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The relationship between space, time, money, and happiness

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The older I get, the more I’m convinced that time is money (and money is time). We’re commonly taught that money is a “store of value”. But what does “store of value” actually mean? It’s a repository of past effort that can be applied to future purchases. Really, money is a store of time. (Well, a store of productive time, anyhow.)

It's hard in that context to plan on 80 years of life on 40 years of work.

Now, having made this argument, I’ll admit that time and money aren’t exactly the same thing. Money is a store of time, sure, but the two concepts have some differences too.

For instance, time is linear. After one minute or one day has passed, it’s irretrievable. You cannot reclaim it. If you waste an hour, it’s gone forever. If you waste (or lose) a dollar, however, it’s always possible to earn another dollar. Time marches forward but money has no “direction”.

More importantly, time is finite. Money is not. The sky is the limit. Theoretically, your income and wealth have no upper bound. On the other hand, each of us has about seventy (maybe eighty) years on this earth, some have 90 maybe 100. If you’re lucky, you’ll live for 1000 months. Only a very few of us will live 5000 weeks. Most of us will live between 25,000 and 30,000 days.

I’ve always loved this representation of a “life in weeks” of a typical American from the blog

Wait But Why:

Your Life in Weeks

If you allow yourself to conduct a thought experiment in which time and money are interchangeable, you can reach some startling conclusions.

Wealth and Work

When I began to fully grasp the relationship between money and time, my first big insight was that wealth isn’t necessarily an abundance of money — it’s an abundance of time. Or potential time. When you accumulate a lot of money, you actually accumulate a large store of time to use however you please. We call it freedom.

And, in fact, this seems to be one of the primary reasons the Financial Independence movement is gaining popularity. Financial Independence — having made and/ or saved enough that you’re no longer required to work for money — provides the promise that you can use your time in whichever way you choose to spenf ypur time. When I attend FYI gatherings, I ask folks what motivates them. Almost everyone offers some variation on the theme: “I want to be able to do what I want, when I want in the manner I want.” I want what I want and I want it now!

To me, one of the huge ironies of modern society is that so many people spend so much time to accumulate so much Stuff — yet never manage to set aside anything for the future.

Why is this?

In an article on Wealth and Work, Thomas J. Elpel explores the complicated relationship between our ever-increasing standard of living and the effort required to achieve that level of comfort.

Ultimately you are significantly wealthier than before, but you are also working harder too. So the idea is to work smarter, not harder. Nobody said you had to pay for oil lamps and oil or books and freshly laundered clothes, a room and board but you would feel deprived if you didn’t, so you work a little harder to give your family all the good things that life has to offer.

Increasing Wealth & Decreasing Costs

It’s a catch-22. You work more to have more money to buy more Stuff and space for this stuff…but because you have so much Stuff, you need more money, and more space which means you have to work more. It’s almost as if the more physical things you possess, the more space you need and the less time you have.

No money no time, no time no money. No money no honey no honey no money. No work no pay. No pay no work.

How do you escape this vicious cycle? There are two ways, actually.

Spend Less, Live More

The first (most obvious) way to remove yourself from this hedonic treadmill is to deliberately reduce your spending so that it’s below the level needed to maintain your lifestyle. As I’ve argued before at Get Rich Fast, Slowly, frugality buys freedom.

When you reduce your lifestyle, it takes less time to fund it. If you’re earning $50,000 per year take-home and spending all $50,000, you leave no margin for error. If something goes wrong — you lose your job, inflation and taxes skyrockets — you’re in a bind. Plus, you don’t give yourself a chance to seize unexpected opportunities!

But if you reduce your spending to $40,000 per year, you give yourself options. You can choose to continue earning $50,000 and bank the difference (building a store of time) or you can choose to work less today (taking the advantage of the time savings immediately).

Spending less also helps fund your future. Learning to live with a “lesser” lifestyle means you don’t need to save as much for retirement. If you spend $50,000 per year, for example, then you need roughly $1.25 million saved before you can retire. Or if you're most us $2.5MM. By the time you retire today's $1 will be worth $0.40. But if you decrease spending to $40,000 per year, your target drops to around $1 million ( $2MM ).

