Beep Beep. Beep Beep. What Is Your Time Worth?

On time, money, and the things we don’t get back

My dad was an amazing doctor. 

One of the things that made him a great doctor was that he loved doing it.

I remember him running around at my soccer games looking for a payphone. The beeper—before they were cool. The Zach Morris brick cell phone. He was always on call.

Whenever I was about to finally beat him in basketball—beep beep. beep beep. 

Like a digital roadrunner cutting through the moment.

“I said, 25 mg of X, 50 mg of Y. Yes, please do that before you leave.”

It didn’t bother me. I was proud of my dad. People needed him. It made me smile, even if I didn’t fully understand why. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about time and how we spend it. 

How much did my dad love being a doctor—and how much did he need the money?

Most doctors don’t seem to be on call that much.

So that leads me to ask myself:

Do I spend my time the same way I spend my money?

Do I spend money to have more time?

Why do I go on vacation if I’m working on vacation?

It makes sense that we blur the two.

You likely get paid by the hour. 

You think in salaries.

And you decide if something is “worth it.” 

Worth what? 

Usually… our time, the experience. The trade.

Adam Smith noticed something like this early. 

He wrote that labor—not gold or silver—was the real measure of value. Not what something is made of, but what it costs in effort to get it.

That idea stuck.

Marx sharpened it. 

He argued that value comes from socially necessary labor time—the average time it takes to produce something. Factories made this feel real. Hours in. Widgets out. Time became something you could measure, standardize, compare.

But something else happened along the way. 

We didn’t just measure time. 

We started trading it. 

Money makes time feel interchangeable. Your hour. My hour. Someone else’s hour in Malaysia. 

All reduced to a number. Almost like a market for time itself.

Keynes came at it differently.

He cared less about production and more about uncertainty. To him, money was a way to carry the future into the present. A way to hold optionality. To have flexibility.

Anthropologists tell a different story. 

David Graeber argues that money didn’t begin with barter, but with debt. With obligations stretched across time. “I owe you.” “I’ll repay you later.” Money came after—as a way to keep track. 

So now we have this thing. 

Part measurement.

Part promise.

Part memory.

All sitting on top of our time.

But we don’t experience any of that directly. We feel something else. 

Kahneman and Tversky showed that humans don’t experience value objectively. 

We feel losses more than gains. 

We anchor to what we had. 

We react emotionally to changes, not absolutes.

So when money moves, it doesn’t feel like math.

It feels like life shifting under our feet.

A paycheck feels like time earned.

A purchase feels like time spent, or a reward for hours worked.

And certain things feel… off.

Inflation feels like your time is being diluted. You worked last year. That effort meant something. Now it buys less. Nothing changed about what you did. But somehow, it matters less.

Debt feels different. Debt feels like owing future time. Not money—time you haven’t lived yet. A portion of your life already spoken for.

Wealth changes the feeling again. At some point, it stops being about your own time. It becomes about directing other people’s time. Hiring. Owning. Investing. 

You’re no longer trading hours. You’re allocating them.

This is where it gets strange. Because time isn’t actually equal.

An hour with your kid isn’t the same as an hour in traffic.  An hour of creative work isn’t the same as an hour of doing your taxes. 

But money flattens all of it. 

Turns it into something clean. 

Comparable. 

Fungible.

And we live inside that system. Every day. 

Economists have clean definitions. 

Medium of exchange. Store of value. Unit of account. 

They’re all correct.

But there is something else.

Money is a system for deciding whose time matters. 

And how much.

Did my dad’s time matter more than my time with my dad…

Because it paid the mortgage?

That’s why it doesn’t feel neutral.

It feels personal.

Money looks like math.

But it quietly decides how we spend our lives.

And sometimes… who we spend them with.

Money is weird.

In memory of my dad, Jeffrey Mandel

Who told me the week he died to "be generous."