#### [[Money Is Concentrated Time and Energy]] --- Money is a medium for exchange. It allows for an equal and consistent exchange of value amongst people. No longer are you trading a sheep for 4 bags of grain from one person, and 3 bags from another. Now its just \$15 per bag of grain. This medium of exchange works because everyone believes that money has value. Prior to present day the USD was backed by the gold standard. This meant that you could redeem your dollars for their worth in gold. This is obviously impractical in many ways but the important thing is that the currency represented something we all thought was valuable. Now the USD is a fiat currency that is considered valuable only by our belief that it is valuable. I still believe that \$2 will buy me a soda, so the \$2 has value to me, as long as the seller of soda believes that the soda is worth \$2 and accepts my money then the currency has value by our shared belief in its value. What money actually represents is human time and energy. I go to work and exchange my time and energy by producing value for the employer who compensates me in currency. I can think of this currency as the physical representation of the time and energy i just sold to the employer. This money is literally my time and energy that can be exchanged for goods, services, and other value. Using money is akin to spending the time doing the task yourself but by exchanging money with others they are performing work (time / energy) in exchange for payment (money) which is ultimately your (time / energy) just being "redeemed" at a later date and applied to a different form of work. When i pay for doordash to deliver McDonalds to my house i am exchanging currency (time / energy) so that i do not have to: - plant the crops - wait - tend the crops - reap the crops - transport the crops - process the crops - cook and prepare the food - and pick up the food it's just hot and ready outside my door. This is because i spent my time and energy performing one form of work, so that i do not have to perform all the other forms of work to acquire the desired good / service / value. One other way of viewing this is to realize that there's no way for one human to know how to do everything. Build everything, fix everything, grow everything, etc. When we exchange currency for expertise its also saving us the time we would have to spend to learn that task / skill / trade and instead allowing us to simply exchange some money for the desired result through the skilled labor of others in exchange for payment. This also opens up the avenue for people to specialize in skills as they can rely on the skills of others through currency, instead of having to be generalists and perform everything themselves. --- Tags: [[Money]] - [[DevLog/Templates/Temporal/time]] - [[Commerce]] - [[Work]] Reference: Related: - [[The best way to incentivize the investment of time is with an equal exchange of value]] - [[The search for novelty in ADHD will cause one to flit from interest to interest inadvertently becoming a generalist]] --- tags: 🧠️/📝️/🌲️ aliases: - Time is money cssclass: null --- #### [[Money Is Concentrated Time and Energy]] --- Money is a medium for exchange. It allows for an equal and consistent exchange of value amongst people. No longer are you trading a sheep for 4 bags of grain from one person, and 3 bags from another. Now its just \$15 per bag of grain. This medium of exchange works because everyone believes that money has value. Prior to present day the USD was backed by the gold standard. This meant that you could redeem your dollars for their worth in gold. This is obviously impractical in many ways but the important thing is that the currency represented something we all thought was valuable. Now the USD is a fiat currency that is considered valuable only by our belief that it is valuable. I still believe that \$2 will buy me a soda, so the \$2 has value to me, as long as the seller of soda believes that the soda is worth \$2 and accepts my money then the currency has value by our shared belief in its value. What money actually represents is human time and energy. I go to work and exchange my time and energy by producing value for the employer who compensates me in currency. I can think of this currency as the physical representation of the time and energy i just sold to the employer. This money is literally my time and energy that can be exchanged for goods, services, and other value. Using money is akin to spending the time doing the task yourself but by exchanging money with others they are performing work (time / energy) in exchange for payment (money) which is ultimately your (time / energy) just being "redeemed" at a later date and applied to a different form of work. When i pay for doordash to deliver McDonalds to my house i am exchanging currency (time / energy) so that i do not have to: - plant the crops - wait - tend the crops - reap the crops - transport the crops - process the crops - cook and prepare the food - and pick up the food it's just hot and ready outside my door. This is because i spent my time and energy performing one form of work, so that i do not have to perform all the other forms of work to acquire the desired good / service / value. One other way of viewing this is to realize that there's no way for one human to know how to do everything. Build everything, fix everything, grow everything, etc. When we exchange currency for expertise its also saving us the time we would have to spend to learn that task / skill / trade and instead allowing us to simply exchange some money for the desired result through the skilled labor of others in exchange for payment. This also opens up the avenue for people to specialize in skills as they can rely on the skills of others through currency, instead of having to be generalists and perform everything themselves. --- Tags: [[Money]] - [[DevLog/Templates/Temporal/time]] - [[Commerce]] - [[Work]] Reference: Related: - [[The best way to incentivize the investment of time is with an equal exchange of value]] - [[The search for novelty in ADHD will cause one to flit from interest to interest inadvertently becoming a generalist]]