Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship pdfdrive com

Which hyperrealities play a predominant role in your life? And will awareness change
how you will interact with them in the future?

---

CHAPTER 9
TEMPORAL PROSTITUTION:
TRADING GOOD TIME FOR BAD
Lost time is never found again.
~ Benjamin Franklin, Statesman
SELL YOUTHFUL TIME NOW; BUY ELDERLY TIME LATER
I
n finance, “the time value of money” is as fundamental as salt and pepper are to
cooking. The gist of “time value” is that money TODAY is more valuable than
money TOMORROW. When these calculations are made, future money is
discounted and valued less. This is why $10,000 today is more valuable than
$11,000 ten years from now.
So why is TIME not discounted the same way?
This misuse of time value rolls out the red carpet for our last and crowning
hyperreality, which frames the two 
SCRIPTED
OS life-paths: 
temporal
prostitution—the subordination of time to money; the presumption that time is
unlimited and can be fecklessly traded, squandered, and dishonored, while money
is piously coveted as a limited resource
.

---

Like most 
SCRIPTED
hyperrealities, the truth has been blissfully
whitewashed. While time’s infinite existence might have a spiritual truth to it,
mortality changes the science. Once our limited existence is plotted atop an
unending string of time, time becomes hyperreal, neither infinite nor abundant.
This self-deception makes commodifying time acceptable, like a worthless
trinket bought and sold at a swap meet.
Philosophically, what is time to you? An age measurement? A way to keep
appointments? Unfortunately, time is merciless and it doesn’t care how you
define it, how you see it, or how you treat it. It’s the undisputed killing champion
of the world, racking up over a hundred billion wins and zero losses. No army
and no earthly disaster can claim the same. You can’t escape time’s ravenous
siphon, and yet everyone merrily pisses it away without hesitation.
At its core, your existence feeds on time just like food and water. 
Life is
rationed by time
. Like cotton weaves a shirt or water fills a pool, your life rations
embody the breadth of your existence. Nonrefillable and nonrefundable, time is a
fuel tank that perpetually burns, permanently sealed from measurement or
manipulation. And while your total life rations are unknown, their daily
dispensaries are not.
Each of us is gifted with twenty-four hours or 86,400 seconds per day. No
one gets more; no one gets less. How you honor (or dishonor) these life rations
marks the difference between being further entrenched into 
SCRIPTED
dogma
or escaping it.
For instance, know anyone who spends most of their free time in front of a
video game? How about the poor sap who spends two hours waiting in line for a
free hamburger? Few people explicitly work for three bucks per hour, but give
them a freebie or a savings opportunity at that same rate and you’ll have tents
lined around the building. Do you think billionaires are pissing their time away
on a blog, arguing with strangers on the other side of the country about how
some fictional HBO character shouldn’t have been killed off?
Temporal prostitution is one of the greatest tragedies of humanity.
My first temporal-prostitution “WTF moment” was a job I had at Sears
Roebuck as a five-dollar-per-hour stock clerk in the drapery department. Talk
about a sixteen-year-old’s nightmare. I was probably the only teenager in the
world who could carry on a conversation about valances. Anyhow, Ed Guerro
was my crotchety supervisor who was your classic hawkeyed micromanager. He
demanded perfection and cursed everything I did: the towels are folded wrong;