It takes much less work to fund an ongoing lifestyle of $40,000 per year than it does to maintain a lifestyle that costs $50,000 + per year. And if you’re in the fortunate position where you can slash your lifestyle from, say, $120,000 per year to $30,000 per year, you can really reduce the time you spend working. One also can automate the process and it can run on autopilot.

Buying Time Promotes Happiness

But what if you like your lifestyle and don’t want to cut back? Or what if you’re not able to cut back? There’s still a way to use the relationship between time and money to increase your sense of well-being.

Last year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal published an interesting article that declared buying time promotes happiness. The authors conducted a series of experimental studies to look at the link between time, money, and happiness. Their conclusion?

Around the world, increases in wealth and prosperity have produced an unintended consequence: a rising sense of time scarcity. We provide evidence that using money to buy time can provide a buffer against this time famine, or a jedge against absentee time, thereby promoting happiness.

Using large, diverse samples…we show that individuals who spend money on time-saving or done for you systems services report greater life satisfaction. A field experiment provides causal evidence that working adults report greater happiness after spending money on a timesaving purchase than on a material purchase.

Together, these results suggest that using money to buy time can protect people from the detrimental effects of stress from time pressure on life satisfaction.

If you want to improve your quality of life, don’t use your money to buy Stuff, use it to relieve the stress and “the time pressure”. Instead of buying a fancy car, purchase time-saving devices. Hire a housekeeper or a yard-maintenance company. Maybe consider a meal-delivery service, a homebased computerized business wherein you spend maybe an hour a day or less, working at best.

Interestingly, the effects of “buying time” have the greatest impact on folks who have less money: “We observed a stronger relationship between buying time and life satisfaction among less-affluent individuals,” the authors write.

Finding Balance

My biggest takeaway from thinking about the relationship between time and money is this: When you spend less, you can work less. In a very real way, frugality buys time. But on a deeper level, frugality buys freedom, freedom +, freedom premium— financial freedom, freedom from worry, freedom to spend your time however you choose in the manner you choose.

When you treat time as money (and money as time), you can better evaluate how to allocate your dollars and your hours. When you know how much your time is worth, you can decide when it makes sense to “outsource” specific tasks and jobs.

Ultimately, there’s a balance to be had, and that balance is different for each of us. You have to decide how much time you’re willing to spend on present comfort and how much time you want to bank for the future. I believe there’s no single right answer to this dilemma. This dilemma - a puzzle wrapped in a conundrum. But fear NOT. ACT boldly, "Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." - Johan Wolfgang von Goethe. Oddly enough the Universe will conspire to make it happen. "Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen." - Ralph Waldo Emerson. After all.... Friedrich Nietzsche — 'The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.'

Enter the Singularity.

Let's see if you can keep up with me... am NOT going to mention how this extrapolates to money, but you can do it... let me know your thoughts, if you have trouble pls... comment below and I'll help out.

No Hype, Just Help!

Physics: What Is Spacetime?

Physicists believe that at the tiniest scales, space emerges from quanta.

What might these building blocks look like?

Well, people have always taken space for granted. It is just emptiness, after all—a backdrop to everything else. Time, likewise, simply ticks on incessantly. But if physicists have learned anything from the long slog to unify their theories, it is that space and time form a system of such staggering complexity that it may defy our most ardent efforts to understand.

Albert Einstein saw what was coming as early as November 1916. A year earlier he had formulated his general theory of relativity, which postulates that gravity is not a force that propagates through space but a feature of spacetime itself.

When you throw a ball high into the air, it arcs back to the ground because Earth distorts the spacetime continuum around it, so that the paths of the ball and the ground intersect again. In a letter to a friend, Einstein contemplated the challenge of merging general relativity with his other brainchild, the nascent theory of quantum mechanics. That would not merely distort space but dismantle it. Mathematically, he hardly knew where to begin. “How much have I already plagued myself in this way!” he wrote.

Einstein never got very far. Even today there are almost as many contending ideas for a quantum theory of gravity as scientists working on the topic. The disputes obscure an important truth: the competing approaches all say space is derived from something deeper—an idea that breaks with 2,500 years of scientific and philosophical understanding.

Down the Black Hole

A kitchen magnet neatly demonstrates the problem that physicists face. It can grip a paper clip against the gravity of the entire Earth. Gravity is weaker than magnetism or than electric or nuclear forces. Whatever quantum effects it has are weaker still. The only tangible evidence that these processes occur at all is the mottled pattern of matter in the very early universe—thought to be caused, in part, by quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field.

