Time Value Of Time
Is one hour today the same as one hour tomorrow?
Is one hour of your life today worth the same as one hour of your life 10 years hence?
Does one hour of work you do today produce the same value as one hour of the same work you do tomorrow?
What role does time have to play in the production of value and how does that fluctuate across time?
TVM
A lot of energy has been put into understanding and predicting the time value of money (TVM), how much value does one dollar invested today produce in 10 years? How about 1,000 dollars? TVM calculations are pretty easy to go about because they involve direct quantized factors, which probably explain why there is more literature on them than on time value of time (TVT).
In studying TVM one thing stands out quickly: x amount of any currency invested today is not worth as much as [1] x amount of the same currency invested some time in the future. For example, 100 dollars invested in Tesla stock in the year 2010 would produce absolutely different value from 100 dollars invested in the same Tesla stock today. So that over time the value produced by x amount of money deployed in the same activity varies. Why do we not see time the same way?
Why does it seem like we weigh one hour today the same as one hour tomorrow? If the value generated by money varies over time, why shouldn’t the value produced by a specific amount of invested time vary over time?
Limits
There are artificial man-made limits such as laws that guide citizens, and there are natural limits which sets hard caps on what is possible in the physical world – such as limits on how many years we live. Either artificial or natural, limits are always in play when dealing with the physical world and they are useful because the bounds they set forces us to be creative.
Death is a hard cap on human life, beyond death nothing else matters, everything becomes nothing and nothing becomes everything, beneath our daily rush of living is the realization that sometime in the future we will be no more and we had better make the most of every day. So that when we speak of the value of time over time, we are actually using a lower limit of birth and an upper limit of death as a gauge.
TVT
If we take a limit of birth (at 0) and death (at 70), realizing that as time ticks towards death we tend to be less physically capable and more susceptible to ailments, one major implication jumps out: time spent in your younger years are more likely to produce greater value than time spent in your later years. Though that is the immediate implication that jumps out, in reality it is not that simple, this is because humans are the only species that take some twenty years to fully develop mentally, to get around to gain knowledge that can be gainfully employed to produce tremendous value, so that in reality time spent in your middle ages, say mid 20s and 30s (+/- 5), are more likely to produce greater value than time spent earlier and later on, predominantly because that age range is when both energy and intelligence coincides and peaks.
The implication of this is daunting and not easily accepted: You have to work yourself like a dog in those peak years to produce maximum value because you will never have an age bracket where both your energy and your intelligence are in tandem. For as you get older you might get wiser but you do not have the energy to execute as you did before, hence you will be left with using the less energy you possess and your new found wisdom to capitalize on the things you have started/built in those younger peak years – if you had actually built anything [2].
Those who do not realize this are very susceptible to bitterness and frustration as they get older. The awareness of trending towards death, coupled with the feeling of having not attained to any significant goal, coupled with low energy to execute on the good ideas they have, you do not need an horoscope to see bitterness and frustration on the horizon. Avoid this with everything in you.
Balance
Most discussions on the concept of work life balance seem to generate significant heat because there is no age limit applied to those discussions, hence everyone has something seemingly contradictory to say, but the moment we put an age limit on the topic, everything that seems foggy evaporates.
The priority a 20/30 year old places on relaxation simply cannot be the same as those of a 50 year old, but the discussions seem to imply that value production is constant across age groups, it is not, has never been and will never be, and since it is not, the concept of creating a balance, in your peak productive years, between work and so called life outside of work is a misplaced discussion to have because the scale must clearly tilt in one direction and that is work. In later years reordering of priorities will be necessary, which if you do not do, your body breaking down will do for you.
What Then?
“I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day, the night cometh when no man can work”. John 9:4
In their older years some look back wishing they had maximized the energy they had when they were younger, others look back in admiration of the things they did when they still had much energy.
You make your choice.
Thank you for reading.
Notes- This does not necessarily have to be in the profitable directions, investments can return and infinite return or go to zero
- Building does not have to be physical in nature. An example is the academic world where studying large chunks of data is what counts as building.