As a freelance designer, people often ask me my hourly rate.

To this, I answer: “You would like to buy an hour of my life, would you? You would like to know the cost, in U.S. dollars, for me to spend sixty minutes refining the curvatures of your company’s logo when I could be sipping rosehip tea, watching a bird make a nest in a magnolia tree and savoring this mysterious gift called time, as it ticks closer and closer to oblivion with each breath I take?”

Fine. I don’t actually say that. I usually say, “I prefer to quote the whole project.”

But really… What is the actual value of time? Not my time as compared to your time. Not the time of a baby-sitter as compared to the time of a lawyer. Just time itself.

Because let’s be honest – we don’t even know what time is to begin with, let alone how to put a price tag on it. I’ve looked pretty deeply into how we perceive time and how we define it, and from what I can tell, the current consensus is: “We’re not sure what it is, but it keeps people from showing up late for parties.”

Which is fine. Time an illusion, an emergent phenomenon, a mystery beyond our understanding. It’s a lovely answer… until you have to decide on its value.

When you put a price on something normal, like say, glass eyeballs, you can count how many eyeballs you made, count how much you spent on the glass, then wait for a one-eyed person to come into your eyeball store, and write a number on the price tag that’s high enough to cover the cost, but not so high that their remaining eye pops out of their head. Supply-and-demand economics. The amount you have left over is used to pay for everything else in your life that’s not eyeball related.

When you’re pricing time itself though, a major problem is that you have no idea what your “supply” is. If you knew you had one hour of life remaining, the rate you would charge to spend that hour cutting someone else’s hair or mowing their lawn would be pretty high. But if you thought you might live to be a hundred, your hour would feel relatively worthless, so you might even spend part of it reading a blog post by some internet rando. All you can say for sure is that you’re alive right now, so your time supply is greater than zero.

When talking about the “demand” part – we all have demands on our time coming from every direction. These include things like eating, sleeping, and completing the next level of Block Blast. Very few of these demands offer compensation in return. The ones that do are the ones we call “work.”

If you’re lucky enough to find someone willing to do one of these time-cash exchanges, it’s pretty much on you to make sure the amount being offered is enough to keep you alive during the time you’re not working, and keep you from complaining during the time when you are. Enough to make it “worth your while,” in other words.

Or if you’re buying someone else’s time, you should have some confidence that the money you’re spending will not just save some of your own time, but also generate enough value to justify the cost of hiring a worker in the first place.

If you want some real-world experience putting this type of advanced economic thinking into practice, try figuring out how much to pay a nanny so they can watch your infant child while you go to work. (Extra credit: You’re a teacher, and the child of the nanny is in your class.)

As for the “cost” of your time, you could try to put a number on how much money was spent developing your marketable skills to the point that someone would even want to buy your time in the first place — but that might require adding up your tuition bills or calling your parents and talking to them about money.

Whatever method you end up using to price your time, it’ll require you, as the time-seller, to do some fuzzy math, somehow find out what your colleagues are charging for comparable work, and muster up enough self-esteem to negotiate a living wage for yourself, all while knowing there’s someone in line behind you willing to charge less.

Except whoops — that someone is now quite possibly an AI-powered cyber-entity — which, as cool as it may or may not seem, throws off the whole premise of the time-for-money exchange system.

With computer time (measured in teraflops per nanosecond) now competing in the job market with human time (measured in coffee breaks and trips to the bathroom), the work product of professions which once required an investment of 10,000 hours to master can now be satisfactorily imitated in the time it takes to formulate a prompt and type it into the right AI model. What was once skilled labor is suddenly un-skilled labor.

With skill and training removed from the negotiating table, the time-pricing equation gets simplified even further down to it’s core question: “How much money does it take to make a person spend their time on the thing I want them to do instead of spending it on the thing they want to do.” This generally boils down, in one way another, to a person with more money controlling the time of a person with less money. Business as usual, in other words.

If the birth of AI and robotics is truly the socio-techno-economic inflection point that it seems to be, maybe it’s also an opportunity to finally switch things up in this whole game of deciding who gets to control who’s time. After all, isn’t that the whole promise of technological advancement? That by creating “labor-saving” devices the human spirit will have more time, and subsequently more freedom to thrive, innovate, and otherwise engage in the pursuit of happiness?

Open-AI co-founder Sam Altman has suggested that widespread proliferation of AI-enabled tools will require some adjustments to “the social contract.” As non-billionaire humans (and paying customers filling the coffers of our big-tech overlords) we need to start with a few demands for this re-negotiation… a few truths to hold self-evident.

The first is to declare that our time has inherent value. Not just in a wooey “life is precious” kind of way. We need an actual baseline number.

Because when you leave it undefined, it means one of the options is zero. And when you’re allowed to say a person’s time has zero value, it follows that you’re allowed to say a person’s life has zero value — which is convenient if you’re an evil, overpowered sociopath. But if you’re a normal, decent person, and you’re in a position to either buy someone’s time, or sell some of your own, it would be helpful to have some idea of what that time is worth, so you can have a place to begin the negotiation.

Figuring out a standardized time-to-money conversion rate may sound like a complicated, geeky economics problem that could lead us into an argument about minimum wage and cost-of-living allowances — possibly invoking the wrath of the Society of Actuaries (you don’t want to mess with those guys), but we don’t really need a precision calculator that accounts for every possible lifespan, circumstance and set of abilities. We just need to agree on a number that accounts for the costs incurred by being alive – costs that are quite different from the “compute costs” of a digital worker.

Since it seemed like no one else was eager to provide this number, I did the math myself. Here’s what I came up with:

For an average American, spending an average amount of money to live up to 100 years of an average life, each hour of time has a value of $60, which works out nicely to $1 per minute.

I wasn’t looking for it to come out to such a nice round, easy-to-grasp number, but I was quite happy when it did. To show how I came up with this number, I made this two minute video (which, rest-assured, cost me much more time to make than the $2 of time it will cost you to watch it.)

Keep in mind, this number isn’t permanent. It changes as the average annual spending in America changes. But given the margin of error in how that number is calculated, and the wiggle-room in the assumption of a 100 year lifespan, it’s a number that can serve as a reliable baseline for the time being.

Any rich person will tell you you’ll never get rich by selling your time, but if you’re like most us, and time is the only thing you have left to sell, knowing each minute is generally worth $1 will hopefully be helpful.

Maybe if we can start from the assumption that one person’s time is just as valuable as anyone else’s, we can spend more time using these amazing tools for our mutual benefit, and less time punching each others’ clocks.

So please share the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QQ2CNNQdY8) and try using $1 / minute as a guide for all your time-based pricing needs. Let me know how it works out.