How many hours do you work just to exist?
Your daily price translated into work hours. That's the moment it truly hits home.
There’s a difference between knowing what you earn and knowing what you cost. Most people know their salary. Far fewer know how many hours per day they work purely to cover their fixed costs.
I once did the math. My daily price divided by what I earn per hour. It turned out that the first three and a half hours of every workday, I was just working to exist. Not to save. Not to do fun things. Purely to cover the basic costs of my life.
Three and a half hours. Every day. Before anything is left over.
That’s the moment money stops being abstract. It becomes time. And time is the one thing you can’t make more of.
If your hourly wage is fifteen euros and your daily price is forty, you work nearly three hours per day just for your fixed costs. If your hourly wage is twenty-five and your daily price is fifty-five, it’s just over two hours. It’s simple math, but it feels different from a monthly bank statement.
The beauty is that this insight works both ways. You can lower your daily price — by canceling subscriptions, by making more conscious choices. Or you can raise your hourly wage. Or both. But you can only change something once you know where you stand.
How many hours do you work just to exist?