Black holes are the best test case for quantum gravity. “It's the closest thing we have to experiments,” says Ted Jacobson of the University of Maryland, College Park. He and other theorists study black holes as theoretical fulcrums. What happens when you take equations that work perfectly well under laboratory conditions and extrapolate them to the most extreme conceivable situation? Will some subtle flaw manifest itself?

General relativity predicts that matter falling into a black hole becomes compressed without limit as it approaches the center—a mathematical cul-de-sac called a singularity.

Theorists cannot extrapolate the trajectory of an object beyond the singularity; its time line ends there. Even to speak of “there” is problematic because the very spacetime that would define the location of the singularity ceases to exist. Researchers hope that quantum theory could focus a microscope on that point and track what becomes of the material that falls in to this spacetime continuum.

Out at the boundary of the hole, matter is not so compressed, gravity is weaker and, by all rights, the known laws of physics should still hold. Thus, it is all the more perplexing that they do not. The black hole is demarcated by an event horizon, a point of no return: matter that falls in cannot get back out.

The descent is irreversible.

That is a problem because all known laws of fundamental physics, including those of quantum mechanics as generally understood, are reversible. At least in principle, you should be able to reverse the motion of all the particles and recover what you had.

A very similar conundrum confronted physicists in the late 1800s, when they contemplated the mathematics of a “black body,” idealized as a cavity full of electromagnetic radiation. James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism predicted that such an object would absorb all the radiation that impinges on it and that it could never come to equilibrium with surrounding matter. “It would absorb an infinite amount of heat from a reservoir maintained at a fixed temperature,” explains Rafael Sorkin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario. In thermal terms, it would effectively have a temperature of absolute zero.

This conclusion contradicted observations of real-life black bodies (such as an oven). Following up on work by Max Planck, Einstein showed that a black body can reach thermal equilibrium if radiative energy comes in discrete units, or quanta.

Theoretical physicists have been trying for nearly half a century to achieve an equivalent resolution for black holes. The late Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge took a huge step in the mid-1970s, when he applied quantum theory to the radiation field around black holes and showed they have a nonzero temperature. As such, they can not only absorb but also emit energy. Although his analysis brought black holes within the fold of thermodynamics, it deepened the problem of irreversibility.

The outgoing radiation emerges from just outside the boundary of the hole and carries no information about the interior. It is random heat energy. If you reversed the process and fed the energy back in, the stuff that had fallen in would not pop out; you would just get more heat. And you cannot imagine that the original stuff is still there, merely trapped inside the hole, because as the hole emits radiation, it shrinks and, according to Hawking's analysis, ultimately disappears.

This problem is called the information paradox because the black hole destroys the information about the infalling particles that would let you rewind their motion. If black hole physics really is reversible, something must carry information back out, and our conception of spacetime may need to change to allow for that.

Heat is the random motion of microscopic parts, such as the molecules of a gas. Because black holes can warm up and cool down, it stands to reason that they have parts—or, more generally, a microscopic structure. And because a black hole is just empty space (according to general relativity, infalling matter passes through the horizon but cannot linger), the parts of the black hole must be the parts of space itself. As plain as an expanse of empty space may look, it has enormous latent complexity.

Even theories that set out to preserve a conventional notion of spacetime end up concluding that something lurks behind the featureless facade. For instance, in the late 1970s Steven Weinberg, now at the University of Texas at Austin, sought to describe gravity in much the same way as the other forces of nature. He still found that spacetime is radically modified on its finest scales.

Physicists initially visualized microscopic space as a mosaic of little chunks of space. If you zoomed in to the Planck scale, an almost inconceivably small size of 10–35 meter, they thought you would see something like a chessboard.

But that cannot be quite right. For one thing, the grid lines of a chessboard space would privilege some directions over others, creating asymmetries that contradict the special theory of relativity. For example, light of different colors might travel at different speeds—just as in a glass prism, which refracts light into its constituent colors. Whereas effects on small scales are usually hard to see, violations of relativity would actually be fairly obvious.

The thermodynamics of black holes casts further doubt on picturing space as a simple mosaic. By measuring the thermal behavior of any system, you can count its parts, at least in principle. Dump in energy and watch the thermometer. If it shoots up, that energy must be spread out over comparatively few molecules. In effect, you are measuring the entropy of the system, which represents its microscopic complexity.

