How We Value Time and Money
People have vastly different ways of defining money.
On one end of the spectrum you have money defined as “that which buys me stuff and clout and feelings.” At the other end of the spectrum you have money defined as “that which lets me buy back my own time so I can use it better.”
There’s a time and a place for both, and for anything in between.
And there are also ways of valuing and defining your own time that can help you make the most of it. There are times in life when you can or should pay for something with money, and others when you can or should pay for it with time.
The almost-completely-optional information economy
There is almost nothing you can’t learn online for free. Anything that has been around for a long time has been made free on the internet — you can count on it.
Almost the entire internet is made of information that exists both behind paywalls and outside paywalls. The same information. The same ideas, the same insights. One person has already started monetizing it, and another somewhere else is currently working their way toward monetizing it by first providing it for free.
Any book older than 1 year can be downloaded for free. (Don’t ask me how. But if you’d like, you can ask this professor:
.)
You can become an expert in quantum physics from the search box on Google.
If you want to be a stock trader, there are (literally) millions of free videos online about trading strategies.
If you want to learn about Ancient Greece, there are (literally) thousands of videos and essays available for free online.
I’ve been to at least 10 different websites that teach every single function in Excel, for free.
I could find you at least 5 dozen different websites that aggregate geopolitical news, for free (with miserable popups and ads, but nevertheless free).
There are only 3 reasons I will pay anyone for information online:
Insights: their personality or experience leads them to create extremely unique connections and ideas (I’m paying them for their insights which I can’t otherwise have). Examples include people with deep technical expertise, or a very specialized company with proprietary data.
Structure: they’ve structured the information I want in a unique educational way (I’m paying to be effectively educated on something complicated). Examples would be courses that combine multiple disciplines, or tie in historical stories that support lessons.
Beauty: People who can take life or information and present it in a moving way (I’m paying for beauty). Examples include blogs on Substack, or any work of fiction that I pay for.
Ideally, Square Man fits all three of these categories. That’s the goal, anyway.
Insights, structure, and beauty. Other than that, there are few reasons for me to pay for information anywhere. Basic data isn’t on that list. Journalism isn’t on that list. 99% of what people teach in “courses” isn’t on that list.
Last week I was trying to rank-order some educational websites based on average monthly visitors and some other metrics. I found at least 4 different websites that offer this service for a price. And then I found a page on one of these very websites that already contained the results I was looking for: a list of the top educational websites, rank-ordered on various metrics.
In other words, paying this company for its services was optional. At least for what I needed. All I had to do was sniff around a bit. And it took, like, 7 minutes.
I was willing to pay for this information if I needed to, but it was worth investing a little of my own time first to see what I could find.
Most companies and people who deal in information have no real edge, no advantage — they’re just charging you because you’ll pay. They pay to get their names at the top of Google, and then they convert clicks into customers. Because those customers, frankly, are either lazy or don’t know that it’s optional. They either don’t know they can pay with time instead, or they aren’t willing to.
Anything you can think of, there’s a blog for it. A free blog. Written by someone trying to work their way towards charging you for information.
Sex, status, and pipe dreams
Last time I got a new phone, I went to Best Buy to grab a phone case and a screen protector. Why not — I didn't feel like supporting Amazon that day. So I shopped around and found both items. The screen protector was $50. Then, I went home and screwed up when I was installing the screen protector. I accidentally ruined one of the edges of it. So I sighed really hard and just logged onto Amazon.
On Amazon, I found the same kind of screen protector (in a 3-pack) for $8. I paid $50 at Best Buy for a screen protector that I could get 3 of for $8.
Best Buy is just like those information peddlers. I always knew this, I just never really cared until now, because I was never quite this disgusted with it. Or with myself for participating. There is one single reason Best Buy is still in business: because people pay unnecessarily huge amounts of money shopping at places they like to shop. And they're happy to do so. If they weren't happy to do so, they wouldn't do it.
Seminars are another big part of our consumer culture. Most seminars don’t have any real value. Not only do they not teach you any hard skills, but they don’t teach you any soft skills either. All they do is motivate you a bit. They tickle your sense of urgency and make you a little happier and a little more productive… for a little while.
People like Tony Robbins aren’t rich because they know something we don’t know or don’t have access to; they’re rich because people want to be motivated and they want to pay $5,000 for it.
Best Buy isn’t rich because they’re a good company. They don't have a compelling sense of value. They really don't care about the customer. They're just... putting prices on things and selling them. It’s an entire business model built on voluntary overpayment. Best Buy, like Starbucks, is a culture indicator, not a business. Shopping either place is attractive for reasons other than value. Partially because it makes us feel attractive.
In the real-world economy, an economy of productive endeavors and tangible products, your money gets you a thing. Or a service. Something with an extremely transparent and obvious value proposition. Manufacturing, food service, and house cleaning service all have a predictable and directly-useful output.
In the information economy, often the only value on a thing (a bit of information, a seminar, etc.) is the value that you ascribe to it. And it’s often value other than usefulness.
