CAPITALISM

Peter Fortunato says that Capitalism is trading what we want less for what we want more. That is probably the most concise and accurate description I’ve read.

I kinda get the disdain. Capitalism isn’t clean and it doesn’t have a conscience but we all are part of it whether we like it or not. We all trade capital and we all are capital. Our human capital is what is traded in years upon years for money we use to buy things we need or want.

Our attention is bought and sold by advertisers daily. They say that if you don’t know what is being sold, it’s you. Meta (Facebook) doesn’t provide the service for free, they just don’t charge you. They are charging FOR YOU.

I grew up thinking that it was honorable to work hard for money - just not too much money. It never made much sense to me. Why shouldn’t my time be valued highly?

The messages I told myself were that if I had money it meant that someone else couldn’t have as much. That we were playing a zero sum game.

Veronica (my wife) was told a very different story about money. She was told that their family moved to this country for the opportunity to make a better life by making as much money as they could by getting a good education and working hard.

Different messages. Guilt about having money. Guilt about not having money.

Religious teachings further complicate the matter, from tithing to talk of camels passing through the eyes of needles. We should probably sidestep that entire topic to avoid starting a debate that’s unresolvable.

No wonder money carries so much baggage with it. No wonder it can make us uncomfortable to talk about it.

We are trading our time for it.

We’re valuing our time by it.

Each of us probably gives our hours (or years) a different value in dollars that are determined by how much we’ll sell that amount of our time for (to our employer).

In a sense, we’re valuing ourselves by it.

I know I sold some days (24 hour shifts) for about a thousand dollars pre tax. There were times I feel that was a great trade. There are holidays I missed with my kids that I know were a bad trade.

Overtime was a wonderful gift when we were a young family and Veronica was staying home with our kids. The opportunity to help support my family was amazing and I never regretted that trade because I saw it as my contribution to helping my wife be with our kids full time. I don’t regret a single shift during that phase of life.

But as cars got nicer and overtime became a habit, I found I was missing too much time with my family to pay for more stuff that really didn’t make me happy.

So it was time to pivot. And we did.

We can take this idea of capitalism in all directions.

We trade our desire for deliciousness now for poorer health later sometimes. We trade our time for money that we then trade for cars and houses etc. after we pay taxes on it all.

You get the idea.

Everyone has to make their own choices in regards to the things we trade in this capitalistic economy. To me, the important thing is that we see the true cost and then decide what is worth trading for what.

Consciously spending is what I am trying to do. Sometimes it helps tying money to an amount of time that it might take me to earn that amount of money, to see if the purchase is worth the time.

For me it is time freedom that I am after so I sometimes pass opportunities to make more money to protect my time freedom.

If someone were to offer to buy my time these days it is getting more expensive as the supply is constantly diminishing.

This isn’t meant to be morbid. I am hoping that the lessons I learned by spending my time on things that didn’t matter might help you avoid the same mistakes.

All that said and I sit and write this letter over a couple of hours for zero pay because it makes me happy and gives me purpose to try to distill what I’ve learned into small pieces that might help someone else.

I am trading this time for the feeling of fulfillment.

The hardest part is truly valuing our time in net dollars. But that is for the next newsletter.

I hope you come back for that one and remember to keep the main thing the main thing.