Costing Life vs. Valuing Life
The Arithmetic Nobody Wants to Do
This is the third piece in a series I didn’t entirely plan.
First I wrote about values and joys — the rocks we protect and the rhythms we repeat. Then I wrote about value and cost — what you pay versus what you get, and how the receipt is a footnote, not the story.
This one is where the series was headed all along. I just had to work up to it.
Because there is one asset where the cost-versus-value mistake is not expensive. It is total. And almost everyone is making it right now, today, this morning, without noticing.
The asset is your life.
The Accountants of Life
You know these people. You might be one. I was one, for longer than I like to admit.
They cost their lives.
Every decision runs through the ledger. The trip gets deferred because the timing isn’t efficient. The beach house gets deferred because the money could compound somewhere else. The year off gets deferred because the career is mid-stride. Dinner gets cut short because the morning is booked. The math is always available, always reasonable, and always says the same thing.
Later. Later is cheaper.
And here’s the thing — the math is right. Later usually is cheaper. In dollars.
The accountants of life are not stupid people. They are often the smartest people in the room. They can tell you the opportunity cost of every choice to the basis point. They optimize. They compound. They defer.
They are running a flawless analysis on the wrong asset.
Because they are pricing everything in dollars, and the actual currency — the only currency, the one every single one of us is spending every single day whether we acknowledge it or not — never appears on their spreadsheet.
A Number for the Accountants
Fine. You want numbers? Let’s do numbers.
Here is a question, and I want you to actually sit with it, the way I sit each morning. Don’t skim it. Do the math. You’re good at math.
What would you do today if you knew you had 1,627 days of good life left — followed by 30 bad ones?
Go ahead. Convert it.
1,627 days. That’s about four and a half years. Four more summers. Four more Thanksgivings. Roughly 230 more Saturdays. If you walk the beach twice a week, that’s around 460 more walks. If you see your parents twice a year, do that arithmetic too. I’ll wait.
And then 30 days that you don’t get to choose.
Now answer the second question, and this is the only one that matters:
What would you value now?
Not someday. Not at retirement. Not after the next deal closes or the market settles or the kids are older or the bonus hits. Now. With 1,627 on the board and the counter running.
I’d bet the spreadsheet changes. I’d bet the deferred trip stops being deferred. I’d bet “later is cheaper” suddenly sounds like the most expensive sentence ever spoken.
Funny how a denominator clarifies things.
She Knew
Here’s what I haven’t told you about that question.
It isn’t hypothetical for everyone.
Brenda knew that reality. At least in a way. Not the exact number — nobody hands you the exact number — but she lived inside its truth. We didn’t call our move to the beach a dream. We didn’t call it an escape. We called it buying time. We didn’t know how much. But we knew we had some.
And so we stopped counting days and started using them.
Two weeks in Florida. White sand. A few good books. Quiet mornings. A trip out and back when we wanted one. None of it was efficient. None of it optimized anything. Every bit of it would have failed the accountant’s analysis.
It was the best money we ever spent. It wasn’t close.
And I know that reality now. For sure. Not the way you know a statistic — the way you know a thing you watched, day by day, holding a hand. I have seen exactly what the last chapter looks like, and I can report back from the edge of it: not one moment of it is improved by the money you didn’t spend living.
Not one.
Someone You Know
Now the part I’d rather not write, so I’ll write it plainly.
Someone you know does not have five years.
Read that again. Not “someone, somewhere, statistically.” Someone you know. In your contacts. At your table this past Thanksgiving. Maybe on your team. Maybe in your mirror — and that’s the catch, isn’t it? Nobody gets the number in advance. The 1,627 days I asked you to imagine? Somebody you love is living them right now, without the courtesy of the countdown.
They don’t know. You don’t know. That is precisely the point.
The accountants of life treat this uncertainty as a reason to keep deferring — since I don’t know, I’ll plan for the long case. The people who have actually stood close to the truth do the opposite. Uncertainty about the denominator is the single best argument for valuing the numerator. Today’s walk. Tonight’s dinner. This summer, not some summer.
You insure your house against a fire that almost certainly won’t happen. You will not spend one Saturday against a clock that absolutely is running. Explain that to me. As an economist, I genuinely want to hear the model.
Permission to Be Direct
So let me be less polite than usual, because some of you need it and you know who you are.
If you can negotiate a contract to the last dollar but can’t get yourself to the dinner table by seven — you are costing your life.
If you know your portfolio’s annualized return but not when you last took a full week with the people you claim it’s all for — you are costing your life.
If your answer to “when?” has been “soon” for more than two years running — soon is not a date. You are costing your life, and you’re getting a terrible price.
I’m not telling you to be reckless. I’ve written an entire body of work about arithmetic, leverage, and clear-eyed analysis, and I’ll stand behind every word. Earn the money. Respect the money.
But understand what the money is for. Dollars are not the asset. Dollars are what you trade for the asset. Costing life means trading your days for dollars and calling the pile a scoreboard. Valuing life means trading dollars back for days — the walk, the table, the porch, the people — and understanding that this exchange, and only this exchange, was ever the point of earning them.
One of these compounds. The other just accumulates.
The Question, One More Time
I sit every morning and think about what I value. You know that by now.
What you may not have known until today is why the practice has teeth. It’s because I once watched someone live with the number almost visible — and she spent her days better than anyone I’ve ever known. Be happy, she told me. Not be richer. Not be more efficient.
Be happy.
So here it is, one more time, and then I’ll let you go:
1,627 good days. Then 30 you don’t choose.
What would you value now?
Whatever your answer just was — that’s your real balance sheet.
Go fund it.