In a hyper-consumerized culture (of which we are definitely not the first), people aren’t really looking for utility. They’re not really looking at the real economics, of anything. They just want sexy things to have a relationship with their bank account. Useful things too, but mostly sexy things. Things that make them feel special. Things that make them feel like part of a class of haves. Things that make them feel attractive.
In the internet economy, there are more people selling courses on how to do something than there are people actually doing that thing. Because the “real” part is optional, and everyone wants to feel like they know how to get rich. It’s not a real skill set, it’s a feeling.
In the creator economy, very few people are actually doing anything productive (or creative). We’re all just selling sex, status, and pipe dreams to each other. We’re passing money back and forth to entertain ourselves. Like it or not, we’re all basically playing the game we hate Wall Street for playing: moving money around and accomplishing nothing. We’re just on the lower fractal where nobody actually gets rich.
If you don’t know how to get rich buying real estate, that’s fine — sell courses teaching other people how to get rich buying real estate. That’s what our economy is like now. And almost nobody actually knows how to get rich buying real estate.
How to value yourself and your time
So where does this leave the person selling, morally?
Well, let’s get back to usefulness and do our best to ignore all that other stuff that people spend money on.
Every non-sociopathic person, at some point, has to deal with impostor syndrome. For instance when you get promoted or become a parent. Or especially if you’re trying to sell a product into the market. You’ll ask yourself questions like “my God, can I really make money for this?” Or “am I providing enough value? Am I taking advantage of people?”
But you also have to remember: people genuinely want to spend money. They want to put their money to use by paying for things they want to use. This is no illusion, this is no trick of modern capitalism — it’s a simple truth of human behavior.
So as long as you’re providing an honest product in good faith, with the intent to provide some sort of real value, you should not feel guilty. The market will tell you whether you’ve provided enough value or not. And then you can adjust what you’re doing.
Two adorable girls I know (who hopefully are reading this) started making art and selling it at their local farmers market. I spent 3 days thinking about whether there’s an apostrophe in farmers market. They were spending hours and hours practicing, learning, re-doing, and refining. And at first they were not sure of their place in the market. They weren’t sure how to price their own time. So, like any reasonable and humble human being, they priced it low.
And people liked both their personalities and their art, and asked why they weren’t charging more. After all, at those initial prices they were probably netting about minimum wage. It got to a point where people were basically begging them, “please take more of our money. Because you’re great, and what you’re selling is great.”
So they did. And then they could justify continuing to spend time on the art. Everybody wins.
On the other hand, you’ve got people selling courses on business who have been in “business” for 18 months. Their time is worth about minimum wage, and you can pretty much guarantee that they’re not saying anything that isn’t available for free.
So if we live in an economy of vapid creativity and optional paywalls, should we just not be spending money on anything?
Of course not. We just have to understand the economics of our own time and why we’re buying what we’re buying.
If you’re buying a course about something complicated because you really admire and trust the person offering it, wonderful. If you’re changing direction in life, there’s a good chance you’re going to have to spend both time and money to educate yourself.
But if you’re paying someone to teach you something you can learn in 25 minutes on YouTube (or, worse, you already know everything they’re going to say because it’s what they always say), your money is best left in your account. Spending money on this particular thing really doesn’t add to how fast or how well you can learn it. You’re really not “getting anything” for your money.
For the average person and for everyday decisions, here’s a framework I find useful.
Naval Ravikant said that you should value your time at an absurdly high number. Like $2,000 an hour. Not because your time is financially worth that, but because your time is worth that in so many other ways outside of money. Because otherwise you’ll get lost in the details of life, of everyday nonsense, and you won’t have enough free time to be creative or focus on family or relax.
I’ve been living this way for years. If my cable company overcharges me by $80, it’s bye-bye $80. Because I’m not wasting my time on the phone trying to get my money back. If they need it that badly, they can have it. I’d rather read a book.
When my boss and I need to get something done, we almost always know without even discussing it whether we should do it or pay for it. Because:
We know the value of our own time
We know our own strengths — what we can and can’t do easily
We know how to use the living shit out of the internet
We know the value of learning things by accident on the way to doing something else
Neil Degrasse Tyson uses a hard dictionary when he needs to look up a word. Because the marginal value of encountering other words along the way is enormous.
Therefore, we are willing to do those things ourselves which might provide skills or knowledge that will compound over time. For instance we’re not willing to spend 3 hours on the phone. But we are willing to spend 4 days doing laborious research instead of buying a course for $700 or using ChatGPT.
And I am willing to spend about an hour looking for research or data about educational websites before I even consider spending money on it. Because it’s easy and it’ll expose me to other useful information.
You can and should spend money on things and people and ideas you want to spend on. And it doesn’t always have to make perfect sense — a life lived by logic alone would not be worth living. The point is, if you understand the economics of your time and your money, you can make better use of both. If the price in one is too high, use the other.
Drink some water and sniff around.
JDR
“My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.” - Jerry Seinfeld