Day 38

Day 38:

When people use the phrase 'Money makes the world go round', it can seem as though that person isn't thinking enough about the importance of compassion, the work of charities, and gravitational fields. However, as I've read more finance books and begun to enter the world of business, I've started to realise why this phrase is not accurate: it doesn't go far enough.

There is nothing in life that is truly free, certainly nothing that is worth having, at least. There are things that we pay money for (food, homes, utilities etc.), but there are also things that we pay for with our time. Washing the dishes doesn't only use the water bill, it also takes up 15 minutes of our time (depending on how good you are at doing the dishes, I'm very slow).  Commuting to and from work can take an hour or more, depending on how far away your work is, and that doesn't include the cost of fuel or fares.  Everything that we do takes up our time, and we all only have 24 hours in a day to spend.  Therefore, selecting what we spend our time on is incredibly important to our productivity and life fulfilment. 

If we go back to the dishes example, if you spend 15 minutes doing the washing up after a meal, and this happens once a day, everyday, then you will spend 1 hour and 45 minutes a week doing the dishes. That's 7 hours a month, or 3 and a half days a year, just washing dishes. Think for a moment about all of the things that you could do in that time: you could have a relaxing mini break, you could catch up with your friends and read all those books you've been putting to one side. So how do we reduce the amount of time that we spend doing the dishes? You could buy a dishwasher, or perhaps hire a house cleaner to do it for you. However, these things cost money, and this is where we can start to see how powerful money is. If you have money to reduce the amount of time that you spend on chores and other tasks, you can concentrate your time on doing things that can produce more money, like extra hours at work, creating a 'side hustle', or managing your investment portfolio. However, if you don't have the money to delegate these tasks, you have to spend your precious time on them, leaving no time to grow your potential earnings.

This is a vicious cycle that has been working since you were born, but has become especially prevalent in the past half a century, For someone who was born this millennium (like me), it's hard to imagine a world in which the vast majority of people, whether they are in the top 10% of earners or in the bottom 10%, use the same devices, watch the same TV shows and wear similar clothes. But this was the case in the post-war period of the 1950's and 60's. Back then, it was a real time-saver to buy a deep freeze unit (what we could call a freezer), so you wouldn't have to go to the shops as often to buy fresh groceries. However, as the wealth gap has grown, so has the gap in opportunities to save time with money. Modern technology has given people the ability to do their shopping once online, and then have it delivered to them at regular intervals. However, many people cannot afford this technology, since it requires an internet-capable device with a stable connection, a permanent address for it to be delivered to, and a stable amount of cash in a bank account, so they don't have to worry about when the money will be taken. These are resources that millions of people do not have.

In this digital age, it is assumed that everybody has a phone or the internet. If you are reading this, you must have these things, because that is the only way that this is available. People who do not have these things are essentially invisible, and it's incredibly difficult for them to be heard, or obtain the resources that many of us consider to be trivial. While we think of ways to reduce the time we spend doing the dishes with money, some people may not need to do the dishes at all, because they haven't eaten today. It is as though we live in entirely different societies. And this digital society has a high entry fee.

I am incredibly privileged. I have always had access to the internet. I always have the time to write and learn and build new sources of income. I have a dishwasher. With the ability to have enough time and money to build wealth being locked behind a technological barrier, it seems to me that it falls to those of us who are in this incredibly privileged position to bridge this divide. This would allow society to see a huge number of new brilliant ideas, higher equality, and with so many more people being able to use their time to generate more income, a wealthier world. 

Money makes the world go round. The world should make money go around.