Rarely do I look forward to the release of a film. However, a few years ago when "In Time" came out, I wanted to see it, not because I knew it would be great, but because I was curious how they would handle it. You see, for a long time, I have looked at purchases in terms of how much time I had to trade for it. Is it worth the time? If you had to trade, would you trade that amount of your life? The movie begs some fascinating think pieces that made it worth seeing. I will address a few here.
You get one year free, and if you want more time, you have to do something valuable enough that those who have time will give you theirs. Near the beginning of the movie, they show the price of coffee rising to 5 minutes for a cup. Do the math. I calculated that to cost me $1.67, which is pretty expensive unless the coffee is starbucks, but it's just some crappy cup of coffee. Riding the bus costs his mother 2 hours, which would amount to me paying $40 to ride the bus (which is about how much I pay in gas for an entire week). The investigator that chases the protagonist is offered ten minutes with a prostitute for an hour. That makes her a pretty cheap hooker at my wage, being $120 for an hour. Of course, it's worse for poor people. The more you have, the less of an impact, but I have looked at things for a long time and wondered if I was willing to trade five days of my life to obtain something.
Most characters in the film buy things that cannot satisfy and that are of no worth. The protagonist gives his friend ten years, and his friend promptly goes out and overdoses on alcohol with nine years left on his arm, nine years of wasted life. Recreation and entertainment rather than sustenance become the driving force for the poor. They know they will die soon, and so they choose to eat, drink and be merry. The rich never do anything because they can live forever unless they die accidentally. Thus, people who are alive never actually live, and the people doing the dying never live for anything valuable. They are willing to pay huge amounts of money for things. The protagonist pays several years worth of money for a car, something people buy to display, and several weeks of money for a meal (that must be some meal), and he wins money gambling. You see, that's the only risk for the rich. We mirror that in our world, paying far more than is wise for entertainment. I read today about the $300/month cell phone bill. I will admit I pay $55 for a single phone, but I get unlimited minutes, and it's not a smart phone, something for which my students regularly mock me. I only need a phone to make calls and receive messages, and I justify that bill because I don't have a house phone.
Ironically, this is exactly how our lives really are. We trade our life for a currency that we then trade for things we value. I can't get people to trade me directly what I offer for what I seek, so we use money (or time) as a medium of storage for our labor and our life until we find something we value enough to trade. However, imagine the power that would give you if you knew you were immortal unless you were foolish. What would you do? You know when you are going to die. You run out of time.
Everyone dies. Not everyone truly lives. Make sure when you die that you have not wasted your time, wasted your life, in things of no worth and things that do not satisfy. That was the worst part of the movie- everything was a big waste, and I understand why one of the characters chooses to time out. Machines go through the motions.
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