What if money were time...

Money = Time

(This post is also available in ITALIAN)

Money is everything that matters in our lives.

I have to admit it, I had a shiver while I was writing it down, but it's like that. Money influences every aspect of our existences: ambitions, choices, dreams, social and sentimental relationships, education, culture.

Ok love, respect, values, brotherhood...Really good things indeed, but if there's something that all sees, controls and rules, that's money. From a simple way of trading to GOD.

What is money for real?

Whatever your belief is, life on this planet has a limited length. We born, co-exist and grow old with the awareness of 'going away' sooner or later, without really accepting this unavoidable step - except some rare cases, have a look at Tiziano Terzani's late years, a famous Italian journalist who passed way in 2004 -

All driven by such an ancestral fear, we have been shot in this world and we spend our lives trying to delay the sentence. If the time we have here is, at least theoretically, equal to everybody, how can we get some more? Easy, we can buy it from someone else.

Money is the privileged channel used by this society to trade the time spent in doing something and, in certain cases, to establish power relationships. Something which isn't the same for everybody, 'cause sometimes one is worth as one, and some other as one hundred. It depends on how much someone else can earn out of it.

Earnings are not meant to be exclusively monetary. It's more like a gap in terms of advantages between two individuals who have spent an equal amount of energies, time and efforts in a certain activity. Because you can do plenty of things with money, also trying to buy back the time you previously sacrificed.

Tickets, please!

Every single good - from the stupid cork which is hanging on my desk from days on, since the buildings outside the window - do exists from the moment somebody has spent enough time to realize it, as well as services and who provides them. The fact we can buy all those things means that we implicitly have the chance to buy a chunk of 'their' time.

In this schizophrenic world, people are forced to trade time - doing something which in most of the cases isn't satisfying - and they get rewarded with tickets to have someone else's available. Exchanges aren't always fair, of course.

Even if time runs at the same speed for everybody, it isn't worth the same for all of us. As well as those ethereal tickets, whose value fluctuates from very little to very much. Let's take somebody like Cristiano Ronaldo, just to make an example: his time is worth much more than mine.

His athletic, aesthetic and relational skills can be monetized in a really good way and they can generate a sufficient incoming to justify the large expense to hire him, for instance, as a testimonial. I remember to have read something about a 5 hours photo shooting he did for a big Chinese company last year: net income, one million dollars.

I mean, he's good-looking, in shape, famous and so on, but 200K per hour...

Image rights. Thanks to his fat face, LIKED by millions of people, that company will manage - or hopes so - to earn more than the amount they spent. How? By convincing us that their product will be better than tens of other identical ones placed in the market: "If Cr7 said so, and I trust him, I'll buy it!"

Free, to choose what we tell you

In the last 'serious' post I wrote a few days ago, which you can find HERE , @destrudo asked me if there's a way to do something concrete and teach people how to choose responsibly, and I want to use these lines to give him a partial answer to that.

The taste of the masses is based on turbid pieces of information, due to the influence of advertising (*). Never as in these years, the media industry is on advertiser's hands, especially on the internet where everything's quick, shining, free. Don't worry, we are paying anyway, just a higher price.

"Have you ever asked yourself what's the sense in advertising such things as big cars or Rolex during soccer games? - I was asked by a famous journalist with the passion for poker games after a long interview - Those poor guys they can't buy at all the new Mercedes - super equipped - SUV, but the fact they are going to desire that object it suddenly makes it fashionable, it creates a hype among people so to speak: getting it means belonging to a certain social class. Those, from the ads market, they are not going to sell that Rolex a bank employee, but thanks to his admiration towards it they'll manage to sell it to someone who can afford it (and maybe also to someone else who cannot). Otherwise, who the hell is going to spend 30K on a stupid watch?

We're all educated to compete since we're kids - all lined up to fight for a note, to establish who's going to be the best, who the excellence, who the anomaly - and we grow up with the myth of wealth. Money is the tool to dispose of somebody's time: the more you have, the longer your life. #roadtoimmortality

(*)Marketing strategies are terrifying in terms of responsibilization and evolution of society. The goal is to create illusions and dreams, turning them into new needs, ready to be sold in the market. A pile of bullshits, and I'm sorry for all my friends who actually work in the field: I love you, I respect and understand you, it's a tough world for everybody.

Reclame

So, avoiding all those threats and being able, through knowledge, to develop a better critical thinking isn't an easy target for anybody in this world. Good, nice, bad or ugly: it doesn't really matter within the "everything's fine as long as it sells" logic.

Ads are flooding us and penetrating in our consciousness, they take over our freedom of choice thanks to trivial psychological mechanisms and, sometimes, they erase it. "Choosing" doesn't mean just being able to say X rather than Y, but understanding why X, why Y or why none of them.

Comprehension and knowledge are not functional to such an economy as the one we have right now, founded on consumption: if you have some doubts, better buying both X and Y, to then realize you have never needed them and bet everything on Z.

Just to be clear: no one wants to take us away from the possibility to choose. Instead, we're all free from this point of view: the only important thing is not knowing how to do it. It's way easier to create needs in a frenzied society, where there's no time to think, have a break or listen to the others and learn.

Do you really think that who buys a certain car is doing it because that very vehicle, with that exact same features, exactly matches their needs? The whole process is way simpler.

We, company, know how to make a car. We start from YOUR need of optimizing YOUR time and create a product that can satisfy both YOUR primary need and all the secondary ones you didn't even think about. Actually, in what we're selling you there's a very little part of what YOU really need. But look at it, shape and colour are catchy...

If you think it better, the social impact you could have by owning it will bring you enormous benefits to your poor existence. The home/work, home/mall or home/in-laws route will be extraordinarily more enjoyable...Not really for you, because since you changed car you can't even smoke inside it, but for those who, fleetingly, look at you.

For those who, abandoned to their intellectual laziness, perceive the essence of your taste in choosing that exact model. They touch with bare hands your lifestyle's elegance, the thickness of your working position. Yes, I'll take it!

This quote was taken from another writing posted on my old blog. One of the best in business.
All pictures are property of the author.

Since you ended up on my blog, don't miss the week's cheapest series:

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