Your Money for Your Life

Let’s talk for a moment about buying and selling our lives.

Most of us are born with very little personal possessions. Rarely are we born into great wealth, so for the vast majority of us, when we reach working age, we bargain with the businesses offering employment with the only valuable commodity we have: chunks of our life, usually sold in blocks of hours.

In high school, I worked two jobs, which probably accounted for a 45 hour workweek in addition to attending school. To put it more bluntly, I sold 45 hours of my life every week, week after week, for less than $4 for each hour (this was in the eighties). I also missed out on a lot of teenage activities because I was working- or rather, I sold those hours to corporations.
This is where the choices of what we do to spend our money (or gain debt) come in. I was fortunate enough that I did not accumulate a lot of debt, but I did spend what little money I had pretty quickly on inconsequential things. And that’s really the issue: we generally sell of vast quantities of our lives (which are finite), then we take that money and spend it on irrelevant things. As we get older, we tend to earn a lot more for our time, but the spending habits often stick with us.

You must stop yourself as you get ready to buy that next consumable purchase and ask, ‘Is this really what I am working for? To buy this object?’.

This is not to say you cannot purchase anything, ever. It is to say that every purchase comes with a higher price tag than just the one marked on the label, and if we recognize that, we can change our habits.

I recall when this point really occurred to me, and it occurred in an unusual place – walking down the street in a run-down neighborhood, which was all I could afford at the time.

I was usually approached by bums and winos anywhere I walked (I had no car), and they would always ask for a couple of dollars. I barely had grocery money. But the kicker was this: one day, as I had spurned the request from yet another bum, and he yelled obscenities after me, I realized that at my salary I had to work twenty minutes at a back-breaking job I loathed to get the money he was asking for. He, who had been living in the bottom of a bottle, had not worked a moment of that job, but wanted me to turn that money I sold part of my life for over to him for him to use. Pretty convenient for him. I work, he gets the money.

That’s the epiphany; I had sold those chunks of my life, I did have the right to use the money I’d gotten, but what was worth that chunk of life? Really, nobody’s life is worth $4 an hour, or $10 an hour, and probably not even $50 an hour. So if I was selling it off so cheap, what was I getting for it in return? What was I buying with my life?

What are you buying with your life?