Time is Money, and other American lies

Rewiring your brain after being born and living 40+ years in America is hard

One of the problems I’ve had of late, no surprise, has been pulling in income. For a while, I was making good money as an English teacher, and if I build up my skills and concentrate on marketing, I can make that same money and more. Russians pay top dollar for native English speakers, in certain circumstances.

But there has been a cancer eating at the back of my mind, and the logic goes something like this:

• In America, I made $40-50 an hour, $90,000-$100,000 per year.

• Here, the maximum I can make, with full fluency in Russian and two decades of experience in Linux, is about 350,000R per month, roughly $40,000 a year.

• I want to find a job locally, so I can wake up with the sun and go to bed with the sun.

• But I also don’t want to waste time. Because I can make more money in the West.

On and on it goes in my head. I’ve been wrestling with this demon for months.

But there’s a false equivalency here that I’ve been missing until recently, and it’s the very famous adage:

Time is money.

Or, to put it in equation form,

Time = Money.

…and I’ve come to realize that that’s not true.

In America, I was making a lot of money, but I was spending a lot of money too. There are certain things designed to suck the maximum amount of money out of Americans:

• Insurance: car, health, life, it’s all a scam

• Taxes: another scam

• Groceries: prices are sky-high, quality is abysmally low compared to any European country

• Rent: a huge scam

By the time you total it all up, plus the money you spend eating out and watching entertainment to numb the pain of existence, there’s nothing left.

A Russian friend shared this post with me this week. It illustrates what I’m saying perfectly:

I make $340,000 per year in San Francisco as a software engineer and it's utterly unlivable.

Let's break it down.

After taxes, my take home is approximately $220,000 or $18,400/mo

Rent for 2 bd/2ba apartment in Pacific Heights: $9,500
Cybertruck lease: $1368
Pack and fold laundry service: $200
Doordash salads: $1680
Dinner and Drinks for Hinge Dates: $2380 (excluding 2-michelin star+)
Skiing: $2650 (average per mo)
New shirt: $20.
Entertainment/Fun Budget: $1802

total: $19,400

Despite working my butt off for 30 hours per week remotely and making $340,000 per year, I am somehow in the position where I'm losing $1,000 per month.

What is wrong with this city?

An IT specialist from San Francisco complained that he had nothing to live on with a salary of $340 thousand a year. After taxes, he has only $220 thousand left.

At the same time, the guy lives "modestly": he spends $9,500 on an apartment, $1,368 on leasing a Tesla Cybertruck, $1,680 on salads from delivery and $4,182 in total for entertainment and dating.

Every month, he remains in the red by $1,000. At the same time, he has to work 30 hours a week remotely.

My friend commented, ‘This new generation is a problem.’

If you look at his expenses, you see a LOT of fluff.

‘Well, I live in a more modest part of the country!’

So did I, once, and the result was the same: the local economy rose up and sucked all the money away.

I should be rich from spending years in America.

But I came here with a few possessions, a paycheck or two, and dreams. And that was it. Pitifully little to show for 45 years of life in America.

It’s possible to get ahead in America, but only if you are awakened to the scams that steal your money.

And I’m not sure most Americans are awake to that. Most immigrants choose to voluntarily fall asleep—that’s the only way you can tolerate American life.

But for me, it all comes back to this false paradox: time=money.

We know that money does not equal happiness.

But if you can earn a good amount of money, a liveable income, while also not wrecking your physical and mental and spiritual health, that is good. It’s good for men to support their families, it’s good for them to work outside of the home. Work is good.

Unfortunately, we have a generation of Gordon Gekkos in charge (if you haven’t seen the movie ‘Wall Street’, see it), and his ‘Greed is good’ motto has permeated American society for so long that it’s practically unconscious now.

We have Washington politicians committed to destroying and raping entire countries for natural resources, as they have been doing for decades, and everybody just automatically punches the button for Republican or Democrat without a second thought.

Thinking is at an all-time low in America. The shots accelerated that—I am firmly convinced there was an ingredient, likely several, that inhibits conscious thought, particularly contrary thought, and makes people more open to brainwashing.

Thinking and praying are largely the domain of the East now.

And, unfortunately, in many places in Russia, that art is lost. There are plenty of people here just going through the motions, just blindly eating, sleeping, making money, mating, and never asking why.

I want to earn money.

I don’t want to have to return to the West to make it. Not physically, not virtually.

I’ve been looking for work for a long time. I want to work in IT, but they’re handing me a shovel and telling me to dig my grave.

We still need money to move forward.

God help us.

Addendum:

I didn’t have much time to write this morning, and I realized I left out an important part.

One of the most common questions I get from Russian readers is, ‘why are you guys (meaning Americans) so obsessed with money? You know that when you move to a new country, you’re going to have to go down a social level or two while you learn the new culture and learn the new language.’

Then that is fine, but in my life, moving to Russia has basically restarted the whole midlife crisis thing that started back in my 30s:

Why am I here?

What will be my impact here?

What will be on my tombstone when I die?

I’m extremely sensitive to wasted time, because I’m conscious that I have very little of it left. And spending hours and hours per day on Headhunter competing for IT jobs that pay less than people at McDonald’s make…that is extremely discouraging.

No matter. I will keep praying. I’ll do what work needs to be done. I’ll look for work everywhere, and keep praying for the right opportunity. My family is counting on me.