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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Money, to an extent, buys time. That's the main reason I pursue it.

The issue is that most people seem to leverage their money to the hilt. They earn $10,000 more, they spend ~$10,000 more. I can see money making you less happy in that situation, because you now face more downside risk if the money goes away.

Whereas if you earn $10,000 and only spend $0-$1,000 more, then you have options, including the option to not do anything to earn money at some point in the future.

The above is a version of the Mustachian philosophy, but you don't need to cut spending to a bare minimum to pursue time. Nassim Taleb argues for "fuck you money", and has written skeptically of the "money doesn't lead to happiness" idea. For him, self-ownership and independence of money is the key. The main purpose of money is not to spend most of it, to have a reserve.

People often ask how my business is going by asking if it keeps me "busy". They're using the wrong metrics.

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> People often ask how my business is going by asking if it keeps me "busy". They're using the wrong metrics.

Or just being polite? Or following norms about not asking about money? Or just using "keeping busy" as a construct for "not unemployed"?

> Money, to an extent, buys time

I think spending money is the wrong way to go about getting the things you want out of life.

Earning money is very inefficient - You have all your costs of education, of finding a job, of getting to work and the biggest one - the taxes you pay.

Then spending money is inefficient too, because whenever you spend money someone is making a profit, taking their bit off the top.

So rather than using the inefficient money-as-a-middle-man I think you're much better off to just go straight to what you want - time in this case.

Just go to work less, have less money, and you'll magically have more time - and in fact it will be more time that if you tried to earn/spend money to "buy" that time.

I'd love it if the work I'm interested in wasn't generally a boolean 5*8hrs/day/week or unemployed. Most people don't have the luxury of a work/free time slider.

(I could freelance, but I don't think that would end well for me.)

> I'd love it if the work I'm interested in wasn't generally a boolean 58hrs/day/week or unemployed. Most people don't have the luxury of a work/free time slider.*

I think you'd be surprised if you asked your boss for unpaid leave. Start with a few weeks a year and slowly ramp it up. You boss will be happy because it will be easier for her to make budget.

I took about 10 weeks unpaid last year, Likely it will be 12 or 15 this year.

Thanks, I've actually _never_ seen that suggested anywhere! Would be a great idea for when my wife and I both have jobs.

There are assumptions here.

>Earning money is very inefficient - You have all your costs of education, of finding a job, of getting to work and the biggest one - the taxes you pay.

In the states you're forced to attend school until a certain age, you can also skip grades if you're ahead of the pack. Finishing high school / college might relate to long term potential income, but that's statistics. For instance, I was selling online gold for a few months and easily made what my first full-time job was in half the time.

>Just go to work less, have less money, and you'll magically have more time - and in fact it will be more time that if you tried to earn/spend money to "buy" that time.

While this is likely to be true, think about what money affords. It's the ability to have experiences easier, with less stress financially. Seeing plays, movies, traveling, dining at famous restaurants. This will depend on what a person wants to do with their time and what they enjoy, but money makes some of these experiences accessible or cuts down on time needed. Think about traveling to certain countries. People have made trips never using planes, but the time it takes is magnitudes longer (again, maybe some people rather boat the entire way).

I seem to recall that other studies of happiness that experiences matter more than things; to generalize, that experiences matter.

My discontent with working full-time is not that I don't have free time, but that I don't have time to do things.

This wrong, if you think about it. Division of labour and using other peoples capital(Equipment).

1 hour of developer time, could be used to leverage 5 hours of cleaner time. And the cleaner would most likely be more efficient at cleaning than you requiring less time.

If division of labour didn't work, then the whole basis of trade is wrong. You might as well do everything yourself.

And we are entering an age in which money can buy time in a much more useful sense, via medical means of treating the consequences of degenerative aging. At the moment that means funding the research, but later it will mean buying the therapies. If you have money, better to put it into stage 1 (research) now rather than waiting around for a stage 2 (treatments) that will only show up after enough is done in stage 1, though.

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