How We Value Time
While I’m not a “gamer” in any real sense of the word, there is one that I downloaded on my phone years ago and play when I have some downtime. It’s called Wordscapes and involves rearranging a set of scrambled letters into words in a crossword-like fashion.
I’ve played it enough that I’m now at Level 2,744. In other words, I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so myself, but that isn’t the point of this post. (Though, by telling you this, I suppose it is one of the points of this post!)
At any rate, there are about 16 “crosswords” per level and everytime you complete one crossword, you have to sit through a short ad before you move to the next puzzle. So, as you can imagine, I’ve sat through more than my fair share of such ads over the years.
The other day, my son was watching me play and, as he saw my level achievement and then the fact that I sat through the ads before I could move to the next puzzle, he asked if I’d ever thought about paying the $5 fee (or whatever the actual fee is) to bypass the ads and just play.
My answer was immediate - why would I do that? It’s a free game so I couldn’t fathom paying for something I could do for free, at what I perceived as a relatively minimal cost.
But later, as I thought more about it, I began to wonder whether all of the seconds I could have saved per puzzle multiplied by 16 puzzles per level multiplied by 2,744 levels, was perhaps worth paying the $5 fee for, after all.
And, in light of that analysis, maybe “free” the way I’d defined it, wasn’t always all that it was cracked up to be. And that maybe my time was worth something, and, maybe, the fee wasn’t all that much of a price to pay to save that time.
The thing is, I know I’m not alone in thinking that if I can get something for free, then the price I have to pay to get it (a few seconds of ads per puzzle) really isn’t all that much. And that’s true. But if it’s going to be a consistent and persistent activity, then maybe, when you add it all up, it really is.
I hate to say it, but it was a minor revelation of the value we place (I place) on time and activity in contexts such as these. (Maybe you do the same?)
I think it also speaks to the mindset of a lot of young folks today, and that, perhaps, many of them are more considered in their trade-offs as to how they (tangibly) value their time. That the way they value important things such as their time are more thought-through than how the older generation values it, even though we may not initially see it that way.
We like to think we’re very measured and thoughtful in our choices and how we value important intangibles, such as our time. But maybe, when we peel the layers back, maybe, we aren’t.
