First thoughts, the basics

Life is so busy, and sometimes we forget to stop and ask ourselves the big questions. Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here? Where am I going? What is this all for? Am I really happy?

Right now, I am sitting in the warm cabin of a sailboat in a harbour in Annapolis, Maryland. My name is Michael Hofmaier, I call myself Mike, but people who know me best call me Hof or Hoffy. But the question - who am I? Maybe I'll save that for a future time. I took a chance to get here, a leap of faith. I've joined two strangers on a sailboat bound for the Caribbean, and hopefully leaving in a few days. Why am I doing it, what is it all for. Well, I suppose its something I want to do. To challenge myself and learn new things and experience something different. Besides, right now I have enough time and enough money. I am happy right now.

Time and money. It seems to me that the vast majority of people have accepted a certain norm, a certain balance between time and money. Looking at a scatter-graph of that balance, I would imagine there's a big milky way of people who have some time and some money. Of course there are also the outliers, suckers without time or money, and those that we envy with all the time and money in the world.

Looking more closely at the milky way of society, we see that at one end of the spectrum we have people with a lot of time but no money - homeless people. They have chosen a life rich in time. At the other end are work-a-holics who work 100+ hour weeks and enjoy big paychecks. But for the rest of us, we've decided to find a balance depending on our priorities and given our situations.

Let's consider how time and money are mutually exclusive for most of us. First of all, many people earn an hourly wage. And those who earn a salary or commission could average it out to an hourly wage easily enough. Essentially we are placing a monetary value on our time each time we go to work. Of course there are other considerations in the value of work beyond money, such as personal satisfaction or gratification. But on the flip side, work taxes us in ways beyond time, for example through stress. For this reason, lets assume the "soft" pros and cons of one's work cancel each other out so that tomorrow, we can focus on just time and money.

Miss Self Important, of the Cheapness Studies Blogspot makes an interesting discussion on the 'opportunity cost of time'. In other words, what is the value of my time? Check it out below.

http://cheapness-studies.blogspot.com/2009/06/time-is-money-but-how-much.html