Once a semester, I engage in a five to ten minute discussion of this question:

Suppose you were to receive $23000 and that is all the money you will receive / earn for the rest of your life. How much would you give away?

This prompts questions back to me as students try to understand the boundaries of this constraint, with my answers inline:

• Do I get something in return for donating money to a charity?
• You get nothing in return.
• What do you mean by ‘give away’? Can I invest it?
• There is no investment, you are just giving it away, a random act of “kindness”, if you will.
• Do I earn money elsewhere?
• Nope, you earn no money elsewhere. The $23000 is all you have and all you will ever have.
• What if I wanted food, do I have to purchase it?
• If you can find a way to obtain food without purchasing it that’s fine, otherwise, yes you have to purchase food with your $23000.
• This is for my whole life, that’s all I have?
• Yup. That’s all you have and all you will ever have.

[A quick note to non-US readers: almost anywhere in the US, $23000 will probably last no more than one year if you have to buy food, pay for housing, utilities, etc. In some places in the US and under certain other arrangements of support, $23000 can be stretched to a few years, but by no means will this be luxurious living.]

And then I reiterate my question: How much of this $23000 will you simply give away? Of the hundreds of students I have asked this question only two would give some of it away. One student said that she would give $25 because there was one time in her life where that’s all the money she had and someone she knew really needed it, so she gave that person all her money. Another student said no more than $5. Everyone else firmly said that they would not give a single penny.

And why would we give any of it away?

So we largely end up agreeing that we are unwilling to part with a single penny. It would just be wasted and it would be foolish.

My students are typically 18-20 year old college students. I do also have a non-negligible number of students who are between 25 to 55 years of age as well. And their response, too, is to never part with a single penny. Hoard it! Be ultra frugal! It’s a limited resource that we’re not getting back!

My next question then is,

How long do you think you will live?

The general consensus is that they will live until about 80 years of age. At this point, we do a little math. For the 18 year-old, living until 80 means that they have another 62 years. How many days is that? As a lower bound, this translates to
$$62 \times 365 = 22630$$

Accounting for leap years, will give us an additional 20 days depending on how persnickety we want to get.

But there we have it. As a class, we have largely agreed that of the $23000 we would have for the rest of our life, we were unwilling to part with any significant amount of it. In fact, virtually the entire class wouldn’t part with a single penny. Not one penny!

So, if all we have left in this life is roughly 23000 days, how many of those days are we willing to give away? How do we value our days? How do we value our time? We wouldn’t part with a dollar of our $23000. Would we give away a day? We wouldn’t part with a penny, would we give away fifteen minutes?

Yet we do. We give away our time routinely and regularly and bemoan when it is lost.

I am not an exception to this. I have wasted time.

What do we consider as wasted time? And as time not wasted? The measure doesn’t have to be accumulation of wealth. It has to be a personal measure. It’s about really figuring out, barring a miraculous breakthrough in time travel or legitimately defeating death, what we want to do with our finite time. What do we consider as a waste now? What will we consider to have been a waste when we look back?

This is the message I try to get across to my students. We’re in class. Let’s do something! Let’s learn! If we’re going to come to class, we’ve deemed it to have value because we are spending time. So let’s extract as much value as possible. Let’s not just give away that time. This goes for instructors, too. If we’re going to be teaching, then let’s teach. We’re spending time just the same and we too value our time. Let’s not drone on without passion or soul.

Over the years, I’ve seen many 18-20 year old students come in and out of class just going through the motions. Heck, I’ve done that, too. Going through the bureaucracy of school. Then I see their future counterparts, the 45-year old student who has come to the realization that they want to do something with their time. That student is motivated and moving. They are engaged. They ask questions. They don’t want their time wasted by me, by some other student, or by their own devices. They are focused. But with 27 (18 + 27 = 45) years gone by. With 9855 days gone by. With 236,520 hours gone by. They’ve learned their lesson and watch out everyone else, they are coming! This is what I want from my 18-year olds as well!

This goes for everyone, independent of profession. What are we doing with our time? Some of us don’t have the luxury of this thought. How can we help them? Would we help them? Teaching is my way of helping where I can.

The $23000 question is always a semi-soul crushing conversation to have. It defeats me as well because from time to time I just waste time. I don’t necessarily consider “just vegging out” as a waste, but there’s a difference between a healthy break and frittering. And then I remind myself of $23000.

I hope my message gets through to anyone who hears it and that it doesn’t take half a lifetime of “waste” to reclaim the other half. But better late than never.