At what point do you realize that money means nothing and time means everything?

Like water on Arrakis, it doesn’t matter how much spice you have if you are dead from dehydration in the middle of a desert. Every hour of every day is all you have. If you are working at a job you hate, for a boss or company you don’t respect, and every day is causing you emotional pain and physical stress that is stifling you, sacrificing other projects (or worse yet harming your relationships), making you a different person (or harming your health), all for what? You are trading your most precious resource for money. You are trading time now for time later that you hope to have (but may not), which is understandable…but how do you measure that exchange? What amount is ‘worth it’?

Any job that is causing enough pain to impact your health long-term is probably not worth doing at any exchange rate. If you are offered $1M to jump off a cliff, that is obviously not a good deal. If you are offered $1M to do something illegal that could land you in jail for life, that is a risk that is probably not worth it (but would also depend on your other options). Is $100K to sit in an office all day for a year worth it?

If I am making enough in one day to have 5 days of freedom later, that is certainly worth it (at least for some amount of time). If I am only making enough for one day, then obviously that is not a good deal as my future day is not guaranteed (and the quality of life may be diminished).

What is the tipping point? The key is to get expenses as low as possible to maximize future value of each dollar earned. How much do you need?

Some kind of formula….current magnitude of pain/time vs future time/current dollars based on how much money one needs now and can save factoring future expenses. The older one gets, the more diminished and speculative the future time becomes, so there is a slope involved.