How Much Would You Pay for a Time Machine?

TL;DR: The market can price the hour. It cannot price what you miss while selling it.

I am all out of five-year-olds.

I say this a lot. I said it today. To be clear, I am not trying to talk my wife into having more kids. It comes up with parents on both sides of the line: parents whose kids are young adults now and are trying to get any time they can, and parents who still have little kids but are afraid the current hype train will leave without them.

I have three kids. They are 8, 10, and 13 now. I love this stage. They are funny, strange, and increasingly their own people.

But five was magic. Five can spend an afternoon with a pile of leaves. Five can treat a fly that got into the house like breaking news. Five still wants you sitting on the floor next to them. I loved that stage. I also mostly missed it.

Not completely. Not in some dramatic movie version. I was there. But I was working in "Big Tech" during the last machine learning cycle. I left early. I stayed late. I traveled internationally. A lot. Even when I was physically home, work owned my attention, my mood, and the part of my brain that should have been listening. But I was still inside a doc, an escalation, a reorg, or already war-gaming the next meeting.

I was around, but not really.

The mistake was not that I worked. I like work. I still work a lot. The mistake was that I used the wrong evaluation to decide whether I was getting a good deal. I priced my time the way the market priced it: What was on the W2? What will the next promotion pay? What if I leave Amazon for something else? What if the valuation doubles? What is the cost of stepping off the track right now?

That was rational. It was also shortsighted.

We sell ourselves for parts and call it opportunity. Then the people we love get whatever is left. The market can price the hour. It cannot price what we bring home after selling it.

The dry name for this is opportunity cost neglect: to evaluate a choice honestly, you have to name the alternatives it displaces. I was not ignoring opportunity cost. I was generating the wrong alternative.

I thought the alternative to one more intense job, one more trip, one more late night, one more "important" push was some other professional opportunity. It was not.

The alternative was bedtime. The alternative was a kid walking into my home office with a silly story. The alternative was being in the kitchen at 3:30pm, when the school day was still fresh enough to talk about. The alternative was a normal Tuesday I would now pay an unreasonable amount of money to visit.

Hourly-wage thinking does not stay at work. It ruins your vacations too. In "Time, Money, and Happiness," Sanford DeVoe and Julian House found that prompting people to think about income as an hourly wage reduced enjoyment and increased impatience during unpaid time.

Once every hour has a price, unpriced time starts to look inefficient. The calculator follows you into the room. Leisure feels indulgent. Family time becomes something you protect in theory but resent in practice.

Celeste Headlee's Do Nothing helped name the broader trap: overworking, overdoing, and underliving. My mom bought me that book. Twice, actually. She is not subtle. The phrase that stuck with me was time "without agenda or profit."

This is not advice for everyone. Money can be a real and significant constraint. If the choice is the right one for your family, take it. The trap I am talking about comes later, when you are still chasing a goal that matters less than you think it does.

I still work a lot when my kids are not home. And often when they are home. I work more than I should when they are asleep. I am not pretending I have achieved balance. I have not.

But every serious commitment has to answer a different question now: "Is this worth time away from my family?"

Recently someone was surprised when I turned down a consulting gig. "That's a lot of money," they said. "Yeah, I know." Then I spent the afternoon waxing skis so I would be ready for closing weekend at Crystal Mountain with my son.

That is not an argument that ski wax is morally superior to work. It is a reminder that the number on the check is only one side of the ledger.

That question has made me harder to book. Good. The work that survives tends to be work I can defend at dinner: people I want to be near, problems that matter, commitments that give more than they take.

There are still places I can help, and want to help, where "no" is the right answer. That is the part that hurts. It is also the part that makes the rule useful.

Companies need a commodity price for your time. They need headcount plans, compensation bands, and competitor benchmarks. Fine. Useful to them. Not to you. Not to your family. Their model is for planning. Yours has to be for living.

Your Saturday morning is not just an hour. Your attention during dinner is not just attention. Your mood after a bad meeting is not contained to the meeting.

Work leaks. That is the part I underpriced.

I do not think the answer is to stop working hard. Sacrificing in the right moments gave me opportunity, security, confidence, and choices.

But the hype train is really loud right now. It can feel like if we waste a second, we will be left behind. It felt like this before. It will feel like this again. I am approaching this one differently.

Not because the train is fake. Because markets repeat themselves. Childhood does not.

If someone offered me a time machine, I would not go to a historic milestone. I would go to a normal weekday in the summer. All three of my kids would be little. The house would be loud and messy. Nothing important would happen. And I would stay there as long as I could.

The market can try to tell me what my time is worth to a company.

It cannot tell me what I would pay to get it back.