"We've got one this in this life, and it's time" - some uber wise fucker

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If you boil down the basic resource paradigms and market paradigms of the world, humans only really have time. That is our only non-replenishable resource. You can work for anything, on anything. You can get anything in this life, except more time. (1)

The one thing you cannot get more of is time. It is the universal currency. You trade your time for money, an intermediate currency, to spend on other things. That intermediate currency you use to leverage your life, your being, your happiness and sanity.

You spend time in schooling, so that you can create more value in other terms. But the effort you expend and the fruits of labor can all be boiled down to the basis of time, it's the bedrock all human product sits upon. The one thing you spend in this life, is time...or its many abstractions. It is the common denominator, and you cannot derive any 1 thing that cannot be created, engineered, fashioned if given enough time. It is the basic block of all that is, all that has, and all that will be in existence.

This is why, the one thing to optimize for in life, is time. Spend the time on things in life that's actually worth it to you to spend time on.

toe notes:

(1) We actually hope to change this with new developments in the fight against aging (1.1, 1.2) and brain-machine interfaces (1.3)

Edit 4/2/20 :

Wait... it never occurred to me that the literal denominator of productivity is time. DUH. This isn't a novel idea, this is the basis of human work and measuring output of our species. I just never drew the connection. Time is the basic unit, time is the denominator. Minimize the denominator and maximize the numerator, that is how you achieve the most in this life... Where else in my life am I missing the obvious...