258. The time markets

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When you start the journey of life your pockets are full of a currency, time, which you can trade for anything else. As you skip along the life Monopoly board, your time reserves slowly deplete, as you trade them for experience, activities, relationships, knowledge and even wealth. The analogy is not perfect. When you spend time, you cannot earn more, at least not yet, even though as a species we are working in that direction, or trade back, buying time with for example experience. You cannot accumulate it, or unequally redistribute it, taking it from others. At the end of the journey, your pockets are full of the things you traded for, and empty of time. When you think about it this way, time is a unique asset, it cannot be grown, only spent. It is its absolute limitation, its inflexible scarcity, that make it the most valuable thing we have. From this perspective, it is bemusing to watch many waste it with a profligacy they would never show with that much more flexible asset, money 

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Location: Hereford, UK

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