In order to live one first has to stay alive. That means one needs food. And in order to live in minimal comfort you need a roof over your head. Food and a house cost money. That observation alone is enough to conclude that money is important. But people want more that just food and housing. With only that life would be boring. There are many enjoyable things which are free. For example: friendship (the real kind), love, the sun. But it is the nature of people to desire more than what nature and socializing offer them for free. Most people also desire things which have to be produced by people, such as a car, movies, museums, TV, a vacation, furniture, a large house, health care, etc. Because it would not be efficient for everyone to produce all those wonderful things for himself, division of labor came about. Everyone specializes in a certain kind of work and earns money doing that. The amount of money you earn represents the amount of goods and services you are able to buy. Because I, like most people, find all those products very handy and enjoyable money is very important for me. One could say money is a form of freedom. The more money you have the more pleasant things you can do. Therefore this is one of my favorite quotes:
All this does not mean that for me making money is all that counts. There is another very important factor: I don't like hard work. I'm lazy. And I especially do not like hard work when the work is unpleasant. When I do find the work enjoyable I am willing to work harder, but not too hard. The facts that I find money very important and that I do not like hard work are two opposing forces. I try to find an optimal balance between them. In any case, if I must choose between a life with a busy office job and overwork every night and a good salary and a car and a grand house on one hand, and a life without much luxury but with work which is fun and not too much on the other hand, I would choose the latter. I want to become a millionaire. But only if that is possible without too great a sacrifice in terms of hard work. If that is not possible, then I accept not becoming a millionaire. Because money is so important it is also important to spend and invest it wisely.
I believe there are important similarities between money and time. First: it takes time to work to make money. The corollary is that when you work less you trade money (salary) for leisure time. Furthermore, time is just like money: at the end of the day you never understand where all your time/money went. A cliche but true saying about time and money is:
There is also a difference between time and money. You can say that you don't have enough money - not enough money to do a certain thing. In general, of course, everyone is always suffering from lack of money, because more is always better. However, nobody has too much or too little time, since time is a scale of comparison and not a quantity. For that reason the quote above must be taken figuratively rather than literally. You may sometimes hear somebody say: I wish a day had 48 hours instead of 24 so that I could do more. But a day is only a definition of 24 hours. The meaning of this expression is therefore: I wish there were 48 hours in 24 hours. That is like saying: I wish there were two miles in a mile, then I could walk further. Somebody who says he doesn't have enough time really means that he has too many things to do, or has taken on too many chores. The following quote comes to mind in this regard: