Does anyone else find it strange that we put a price on an hour of someone’s life?

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately and I’d genuinely like to hear other people’s thoughts, especially if you disagree.
The older I get, the stranger money feels to me.
Obviously I understand that we need it. I have bills, I want financial security, and I enjoy being able to travel, eat nice food and live comfortably. I’m definitely not trying to romanticise poverty or pretend money has no practical importance.
But philosophically, I find the whole concept increasingly bizarre.
When most of us go to work, what are we actually selling?
On paper, it’s our labour. But in a more existential sense, aren’t we selling time from our lives?
An employer buys an hour in which you could have been doing literally anything else. Once that hour is gone, you can earn more money, but you can never earn that hour back.
And that makes me wonder:
If an hour of my life and an hour of yours are equally finite, why can one be worth €15 and another €500?
I understand the economic reasons. Scarcity of skills, education, demand, responsibility, profitability, etc.
But I’m questioning whether we sometimes allow an economic calculation to become a moral one.
Does someone earning €200,000 genuinely contribute ten times more to human life than someone earning €20,000?
Is an hour belonging to a CEO inherently more valuable than an hour belonging to a cleaner?
Is creating an investment strategy more valuable than teaching a child to read?
Is generating profit more socially valuable than caring for an elderly person who can no longer care for themselves?
The market can tell us what a particular form of labour is worth to the market.
I’m not convinced it can tell us what that labour, or the person doing it, is actually worth.
That distinction interests me.
Marx wrote about labour becoming a commodity under capitalism, and about alienation: workers becoming separated from what they produce, from the process of producing it and eventually from themselves.
I sometimes wonder whether we’ve also become alienated from time.
Monday is something to survive.
Wednesday means we’re halfway there.
Friday matters because work is ending.
Sunday evening becomes unpleasant because Monday is approaching.
Then suddenly another year has disappeared.
Isn’t it strange that we can spend so much of our limited existence wishing time would move faster?
There’s something almost Dantean about it.
In Inferno, people become trapped in endless repetitions connected to what consumed them during life.
Sometimes modern adulthood feels like its own strange version of that.
We work to earn enough money to create a comfortable life.
But earning enough for that comfortable life often requires sacrificing huge amounts of the life we are supposedly trying to improve.
Then we spend money trying to recover from work.
Convenience because we’re exhausted.
Holidays because we need escape.
Entertainment because we need to switch our brains off.
Eventually we dream about retirement, when our time will supposedly become ours again.
And somehow the person who becomes exceptionally good at this system is considered exceptionally successful.
What exactly have they succeeded at?
I’m not against work either.
I actually think work can be incredibly meaningful.
We teach, build, grow, care, invent, discover, organise, create and solve problems.
William Morris, among other socialist thinkers, argued that work itself could contain dignity, creativity and pleasure.
I think the problem starts when we confuse meaningful contribution with profitable contribution.
A parent can spend years raising a child and receive no wage.
Someone can care for a dying relative without earning anything.
A teacher might say something that completely changes the direction of a student’s life.
A nurse might make the most frightening night of someone’s life slightly easier.
Those things can have enormous human value while producing relatively little financial value.
Meanwhile, something can make enormous amounts of money without necessarily making anyone’s existence kinder, healthier, wiser or more meaningful.
So what exactly are we measuring?
Erich Fromm wrote about the distinction between having and being, and I think about that a lot too.
We’re constantly encouraged to have more.
More money.
More property.
More qualifications.
More achievements.
More proof that our lives are progressing successfully.
Even things that are supposed to exist outside productivity eventually get absorbed into it.
A hobby becomes a side hustle.
Exercise becomes optimisation.
Reading becomes self-improvement.
Creativity becomes content.
Rest becomes valuable because it supposedly makes us more productive afterwards.
Sometimes I wonder:
Can we do anything simply because being alive while doing it feels worthwhile?
For me, that’s where money stops being a useful measurement of success.
Money is obviously real in a practical sense. My electricity company is unlikely to accept a philosophical argument about socially constructed currency.
But I don’t think its value is inherent.
We created money.
We created salaries.
We created markets.
We created systems that assign radically different prices to different people’s time.
Then we were born into those systems and began treating their measurements as though they were laws of nature.
They aren’t.
Money can measure economic demand.
It can measure purchasing power.
It can sometimes measure scarcity or responsibility.
But it can’t measure kindness.
It can’t measure wisdom.
It can’t measure whether somebody felt loved because you existed.
It can’t measure whether your work mattered to another human being.
It doesn’t even reliably measure how hard somebody worked.
So perhaps the question that interests me more than “Who owns the means of production?” is:
Who owns your time?
Because time is the one form of capital every person possesses, although none of us knows how much we have.
You can make more money.
You can’t make more life.
Eventually the billionaire and the person with nothing reach exactly the same balance.
Zero.
And maybe that should change how we think about success.
I don’t think the goal should necessarily be to make your time as expensive as possible.
Maybe it should be to make it as meaningful as possible.
Did you love people?
Did you make things?
Did you help anybody?
Did you learn?
Did you experience your own life rather than constantly preparing for some future version of it?
Did your work mean something to you?
How much of your finite existence did you exchange for things you never actually cared about?
I don’t really have a neat conclusion to this. I’m more interested in hearing how other people think about it.
Do you think salary is a reasonable reflection of the value of somebody’s time, or just the economic value of their labour?
If everyone’s time is equally finite, should we place more value on certain kinds of work than others?
And maybe the biggest question:
If you reached the end of your life with less money than somebody else, but more time spent doing things you genuinely considered meaningful, in what sense were you actually less successful?
Curious to hear other perspectives on this.