The Phases of Life

Time, Money, Health

In life you have a combination of time, money, and health. Wealth is easy enough to measure. I’ve shown how we can measure time. But, health is a tricky one. It generally goes downhill over time, but it can also fail all of a sudden.

There is an exchange between them as you can spend time and money to get healthier. You can burn your time and health to make more money. You can use your money to gain more time.

I’ve created a graph that shows the general trajectory of the three over time. As you can see at no point do you have maxed out wealth, health, and time. Maybe if you are a trust fund kid, early retiree, or Sims character you can have it all, but that’s just a dream for most of us.

So, since we don’t have a bunch of everything available at the same time I recommend dividing your life into different phases. Before you start working, you have lots of time and health. Use it to make friends, spend time figuring out what you enjoy, and building your identity. Once you start working your free time craters as you have an employer demanding your time so you can make a living. However, you probably are in decent health, so I’d recommend traveling. If you end up with kids then your time will evaporate, so you’ll want to use money to try to get some back.

Examples of this in my life

My wife and I traveled a couple times a year when we were without kids. Most people would consider having kids a turning point for travel and for us it was, but in the opposite direction. Our travel ramped up as a combination of factors made it possible in that phase of life. One was that we received leave from our employers and another was that kids under 2 fly free. Covid came and enabled remote work which further opened the door to working outside of home.

Now our travel phase of life has closed since our kids are in school which limits travel to holidays or the summer which are the most crowded times to go anywhere. During this phase we can build deeper connections, volunteer regularly, and do organized activities like sports.

Your turn

Look at your current situation and what your situation may look like in the coming years. What is something you should be doing more of now while you have more time/money/health? Are there things you wish you did more of when you were healthier or had more time? Life is a balance, if you live a boring life only saving for retirement when you get there you may have tons of money but not be healthy enough to spend it traveling or doing what you expected. So, take some time to make sure you are optimizing in your current phase of life, because it will change.