Time is money

Time Is Money Time is an abstract thing. Time is all around us. It governs everything we do and how we do it but how do we perceive time? The oldest meaning of the word as it is described in the Oxford English Dictionary is, ”A finite extent or stretch of continued existence.” This description does not make a lot of sense to a lot of people. Then how do we understand time? ”Time is money” is one way to look at it, but what exactly does this mean to us today? The idiom is commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin who wrote it in his letter Advice to Young Tradesman in 1748, and it came to be the maxim of the modern capitalist society. By accepting this metaphor, time becomes valuable: every second is a penny and every minute is a dollar. But this also brings with it the idea of wasting your time, as if you are actually wasting money. In fact, this idiom has affected our entire vocabulary of time related words. We spend time, we save it, and we borrow it (Delaney). When you are hanging out with your friends you're not using or enjoying time, you are spending it. Thus, a metaphor that is sufficiently striking can spread beyond the particular phrase but have an impact on our language in general. But the influence of ”time is money” is not only limited to the language but also to our everyday lives and in particular to our work life. In modern day's capitalist societies our amount of work is defined by the time we spend. We get paid by the hour, we have to be there on time, and if we stay longer we get paid overtime. This takes the metaphor a step further; so that money equals work, and when we are wasting time it implies that we could use it in a better way i.e. by working. In the United States people follow this idea very closely and work an average of 1790 hours a year compared to 1546 hours in Denmark (OECD). But outside of the Western Civilization the idea of time is very different. To some people, African time is a concept associated with sloppiness and laziness, but it merely constitutes a different approach to punctuality. In many African and Latin American cultures time is not necessarily money. These people are considered polychromic individuals. That means people who integrate task-oriented activities with socio-emotional ones (”Cultural Differences”). For them time is not divided into work time and leisure time but everything happens at once. This makes the idea of wasting or spending time a little inappropriate and calls for the word passing time instead. Thus, even though the idiom time is money plays an important part in our idea of time and in our language it is not universal. Maybe this metaphor and its importance in the Western world tell more about the state of our society than it does of the concept of time.