Money is a Form of Life Energy

“Our life energy is our allotment of time here on earth, the hours of precious life available to us. When we go to our jobs we are trading our life energy for money. You could even say that money equals our life energy.” - Vicki Robin

Vicki Robin's concept of "life energy" in her book "Your Money or Your Life" offers a profound perspective on the relationship between money and the hours of our lives spent earning it. This concept connects the value of money to the time and effort we invest to earn it, making money a representation of our life energy. It’s relatively simple and straightforward: we trade our life energy or time for money, therefore what we trade our money for we are effectively trading our time.

If you earn $20 an hour and buy a $50 dress, you’re saying that this dress is worth two and half hours of your life. This is definitely different from girl math. Vicki goes even further to say your hourly wage is not your real hourly wage, you must account for the time getting ready for work, traveling to and from your job, the cost of special clothes you wear on the job, any meals you have to buy during working hours… the list goes on. So you may earn $20 an hour before taxes, but after those and deducting your costs of doing business you may actually be earning closer to $10, suddenly making that dress worth 5 hours of your time. Is it still worth it?

Only you can decide whether or not money spent is spent well. Hopefully you’ll consider seeing money as a form of life energy and only part with it for reasons that have meaning to you!