We live in a time-based reality.
From the moment we are born, we are imprinted with constructs of time. From our birthday, to our eating and sleeping routine, to our school system and eventually to our work life.
Our major economic drivers are all conditioned on time: real estate, insurance, debt, salary and hourly wages. It allows us to build wonderful models for leverage, risk-mitigation strategies, and other economic constructs that time and again prove the absurdity of future projections for anything meaningful in life (see Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan and the six sigma outliers that continue to present themselves in society).
The benefit of time is that it is the easiest thing to control in another person. It is easily measurable, monitored, and managed. Our currency when it shifted from the gold standard to the basics of the federal reserve (utilizing debt instruments), simply shifted from one notion of scarcity (physical gold) to another more advanced concept (time wrapped debt).
Today, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are just another tech-enabled evolution of the Ponzi-scheme hoping to amass enough reputation to become a fiat currency. Still though, there are only so many “bitcoins” to mine. It is still based on scarcity, just now the tech nerds can try and get a leg up on running the world over the socially astute word-smiths known as politicians (mad respect for their skills and the original intentionality behind the Founding Fathers’ creation). At least with Bitcoins and all derivatives of the millenial’s version of pet-rocks and beanie babies, there is an effort for transparency, disintermediating rusty behemoths, and demonstrating the global power of the collective.
It’s still sadly based on a falsified perception of time and scarcity, and is not the wizard’s potion bringing us to the new era.
Time is scarce. Time is neat. Time is predictable. And time can be controlled. Humans have some limit on it and therefore those who know how to play the game can come to control others who don’t know the rules.
Games are fun and there are clear winners and losers. But games are also self limiting.
We are limiting ourselves as a race in our capacity to create by being controlled by time and our time-based form of currency.
One of the challenges of a time-based reality is that time isn’t equal, nor is the exchange of value from those pegged to it. It is input based, not output based. For those who think we aren’t in a decrepit form of socialism who take salary, pay insurance, rent and loans…well, think a little deeper. We have collectively been thrown into a system that confines you based on time. Your time is part of the collective now. Time is the great equalizer.
We all have our moments of peak performance. One hour working well rested with an aligned biochemistry, biomechanics and mental and emotional balance provides more output than a similar person who is short on sleep, fed fast-food, and is dealing with a sense of insignificance or other emotional insecurities. And yet, we will be paid the same amount of money for that one hour. Is that an equitable exchange of energy?
A strong argument is that the ebbs and flows of a person over the course of a year will balance out and that is why moving to a salary system makes sense; it’s not a precise science but it’s close.
The challenge with that is an expectation of salary increases year after year. This presents a winning strategy for the game player (be it an individual or entire industry) to pursue the highest paid position with a large corporation that has the leeway and lack of discipline to allow the increase to happen regardless of whether it’s merited or not.
The second part of the winning strategy is to constantly seek transfers to other companies based on increases. This creates people and industries at the top who are there not because of their ability, passion and benefits to society through meritocracy but rather through the adroitness at understanding and leveraging the rules of the game.
This creates overpaid individuals and industries who are dumb, uncaring, and dispassionate mercenaries who fill up the top paying positions (and suck up the top talent) that provide far less use than often a team of 2-3 highly motivated younger interns or new startups could. The flaw of the game is that the understanding of how to play the game trumps the output of the players.
Some of the top paid executives and industries in America are awful at what they do. In fact there are many CEO’s who jump from one company to the next sinking their ships in pursuit of higher pay-outs and have no sense of what their directives actually mean for their company, nor would they care. Protected by an army of consultants to point the blame to should there be issues, they have created scape-goats to continuously propel themselves to higher and higher total compensation packages. The same fact pattern fits industries as well.
Let’s put it more compassionately…okay I’ll try…
This system promotes a behavior where individuals and industries are motivated to play by the rules of the game which often times means sacrificing what their passion is and what they are uniquely designed to do. The better they are at playing the game, the harder it is to leave their winning position to pursue their passion because the “opportunity cost” is too high. (You know, let’s think that being unfulfilled for the rest of your life is an aspiration to live up to that carries with it a highly projected financial value based on the projected salary and future compensation.)
We have this belief that oftentimes we have to sacrifice our passion for money, or vice versa, we have to sacrifice wealth if we pursue our passion…otherwise everyone will just try and be actors or painters or something that society doesn’t intrinsically value, and someone’s got to do the messy job required to operate in society.
Those jobs however, are being continuously removed by automation, technology and saturated markets. It’s happening, look around.
I’m not implying that the system as a whole is broken. There’s a lot of great things being put forth in the world and a lot of great managers who care. I’m arguing that the reward mechanism for which is skewed and it’s because it’s pegged us as a society to time–a scarce, equalizing resource that thereby requires us to parse out to various objectives and initiatives we want in life.
Who decides how much time in life you get? And who gets to decide where your time goes? Both answers should be you, but we’ve created a society in which neither answer is. And as a result we are being manipulated by the greater system, by no individual with pernicious intentions (I’ll play naive), but by the reality with which we’ve constructed together. A construct, I might add that was SO incredibly necessary to get us to where we are today.
But as technology has enabled us to move away from manufacturing and production as our primary modes for survival into a far greater intellectual-property driven society, which we are coming to realize that no one “owns” an idea (but that’s a point for another post), there will be a turning point in which the scarcity-based exchange of energy will be replaced with something far better: an intentionality, infinitely abundant energy-exchange based system. It seems silly, but with the beauty of Blockchain and micro-transactions and the fact there are cameras and microphones in every streetlight it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable.
I have come to understand how all things scarce in society can become infinite except real estate. But perhaps not everyone’s ideal location to live is on the California coast watching the waves gently crash while our sun sets. That is, unless we train ourselves in our VR headsets to live in constructed realities and either not know or not care about the difference.