The Hourglass / Sands of Time

One thing I have come to appreciate having started work a fortnight ago is the elusiveness of time.

A necessary part of the phase-shift I went through is a sharper understanding of time; and as a result, it wields a heavier influence on my perspective and holds greater sway in judgements. A new adjunct to decision making now involves the implicit calculation of time cost. At best it is a very convoluted computation but I will attempt to illustrate the general notion using a simple example.

Put yourself in my position. Let’s say you go out and see a movie with someone – it’s your shout so you buy the tickets. You only ‘feel’ the $32 that Hoyts is charging the little green man on your AMEX card.

The laws of economics have always held that we will part with our hard earned where the utility or satisfaction we derive from the purchase exceeds its price. I.e. A week’s holiday in Europe would be worth around $5,000; were you to see it advertised for $1,000, you’d be a fool not to book because it is objectively worth much more than $1,000 to 99% of people.

So, coming back to our example, why do you pay $32 for movie tickets? I mean sure, Angelina or Johnny may be easy on the eye, but personally, I could put that money to better use than watching Cap’n Jack’s swashbuckling antics. You pay the $32 because you value the opportunity to detach from reality and the company of your movie-going accomplice at more than the cost of the tickets.

But wait: there’s more. Leaving all else aside, let’s say you earn $28 an hour. Hypothetically, this would be the value of your  time if there were no constraints on hours worked and further if you ignored and excluded other activities which don’t earn money but are worth more than $28 an hour to you. So your generous offer to take your accomplice to the movies is actually costing you $116 or thereabouts.

Once the mind grasps this premise for valuing time, one begins to appreciate the importance of being selective in what or indeed who one chooses to spend time on/with. At some point the worth of time needs to be quantified, and unfortunately the reality is a trifle more complex than dividing an annual salary through hours worked.

For example, were I to do this simple arithmetic, I’d get $28.40 per hour. However that’s only the first step. I need to work out the intangible value. Factoring in positive aspects of work (socialising, learning, personal growth, free coffee etc), the figure would be closer to $60 an hour. Similarly, negative aspects such as stress and the opportunity costs would be subtracted.

Leisure is by far the most significant of these opportunity costs. Economics actually models the labour indifference curve for hours worked against leisure and therein lies the crucial trade-off inherent in working. Work detracts from leisure and by general interpretation, they are each other’s antithesis. Normally if your hourly wage was doubled, you’d be willing to work more hours. Conceptually however, this logic doesn’t always apply. The phenomenon is known as the ‘backward-bending’ region of the supply curve: typically, wealthy individuals work less hours in spite of enormous rates because they value their time at leisure more than the marginal financial benefit of working extra hours. Once you’ve accumulated a critical mass of money, the pursuit and focus change to time: perhaps the only commodity which cannot be bought nor manufactured.

The average person who lives to be 80 has 700,000 hours of life in their account. Some 200,000 of those are spent sleeping. They are left with a balance of half a million hours with which to spend as they see fit. Of course, social doctrine and the laws of nature to a lesser extent kindly allocate a big chunk of that for us as we’re dragged kicking and screaming through the dictated process of living a ‘normal life:’

• Infancy: 25,000 hours (waking)
• Prep to 12 education: 16,600 hours (at school)
• 35 year Nine-to-five career: 55,000 hours (63,000 with an hour’s daily travel)

Running the numbers, we’re left with some 395,000 hours that more or less ‘belong’ to us, and that’s without a downward adjustment for the constraint of old age. Learning to competently manage this endownment is more difficult than mastering the running of a multi-million-dollar asset portfolio.

Strangely enough I was discussing a thread of this problem in a different context with my boss last week. The topic was Type 1 versus Type 2 errors. Essentially, they are the two ways in which we as humans err. Type 1 or ‘false positive’ error occurs when we reject something we should have accepted (finding an innocent person guilty) whereas Type 2 or ‘false negative’ error is the acceptance of something that should have been rejected (finding a guilty person innocent.) Type 1 has always been the more serious of the two and for this reason our legal system is founded on the presumption of  ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and the burden of proof placed upon the prosecution. Better to let a guilty person off than punish one who’s innocent.

With respect to time, the errors are subtly different. Transplanting the underlying reasoning; a Type 1 error would be neglecting to spend time on that which we should, and Type 2 the wasting of time on things we shouldn’t. It is not possible to make a value judgement as to which of the two is more serious because the time in question is transient, making every error fundamentally irreversible. Once the clock ticks over midnight, it will be tomorrow. The 24 short hours that comprise June 4th 2007 will not come again.

Of the two errors, Type 2 (wastage) is the easier to avoid. Consider Television. Though the typical Westerner watches considerably more; let’s be conservative and say our average person watches Television 90 minutes a day from age 10 to 80, a reasonably prudent estimate. The evening news and perhaps a serial drama doesn’t seem that big a deal, but carried and compounded, it equates to some 38,000 hours, 10% of allocatable lifetime or a staggering 4½ years of life spent watching the idiot box. Certainly open to debate, but it seems a terrible waste when you think of the ways you could spend four and a half years.

Amusingly, the realm from which this error dichotomy hails, Mathematics; contends that the more we try to avoid one type of error, the more probable or susceptible we will be to committing the other type. Going back to our criminality example; the harder you try to ensure innocents aren’t wrongly convicted, the more criminals will get let off.

The author is no stranger to this purported ‘rule.’ The imperative of avoiding causes deemed to be lost has likely resulted in opportunities being missed. However that said, it does, for example, make a compelling case for having not engaged in a relationship. Having witnessed numerous people plough not only countless hours but profuse amounts of energy into relationships that were doomed to begin with is vindication enough. I have certainly learnt well enough from lavishing time upon people who do not deserve it.

Rules being what they are however, don’t exist without exception. The two errors can be minimised simultaneously. Though the harsh reality is that life is short and we can’t slow the passage of sand through the hourglass, we do have the power of choice (though not always the sense to use it properly). We can maximise the value of our time and consequently our fulfilment in life by shunning whatever ‘wastes’ our time in favour of what brings us higher value. We can turn off Desperate Housewives and instead choose to converse with someone who means something to us.

Life is a depreciating asset:

 “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
            ~ Morgan Freeman, The Shawshank Redemption

P. X. Waterstone

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Sand in the 20-minute-glass
• Chapter 9: The Sands of Time
• FAWM 2009 #11: Time Travel (The Hourglass Beckons)

~ by X on June 5, 2007.