Buyer Beware: Everything Is A Trade

How much of your life are you trading for things that aren’t important to you?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Indeed, there’s no such thing as a “free.” Anything you have and anything you’ve done was traded, by you, for something else that you don’t have and didn’t do. Even if your old friend Joey picks up the tab for lunch, you’ve traded your time. An hour spent at lunch with Joey instead of that same hour spent doing anything else you could conceivably have been doing. Whether or not that was a good trade depends on how much you value your time with Joey.

And that, writ large, is the conundrum of life. It’s easy to observe that everything is a trade, but difficult to determine relative value.

The 2011 film “In Time” used sci-fi to explore this issue. In the future imagined by writer Andrew Niccol (also the writer of “Gattaca” and “The Truman Show”), money has been replaced by time. Instead of bank accounts containing currency, a chip implanted in every citizen’s forearm tracks the exact amount of time they have left to live. At points of purchase both formal (e.g. stores) and informal (e.g. back-room gambling), people exchange minutes, hours, days and years for food, housing, transportation, medical care and other necessities. When your balance drops to zero, you drop dead. As long as you have time (the definition of wealth), you can live indefinitely, at whatever biological age you please.