> Money buys time, and time has value

Only when you look at it from the business owner perspective, who can simply buy more labor (time) to make more money.

For individuals, the only thing we have in this world is time, and it's finite. When it's all gone, it's all over for us. That means time is the most valuable thing possible to individuals.

If and when we choose we can sell some of that time for money. But money in not what we want, and it doesn't give us direct value. Time is what we all want, because sooner or later it runs out.

While it’s true that our time is finite, many people don’t have any clear idea how they want to spend their time. This is particularly true when retired. Often, people end up spending time playing games or surfing the Internet or whatever just because they don’t have any other plans.

So the value of time very much depends on your stage in life and your finances and your goals. Spending your time working or doing things yourself can be a good trade if you have the time and need the money.

Those things are perfectly legitimate usages of time. The whole point of time having value outside of money is that we should have to power to spend our time on things that don't produce money.

> For individuals, the only thing we have in this world is time, and it's finite. When it's all gone, it's all over for us. That means time is the most valuable thing possible to individuals.

But this is a difference in degree, not kind. When the average individual buys something online, some individuals may choose to pay a little more for expedited shipping. It's the same principle. More abstractly, if I were to pose an individual looking to purchase Nike shoes 2 options: $100 to get the shoes today, or $1 to get the same shoes a year from now, the majority of individuals would choose the former, rather than the latter. Again, that's because of the time-value of money.

Now, you're correct that not everybody has the means to be able to buy time like this, but one can't conclude from this reality that time is "more valuable than" money.

> Time is what we all want, because sooner or later it runs out.

Yes, this is correct, and it reinforces the argument that time and money are just two currencies that are interchangeable. Money is just a proxy for value, and time is undeniably valuable. Not everybody has enough money to buy 70+ years of "free time", which is why the median person typically trades labor instead of money for future "free time" (retirement). In most countries that offer social security, that's the underlying mechanism: convert mass labor into money (taxes/contribution) which can then be converted into long term investment (sovereign wealth funds, SS trust funds), which is then converted to equally distributed "future free time" for everyone involved.

Individuals can definitely buy time. Hire a house cleaning service, landscape company, grocery delivery service, nanny, etc. Those are all ways to buy time that frees up the individual to do other things.

Traditional thinking says if you earn more per hour than you're paying for stuff like that then it's a net win, but again that is a business idea (opportunity cost) and doesn't work for individuals. If it were true, everyone earning more than minimum wage should be paying someone to do every single thing in their entire life... but that doesn't work because you can't just earn more money when you're on salary, and you don't have infinite hours to work endlessly more.

This analysis totally ignores a whole bunch of factors, including that you can’t pay someone else minimum wage for a bunch of things, and that “hiring someone to do X” has a huge transaction cost associated with it. Not just the hiring part, but the coordination, etc.

The “can’t work more hours” piece actually works towards your argument for finite time: why would you want to spend any of your outside-of-salary time doing stuff you don’t want to do that could pay someone less to do?

Time is not fungible.