---

those toasters aren’t stacked properly; or my favorite, if you need to piss, wait for
lunch or piss your pants.
It was at Sears where I learned that in order to make $500, I had to swap one
hundred hours of my life, and swap them under the constant surveillance of Ed
Guerro.
This was important. Back then, my hobby was car stereos, and a 300-watt
Rockford Fosgate amplifier with a $500 price tag had my interest. My audio
system, already amped and stacked with dual twelve-inch subwoofers, shook the
street with thunderous force. My neighbors hated me, and I salted their anger by
not rocking to Neil Diamond but to 2 Live Crew. However, in my rebellious
mind, they didn’t hate me enough. My shit needed to thump harder, and that
new Fosgate amplifier would, indeed, volumize the thumpings.
But there was a problem…
I hated my job.
And I hated Ed.
This was a watershed moment because I noticed trading time for money
sucked, but it also held another truth few grasp: The things I wanted, specifically
my amp, really didn’t cost money; 
they cost me fragments of my life
. The price tag
for my amplifier wasn’t $500; it was one hundred hourly life rations joyously
spent with dickhead Ed. Suddenly, a few extra decibels of bass didn’t seem worth
it.
The life-ration concept is uniquely demonstrated in the 2011 movie 
In Time
.
In the movie, humans have their forearms timestamped with a countdown death
clock, which ticks toward the end of life. With a quick glance, anyone can see
how many life rations they have left to breathe. In this dystopia, work is not paid
with money but with more life rations—time added onto your death clock.
Working one day might earn you two. While the movie wouldn’t win an Oscar,
it exposed some great revelations with respect to how we use our time.
First, just because your death clock isn’t visibly stamped on your forearm
doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Like air, it exists—you just can’t see it. This invisible
time bomb perpetually ticks toward death, bleeding every second of your life’s
rations. And nothing can stop it—not the $4 million you saved for the last forty
years, not your MBA, not your granite countertops. We are relentlessly pursued
by time with death as its final goal. It has no mercy and often, has no just cause.
So ask yourself.
If a death clock suddenly became visible and advertised your life rations for
easy viewing, say your smartphone, would you spend your time differently?

---

Would you be OK sitting at a desk five days a week, doing a job you hated?
Would you spend two days camped outside at Best Buy, hoping to save two
hundred bucks on a curved television? How about buying into a financial
scheme that promised freedom only after 90 percent of your life’s rations have
bled dry? And more importantly, what remaining time on your death clock
would deliver the much-needed head smack that screamed, “OMG, my life is too
precious to be squandered on a sidewalk waiting to save ten bucks.” Six weeks?
Months? Years?
Second, under 
SCRIPTED
rule, how many life rations are you trading today
to earn freedom tomorrow? When we project the same “time value of money”
principle to time, we come to the same conclusion: 
Free time today is better than
free time tomorrow
. Youthful time sold today (working five days a week) so you
can buy elderly time later (retirement in your twilight) is a bad bet.
Think how ridiculous this is. You work Monday through Friday, or you
spend five life rations just so you can earn two. Five for two. Would you accept
this negative rate of return in the financial world? Hey, invest five life rations and
I’ll give you two back as payment? Oh and BTW, 
you won’t get back your original
investment.
Remember, time spent can never be reclaimed or refilled, so it’s 
not
an interest payment; 
it’s an immediate loss of principal
and a dismally negative
rate of return.
Gone means gone. In the 
In Time
world, negative returns wouldn’t fly; no
one would work because it pays better not to! And yet, in our invisible-death-
clock world, it’s perfectly accepted.
In the end, our fate is sealed. However, what isn’t sealed is the 
type of time
you can enjoy among your life rations. Within your time bank, there are two
time types you can manipulate: (1) 
free time
and (2) 
indentured time
.
Free time is the time you own, and it’s the only time that’s important. No one
has a claim on it. You do what you want: sleep in, write, read, whatever warms
your heart. Follow 
SCRIPTED
protocol and you’re locked into a shitty deal
where free time is automatically presumed to exist only on the weekends, at least
until retirement at some godforsaken age a gazillion years later. Retirement
might as well mean “the flash of free time before I die.”
Conversely, indentured time is time 
someone else owns
: school, studying,
work, traffic, your biz, 
etc.
So if your workday consists of nine hours at the office,
two hours in traffic, two hours in dress/undress, and one hour in unwind time,
how much free time do you really have? Assuming eight hours for sleep, add up

---

the work-related time, and your free time amounts to a pitiful two hours per day
for a workday. Effective use of your life’s rations?