I've come to two conclusions:
One, if I'm going to bother to have this thing up, I might as well post on it once in a while. It's been almost half a year since my last update! Sad.
Two, I think way too much.
PHILOSOPHY ALERT! THOSE WHO HATE IT, DON'T READ BEYOND THIS POINT! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!
Case in point: This morning, while I was gettin' ready to read me some Old Testament (which really has little to nothing to do with the thought), I came to the conclusion that money would be nigh-worthless if time (or death, if you will) didn't exist, and almost all we're buying with money, after all is said and done, is just other peoples' time. So time does, in fact, equal money in a whole new way that I'd previously never thought.
Allow me to explain. If we never felt that there was an eventual end to our existence, we would likely not feel rushed to accomplish anything. Why would we? It's not like there would be anything to hurry up for. We would ALWAYS have time on our side.
Want a new car? Build one. Need a bridge to get across that chasm? Make it happen. Want to completely understand advanced thermodynamics? Spend a century or two studying it. The main reason we pay people to do these things now is because we either have more important things to do or just plain don't care to take the time from our limited lives to learn/build/obtain what's necessary to get what we want.
I acknowledge I might be completely wrong in what I suspect an immortal's mindset would be. Maybe he or she would be just as impatient as the rest of us, but I suspect otherwise. Death gives us a sense of urgency, at very least in the back of our minds. Without the thought of death in place, I think we'd see the world VERY differently.
Now, the exception to this idea is the things we can't do for ourselves. Say there's a plant that only grows in Michigan and one that only grows somewhere in India and for some reason couldn't be grown or transported anywhere else without being picked. Now say we want to cook a dish that requires both of them, but the shelf life of either would expire by the time we'd be able to go get the other. We'd have to overcome this obstacle by employing someone else to compensate for our inadequacy to be in two places at once and get one or the other and meet us somewhere in Europe or someplace like that so we could produce the desired meal. For that much work, I hope it would be worth it.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this thought, and I think it entirely possible that if anyone bothers to read this, you're probably thinking, "Yeah, this sounds a whole lot like X idea proposed by Y person/philosopher/raving lunatic." If you did indeed think or say that, you're probably now thinking, "And now that I think about it, that person was proven wrong already... so therefore you are too."
That, or maybe everyone else has always interpreted "time = money" this way and I'm just the last kid off the bus.
Either way, I'm OK with it, and honestly not too surprised.
One, if I'm going to bother to have this thing up, I might as well post on it once in a while. It's been almost half a year since my last update! Sad.
Two, I think way too much.
PHILOSOPHY ALERT! THOSE WHO HATE IT, DON'T READ BEYOND THIS POINT! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!
Case in point: This morning, while I was gettin' ready to read me some Old Testament (which really has little to nothing to do with the thought), I came to the conclusion that money would be nigh-worthless if time (or death, if you will) didn't exist, and almost all we're buying with money, after all is said and done, is just other peoples' time. So time does, in fact, equal money in a whole new way that I'd previously never thought.
Allow me to explain. If we never felt that there was an eventual end to our existence, we would likely not feel rushed to accomplish anything. Why would we? It's not like there would be anything to hurry up for. We would ALWAYS have time on our side.
Want a new car? Build one. Need a bridge to get across that chasm? Make it happen. Want to completely understand advanced thermodynamics? Spend a century or two studying it. The main reason we pay people to do these things now is because we either have more important things to do or just plain don't care to take the time from our limited lives to learn/build/obtain what's necessary to get what we want.
I acknowledge I might be completely wrong in what I suspect an immortal's mindset would be. Maybe he or she would be just as impatient as the rest of us, but I suspect otherwise. Death gives us a sense of urgency, at very least in the back of our minds. Without the thought of death in place, I think we'd see the world VERY differently.
Now, the exception to this idea is the things we can't do for ourselves. Say there's a plant that only grows in Michigan and one that only grows somewhere in India and for some reason couldn't be grown or transported anywhere else without being picked. Now say we want to cook a dish that requires both of them, but the shelf life of either would expire by the time we'd be able to go get the other. We'd have to overcome this obstacle by employing someone else to compensate for our inadequacy to be in two places at once and get one or the other and meet us somewhere in Europe or someplace like that so we could produce the desired meal. For that much work, I hope it would be worth it.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this thought, and I think it entirely possible that if anyone bothers to read this, you're probably thinking, "Yeah, this sounds a whole lot like X idea proposed by Y person/philosopher/raving lunatic." If you did indeed think or say that, you're probably now thinking, "And now that I think about it, that person was proven wrong already... so therefore you are too."
That, or maybe everyone else has always interpreted "time = money" this way and I'm just the last kid off the bus.
Either way, I'm OK with it, and honestly not too surprised.
No comments:
Post a Comment