If you wrote an inspirational book, would you prefer it to help 1 person or 1,000 people? To be more blasé, If you spent 5 minutes doing something — anything — would you prefer it to count in the grand scheme of things or not? Unless you were deliberately being contrary, I suspect you want what you do to matter.

And that's the crux of "an economy of moves", with time and space as leading currencies — space can be rearranged, but time, for our practical purposes, keeps flowing (like the sands in an hourglass…). All these things change when you make a difference, and your energy is spent to perhaps gain more space, but not time.

You don't necessarily spend time either, altho it makes sense for related analogies — time can be thought of a divisor over which the dividend is the impact you've had. Yes, in reality, we can't quantize so cleanly, but as an evocative thought experiment, it works.

So: given an equal amount of time, say 10 minutes, would you rather spend that helping someone you love or hurting someone you care about? And after you answer that with good intentions, think about how much you've actually done the latter. Some of us are more guilty than others, and we should be.

There's turmoil in the US financial economy right now, as well as various political jabs instead of focusing on issues. It's crazy that even with "700 billion dollars" and other big numbers being floated about, that not enough people are emphasizing an economy of moves. And by emphasis, I mean a "!" which stands for action. Too many are content with their arbitrary befuddlement of words and numbers, and while that's how they want the world to work, that's not how we earn happiness. We earn happiness through an economy of moves*.

* Remember how you felt the last time you spent a few seconds hugging a friend you care, or petting a pet.