If you go through this exercise for an ordinary substance, the number of molecules increases with the volume of material. That is as it should be: If you increase the radius of a beach ball by a factor of 10, you will have 1,000 times as many molecules inside it. But if you increase the radius of a black hole by a factor of 10, the inferred number of molecules goes up by only a factor of 100. The number of “molecules” that it is made up of must be proportional not to its volume but to its surface area. The black hole may look three-dimensional, but it behaves as if it were two-dimensional.

This weird effect goes under the name of the holographic principle because it is reminiscent of a hologram, which presents itself to us as a three-dimensional object. On closer examination, however, it turns out to be an image produced by a two-dimensional sheet of film. If the holographic principle counts the microscopic constituents of space and its contents—as physicists widely, though not universally, accept—it must take more to build space than splicing together little pieces of it.

The relation of part to whole is seldom so straightforward, anyway. An H2O molecule is not just a little piece of water. Consider what liquid water does: it flows, forms droplets, carries ripples and waves, and freezes and boils. An individual H2O molecule does none of that: those are collective behaviors.

Likewise, the building blocks of space need not be spatial. “The atoms of space are not the smallest portions of space,” says Daniele Oriti of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. “They are the constituents of space. The geometric properties of space are new, collective, approximate properties of a system made of many such atoms.”

What exactly those building blocks are depends on the theory. In loop quantum gravity, they are quanta of volume aggregated by applying quantum principles. In string theory, they are fields akin to those of electromagnetism that live on the surface traced out by a moving strand or loop of energy—the namesake string. In M-theory, which is related to string theory and may underlie it, they are a special type of particle: a membrane shrunk to a point. In causal set theory, they are events related by a web of cause and effect. In the amplituhedron theory and some other approaches, there are no building blocks at all—at least not in any conventional sense.

Although the organizing principles of these theories vary, all strive to uphold some version of the so-called relationalism of 17th- and 18th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. In broad terms, relationalism holds that space arises from a certain pattern of correlations among objects. In this view, space is a jigsaw puzzle. You start with a big pile of pieces, see how they connect and place them accordingly. If two pieces have similar properties, such as color, they are likely to be nearby; if they differ strongly, you tentatively put them far apart. Physicists commonly express these relations as a network with a certain pattern of connectivity. The relations are dictated by quantum theory or other principles, and the spatial arrangement follows.

Phase transitions are another common theme. If space is assembled, it might be disassembled, too; then its building blocks could organize into something that looks nothing like space. “Just like you have different phases of matter, like ice, water and water vapor, the atoms of space can also reconfigure themselves in different phases,” says Thanu Padmanabhan of the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in India. In this view, black holes may be places where space melts. Known theories break down, but a more general theory would describe what happens in the new phase. Even when space reaches its end, physics carries on.

Entangled Webs

The big realization of recent years—and one that has crossed old disciplinary boundaries—is that the relevant relations involve quantum entanglement. An extrapowerful type of correlation, intrinsic to quantum mechanics, entanglement seems to be more primitive than space. For instance, an experimentalist might create two particles that fly off in opposing directions. If they are entangled, they remain coordinated no matter how far apart they may be.

Traditionally when people talked about “quantum” gravity, they were referring to quantum discreteness, quantum fluctuations and almost every other quantum effect in the book—but never quantum entanglement. That changed when black holes forced the issue. Over the lifetime of a black hole, entangled particles fall in, but after the hole evaporates fully, their partners on the outside are left entangled with—nothing. “Hawking should have called it the entanglement problem,” says Samir Mathur of Ohio State University.

Even in a vacuum, with no particles around, the electromagnetic and other fields are internally entangled. If you measure a field at two different spots, your readings will jiggle in a random but coordinated way. And if you divide a region in two, the pieces will be correlated, with the degree of correlation depending on the only geometric quantity they have in common: the area of their interface. In 1995 Jacobson argued that entanglement provides a link between the presence of matter and the geometry of spacetime—which is to say, it might explain the law of gravity. “More entanglement implies weaker gravity—that is, stiffer spacetime,” he says.

