Every price contains a little time

Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez ask readers to translate spending into “life energy”: not just the hours on a payslip, but time and costs attached to earning—commuting, recovery, clothes, meals or childcare. A purchase can then be viewed as a slice of finite attention rather than an isolated number.

That conversion is an accounting lens, not a universal moral scale. Paid work can carry meaning; unpaid care complicates any hourly calculation; disability and low wages constrain choice. Still, the mechanism exposes an exchange that currency conveniently hides. The price tag states how much money leaves. It does not state how much lived time was gathered to put that money there.