126B in "value creation" in that way..
But at the same time, I do value my own time, in terms of being free to choose how I spend it.
Ordering from Amazon (or online in general) has absolutely increased that freedom for me. Rather than having to find and drive to a store to get something (and I think 1 hour per trip is a good metric), I spend 3 minutes ordering it, and it arrives at my door the next day.
Meanwhile I spend that hour doing other things that are more valuable to me. I may not acknowledge this each time, but in aggregate it certainly adds up.
So it's not about making more money as much as it's about the value of reducing toil for yourself.
You have time currency and you have financial currency. they are not divisible in the same way. they have some additive components though. If I spend 5 hours a week on house work like cleaning and then i use money to hire a person to do it for me i now have 5 hours of time currency.
that time currency could be invested into enjoyment, learning, or for some direct financial currency creation.
this how it works, your likely being overly litteral material making your life worse. as normal people will view you as obtuse vs the wise person you think you are.
Unless I’m taking an hour off of work, that hour is not worth any specific amount of money.