The Economics of Living
Why Luck and Time Matter More Than Effort
Life is a market. Not everyone gets the same starting capital, and the game is rigged. Still, we’re expected to succeed like the odds don’t matter.
There is no free lunch. It’s one of the most basic principles in economics, and perhaps the most existential. At face value, it means everything has a cost. But when you apply this to life itself, it becomes something deeper. More haunting. Because in the economy of existence, you’re charged for your very presence long before you’re old enough to understand the bill.
The Unequal Start: Inheritance of Circumstance
Classical economics often begins with the idea of rational choice, where individuals make decisions to maximize utility. But how can you make rational choices if you never got to choose the game?
No one consents to birth. You’re born into a geography, a family, a race, a body. That is your initial endowment, the baseline of your “life capital.” For the wealthy, this endowment includes financial resources, elite education, strong social networks, and even access to leisure and love. For the poor, it might include nothing but debt, inherited trauma, and the exhausting necessity of surviving another day.
This asymmetry shapes everything. In economic terms, it’s path dependence—where your starting point heavily influences your future options.
Time: The Ultimate Currency
The film In Time fictionalizes a brutal truth: time is a resource allocated unevenly, and the poor hemorrhage it while the rich hoard it.
This is real. Economists have shown that wealth buys time—shorter commutes, fewer jobs, better healthcare, longer lives. The working class trades hours for wages, often in unsafe or draining conditions. They clock in and out, while the wealthy accrue passive income, investments, and legacy.
In behavioral economics, this is called scarcity mindset. The more time or money you lack, the less bandwidth you have to think long-term. Poverty forces people into short-term decisions that perpetuate their condition. Meanwhile, the privileged optimize and compound.
The Luck Factor: The Hidden Multiplier
Hard work matters, but only within the rules of the game. And life’s game has weighted dice.
You can be smart, driven, even virtuous—and still lose. Because success isn’t a meritocracy; it’s a probabilistic function of effort x access x randomness. Luck, where you’re born, who believes in you, what illness never touches you, can be a bigger multiplier than any effort.
This aligns with stochastic models in economics, where chance and risk are built into outcomes. The stories we tell about “making it” are outliers. Survivorship bias blinds us. Most people working just as hard don’t “make it” because the system is not evenly responsive.
The Market of Life: Is There a Winning Equation?
Let’s model life like a market:
Inputs: time, energy, money, love, access
Constraints: geography, class, race, gender, trauma
Externalities: climate, war, economic policy, generational wealth
Outputs: health, happiness, freedom, meaning
There is no fixed winning equation. Optimization depends on constraints and variables that vary wildly. The same formula won’t work for everyone. And for some, the best possible outcome may still look like struggle.
So is it worth being alive if you’re born on the losing end?
The Awakening: Value Beyond Market Logic
Here’s the twist: life is not just an economy.
It uses economic principles, but it also breaks them. The market doesn’t account for love that comes without a transaction, or joy that erupts in places of scarcity. It doesn’t quantify the meaning you find in a glance, a song, a tree, a moment of peace. These are not productive in the GDP sense. But they are real.
The realization is this:
Even if you are not lucky, even if you were not born into privilege, you are not a failed investment. Your life does not need to “pay off” in capitalist terms to be worthwhile. Systems may be rigged, but your experience within them can still carry meaning, rebellion, and beauty.
There is no free lunch. But there are stolen moments. And sometimes, that is enough to claim your place in the world and make it yours.
“The economy of life begins with a cost no one asked for. We romanticize the climb, but never question the mountain.”
— Vanessa Liu