Excerpt from “How Different Cultures Understand Time” http://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-understand-time-2014-5

“For an American, time is truly money. In a profit-oriented society, time is a precious, even scarce, commodity. It flows fast, like a mountain river in the spring, and if you want to benefit from its passing, you have to move fast with it. Americans are people of action; they cannot bear to be idle. The past is over, but the present you can seize, parcel and package and make it work for you in the immediate future.

In the U.S. you have to make money, otherwise you are nobody. If you have 40 years of earning capacity and you want to make $4 million, that means $100,000 per annum. If you can achieve this in 250 working days, that comes to $400 a day or $50 an hour. With this orientation Americans can say that their time costs $50 an hour. Americans also talk about wasting, spending, budgeting and saving time.

This seems logical enough, until one begins to apply the idea to other cultures. Has the Portuguese fisherman, who failed to hook a fish in two hours, wasted his time? Has the Sicilian priest, failing to make a convert on Thursday, lost ground? Have the German composer, the French poet, the Spanish painter, devoid of ideas last week, missed opportunities that can be qualified in monetary terms?”

And I’ve always wondered why I feel so confined & pressed by time. Nice to know I’ve been socially engineered to equate my time with money aka the necessity to produce for money.

After reading how other cultures value their time and the correlation (possibly causation?) to their happiness, it all makes sense when comparing our societal values.  I recommend reading (most of) the article to get a better sense of my point.