Concept
Life energy
Life energy is Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez's term for what money actually is: the hours of your finite life you traded to get it. Pricing every purchase in hours rather than currency turns spending from a habit into a decision.
You have a limited number of hours. You sell some of them to an employer or a client, and the money that arrives is those hours in another form. The reframing sounds philosophical until it is applied to a receipt: a jacket is not two thousand lira but eleven hours of your life; a delivery habit is not small change but two working days a month. Once prices are hours, the question Robin and Dominguez ask of every spending line becomes answerable: did I receive fulfilment in proportion to the life energy spent? Nothing is prescribed. Some expensive lines return a great deal of life and should stay; some cheap ones return nothing and are where the cuts come from. The concept depends on knowing your real hourly wage, which is lower than your contract says, and on a month of tracking every expense so that the lines exist to be asked about.
A real-life example
Emre, a graphic designer in Kadıköy, prices his monthly food delivery at 1,400 lira and thinks nothing of it. At his real hourly wage of 98 it becomes fourteen hours, nearly two working days. He does not cancel it; he cuts it to the two evenings a week when it actually buys him something, and finds the rest of the money buys a course he had put off for a year.
How to use it
- 1Compute your real hourly wage once and write it where you will see it.
- 2For a month, convert every purchase over a small threshold into hours before deciding.
- 3At month end, ask each category whether the life it returned matched the life it cost.