Several approaches to quantum gravity—most of all, string theory—now see entanglement as crucial. String theory applies the holographic principle not just to black holes but also to the universe at large, providing a recipe for how to create space—or at least some of it. For instance, a two-dimensional space could be threaded by fields that, when structured in the right way, generate an additional dimension of space. The original two-dimensional space would serve as the boundary of a more expansive realm, known as the bulk space. And entanglement is what knits the bulk space into a contiguous whole.

In 2009 Mark Van Raamsdonk of the University of British Columbia gave an elegant argument for this process. Suppose the fields at the boundary are not entangled—they form a pair of uncorrelated systems. They correspond to two separate universes, with no way to travel between them. When the systems become entangled, it is as if a tunnel, or wormhole, opens up between those universes, and a spaceship can go from one to the other. As the degree of entanglement increases, the wormhole shrinks in length, drawing the universes together until you would not even speak of them as two universes anymore. “The emergence of a big spacetime is directly tied into the entangling of these field theory degrees of freedom,” Van Raamsdonk says. When we observe correlations in the electromagnetic and other fields, they are a residue of the entanglement that binds space together.

Many other features of space, besides its contiguity, may also reflect entanglement. Van Raamsdonk and Brian Swingle, now at the University of Maryland, College Park, argue that the ubiquity of entanglement explains the universality of gravity—that it affects all objects and cannot be screened out. As for black holes, Leonard Susskind of Stanford University and Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., suggest that entanglement between a black hole and the radiation it has emitted creates a wormhole—a back-door entrance into the hole. That may help preserve information and ensure that black hole physics is reversible.

Whereas these string theory ideas work only for specific geometries and reconstruct only a single dimension of space, some researchers have sought to explain how all of space can emerge from scratch. For instance, ChunJun Cao, Spyridon Michalakis and Sean M. Carroll, all at the California Institute of Technology, begin with a minimalist quantum description of a system, formulated with no direct reference to spacetime or even to matter. If it has the right pattern of correlations, the system can be cleaved into component parts that can be identified as different regions of spacetime. In this model, the degree of entanglement defines a notion of spatial distance.

In physics and, more generally, in the natural sciences, nature is quantum, space and time are the foundation of all theories. Yet we never see spacetime directly. Rather we infer its existence from our everyday experience. We assume that the most economical account of the phenomena we see is some mechanism that operates within spacetime. But the bottom-line lesson of quantum gravity is that not all phenomena neatly fit within spacetime. Physicists will need to find some new foundational structure, and when they do, they will have completed the revolution that began just more than a century ago with Einstein.

What about you? How do you view the relationship between space, time, money, and happiness? Do you have some examples from your own life of buying time in order to improve your happiness? Tell us where you are, now and how you plan to get there. Tell us the before, and after, pray tell (don't be shy) ...What balance have you arrived at — and how did you get there? The balance of time as it relates to school, work, social life and family. Some people can have it all, if they help enough people. What does spacetime got to do with it?

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How does this soliloquy ( the last part of essay on physics about spacetime ) extrapolates to money, I didn't mention, but suggest how, but you can do it... I know you can ...let me know your thoughts, if you have trouble pls... comment below (Don't be shy!) and I'll help out.

There are 13 reader responses to "The relationship between time, money, and happiness" the 1st part of this essay... to start...

Evan says

15 May 2018 at 10:49

This is exactly what people miss! It’s not about money necessarily, it’s about time and freedom.

I was having an interesting conversation last night, semi-related, about how there’s research showing that people perceive time more slowly if they have more variety in their life. If perception is reality, then that means you can, in a way, make your “life” longer by bringing more variety into your day to day activities. This can be pretty hard to do if you are working long hours.

Therefore, as you say, frugality leads to more time freedom. More time freedom means you can set up your life the way you want. Use this to add variety, and your perception of time slows down as well! That’s a lot more life to live!

Reply

late bloomers money says

15 May 2018 at 12:13

Great stuff JD, I agree, finding the balance is key. Most of us work hard hard now and think that we can sacrifice our time now so we can have better life later on. But I don’t want to look back 20 years later and realize all I’ve done with my time was work!

Reply

Jason@WinningPersonalFinance says

15 May 2018 at 13:43

I don’t know if there is any money challenge that’s more difficult than finding that balance between time, money and stuff.

We can all go live in the woods and retire today. Most of us would not be happier doing so.

