Welcome to Time, Food, & Money: The Algebra of Life
A first-principles framework for reclaiming our lives from a chaotic world.
Modern human life has increasingly become a game of incomplete information.
We face too many different choices in too many different areas of our lives.
It has become overwhelming. We’re tired, and things are getting more expensive.
Living amidst this social complexity, we are repeatedly forced to answer three exhausting questions:
How should we use our Time?
Which Foods should we eat?
How should we spend our Money?
As a species, we have never had so many choices, but this has impaired our ability to choose wisely.
Animals seem to have it so much easier.
Lacking any conception of Money, their Time must be used to directly acquire Food. And without our big brains and opposable thumbs, they only have so many ways to physically do this.
Animal life is so much simpler because the “algebra” of their lives only has two “variables”: Time and Food.
Humans are the only life form that uses Money to intermediate between Time and Food, giving the “algebra” of human life a third “variable”: Money.
Since our transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, and especially since the Second Agricultural Revolution, the concept of Money has become increasingly fundamental to human life.
We can no longer be hunter-gatherers, yet we long for their cognitive simplicity.
Over the past decade, I have come to believe that modern humans are losing touch with the meaning of these ancient concepts to our species. This is a problem because if we aren’t clear on what they mean, we cannot hope to understand the interactions between them.
But this is precisely where many of life’s secrets are hiding.
Most people treat decisions in the domains of Time, Food, and Money separately, but this is a big mistake. We must deeply understand how these concepts relate to each other if we hope to make life-enhancing decisions across all three domains.
The Algebra of Life framework was created to address this problem by isolating the specific meaning of each “variable”, for the purpose of exploring the implications of their two-way interactions.
To make sense of our everyday lives, I believe the concepts of Time, Food, and Money must be understood together. That is the overarching goal of this publication.
Part I will introduce Time (Chapter 1), Food (Chapter 2), and Money (Chapter 3) as concepts, to isolate their core meanings to our species.
With this foundation complete, Part II will explore the two-way interactions between each dualistic pairing: Time & Food (Chapter 4), Time & Money (Chapter 5), and Food & Money (Chapter 6).
Finally, Part III will apply The Algebra of Life to our modern decision-making context, so that we might improve our lives across the three domains of Time, Food, and Money (Chapter 7).
The 7-Post Introduction: Our Evolutionary Arc
The first 7 posts will introduce The Algebra of Life by briefly tracing our species’ history from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, so that we can better understand both where we came from, and how we got here. They are sequenced as follows:
Post 1: What makes us human and how has that changed? — How our mind-bending evolutionary trajectory made life a game of incomplete information.
Post 2: How should we spend our Time, now? — How early agricultural Food surpluses expanded the frontier of human minds.
Post 3: From imagination & experimentation to import & exportation — How the Second Agricultural Revolution irreversibly brought Food into relation with Money.
Post 4: Why Money belongs alongside Time and Food in The Algebra of Life — Reframing the meaning of Money to humans in our modern world.
Post 5: Scoping the variables of The Algebra of Life — Why these three domains of decision-making are broader than you realize.
Post 6: Corporations: where Time, Food, and Money mean something different — Introducing the ‘middlemen’ between nature and our stomachs.
Post 7: The Algebra to heal our broken understandings — Why the concepts of Time, Food, and Money must be understood together.
Publishing Rhythm
This 7-post introduction is only the beginning. Foundational core posts drop every Wednesday and Saturday until Part 1 is complete (30 total posts), and every Wednesday thereafter, until all 60 have been released. To establish the baseline philosophy, all core posts of The Algebra of Life framework will remain free and open to the public.
Join the Equation
Nobody is going to solve the “algebra” of your life for you — especially not the specialists. Time, Food, and Money are not well-explained in school, so we must take matters into our own hands.
Subscribe now to unlock your freedom by rediscovering these concepts and decoding their interactions. Join us in applying ancient relationships to modern problems.
Looking forward to the series!