Hiring a cleaning person would set me back on my path to FIRE. But if I do, my house would be cleaner than ever and I’d have that time back to do what I want today. Maybe it’s worth working for an extra three months to never have to clean again.

Making the decisions may be hard but they are much easier once you really lay out and understand the costs and benefits of every choice.

Reply

JeffreyTurner says

15 May 2018 at 15:10

I have always regarded money as a claim on labor, which is essentially the same thing, however by framing it as a claim on time perhaps that allows us to refocus on how we use our time, rather than on how we live on passive income.

My main concern with the Fire community is that it is difficult for people to let go and give accumulating money, in order to enjoy the time we actually have. I fear that saving money could in itself become an addiction that devours our lives. It would be good to see how many people have made that leap, even if it is to work part time. I myself keep wanting to accumulate a little more money even though I know that to spend that money on ‘things’ is probably destroying the world I live in. Simplicity is also time.

Reply

anon +40 says

15 May 2018 at 15:51

I buy time frequently, & it’s one of the main reasons I could never do that FIRE stuff. For example, I pay for food delivery after work bec. I hate to cook & don’t want to spend time doing that when I could be writing (my passion) or spending time w/family (my loves). I don’t buy a lot of things, I don’t have any debt, but I’m desperately short on time bec. my job, my family, & my hobbies make demands of me, so I’ll gladly use money to buy me more time NOW when I need it, not some mythical future that I can’t appreciate.

Reply

FullTimeFinance says

15 May 2018 at 16:45

In my opinion money is a tool. Time and enjoying it is a goal. Money is just a tool to facilitate that goal, and not even always correlated with it.

Reply

Freddy Ky says

16 May 2018 at 06:11

Money is a renewable resource. Time is not!

Reply

S.G. says

16 May 2018 at 06:15

I think the money problem is partially cultural. We have a culture that doesn’t pass on virtues like prudence, and we see that in how people interact with money. In many ways wealth is like being thin or well educated: it takes a sacrifice today to invest in your future and in each immediate present that can be a difficult decision to make, even if you have a solid philosiphical structure. If you don’t have that structure you have even more difficult.

Reply

Joe says

16 May 2018 at 07:12

I’m in the spend less camp. Now I have more control of my time.

Buying time seems very inefficient to me. Labor is too expensive here in the US.

Buying time in cheaper countries is much more affordable. I’d like to try that someday.

Reply

Wealthy Content says

17 May 2018 at 04:10

Love it, great post! It sounds so basic but you have to catch yourself as your brain seems to be wired differently based on the inputs received over its lifetime.

Reply

Dan @ Stocktrades says

18 May 2018 at 19:59

Awesome post JD. I’m currently working towards selling my second home, taking the profits made and moving back into my original home, which I have been renting out for the better part of 5 years.

This will drastically reduce my living expenses(I will literaly only have my mortgage and basic necessities like food utilities and insurance) to the point where I can actually quit my job and work full time on my website.

The satisfaction and happiness that this brings me is far more than anything I have felt from getting paid 6 figures at the job I have now.

I am literally quitting a job most would kill to have so I can spend more time growing my website, providing excellent advice to those who need it, and living life on my own schedule.

Cheers!

Reply

Noonan says

19 May 2018 at 12:24

Great post about a very important topic JD!

A severe job-induced “time famine” motivated me to FIRE in 2008 at age 48. Since then, I’ve been much happier. I attribute this to the fact that i’ve gained almost total control over my schedule. No bosses are telling me what to do or when to do it—except for the boss i happen to live with. :)

At its essence, a decision to FIRE reflects a personal choice that additional time is a lot more important than additional money. A growing body of behavioral science suggests that consistently choosing time over money actually increases happiness:

“Life frequently presents time versus money trade-offs. [Our research] showed that the way people answer this [hours versus dollars] question predicts their happiness. Although time and money are both valuable resources that give hope for greater happiness, choosing time over money promises a happier life.”

Hershfield, Mogilner & Barnea, People Who Choose Time Over Money Are Happier, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550616649239 (first published 5/25/2016).

Reply

Andy says

20 May 2018 at 15:06

Couldn’t agree more. It is unfortunate how many people work themselves to extremes for an endless cycle of worry and more stuff. The only way to really get out of it is to find a point of contentment, knowing that more is not always better.

Reply

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Sunday, May 20, 2018

The relationship of space, time, money, and happiness

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