Stop asking what things cost. Ask how long you work for them.

Here's a bar-trivia question that will rewire how you think about every price you see for the rest of your life.

In 1919, a dozen eggs cost 61 cents. Today they can hit $8 and beyond. So: when were eggs more expensive?

If you answered “today,” congratulations, you've fallen for the oldest illusion in economics — the same one your grandfather falls for when he tells you a Coke used to cost a nickel. Because in 1919, an unskilled worker earned about 25 cents an hour, which means one egg cost roughly 12 minutes of work. Today, at around $17 an hour, that same egg costs about 2.4 minutes. Measured in the only currency you can never print more of, eggs are 80 percent cheaper than in 1919, even at panic-headline prices.

The nickel Coke is an even better trick. In 1900, a dime bought you a Hershey bar and a bottle of Coca-Cola, and it sounds like paradise until you learn wages were about 14 cents an hour. An ounce of chocolate cost over 21 minutes of work; today it costs about 1.25 minutes. An ounce of Coke went from 3.3 minutes to about 3.6 seconds.

The burger that measures the world

The best tool ever invented for this is, absurdly, a hamburger. The Economist has published the Big Mac Index since 1986 because the sandwich is nearly identical in over 100 countries, which makes it a perfect universal yardstick. But the dollar comparison is the boring half. A Big Mac costs $2.38 in Taiwan and $7.99 in Switzerland, and that tells you almost nothing about who can actually afford lunch.

Now convert to time, and the world snaps into focus.

In Denmark, where hourly earnings average around $57.60, a $5.49 Big Mac costs under six minutes of work. In Pakistan, the burger is nominally cheaper at $3.77, but with earnings around 86 cents an hour, it costs 4.4 hours. For the time a worker in Pakistan spends earning one Big Mac, a Danish worker earns 46 of them.

Read that sentence again. Same burger. Same bun, same two patties, same special sauce. One of them costs six minutes of a human life and the other costs half a working day.

UBS has tracked this for decades across dozens of cities: the global average has hovered around 35 to 37 minutes of work per Big Mac, with Tokyo and big US cities down around 10 to 13 minutes while workers in Nairobi have needed anywhere from 90 minutes to nearly three hours.

A Big Mac can be more expensive in money and cheaper in time, depending entirely on where you stand. Which means every “cheap country” listicle you've ever read was measuring the wrong thing. Cheap for whom? For you, the visitor with the foreign salary. For the person making your burger, that cheap meal might be the most expensive lunch on Earth.

Your great-grandmother's grocery bill would horrify you

Run the time-price lens backwards and the past stops being the affordable golden age everyone's nostalgia insists on. Researchers priced a basket of 42 everyday food items — sirloin, eggs, oranges, bread — in 1919 and again in 2019, in hours of work.

Hours of work needed to buy the same 42-item food basket. Same food, same country, a century apart.

Your great-grandmother worked more than a full week to put on the table what costs you a Friday morning. “The good old days” were, for the ordinary person feeding a family, brutally expensive. We forget this because the receipts from 1919 look adorable, and because nobody's grandmother ever said “a dollar an hour” in the same breath as “bread was a nickel.”

So why don't you feel rich? (Here's where I annoy everyone)

If you've read this far you may be getting irritated, because this cheerful arithmetic seems to collide head-on with your bank account — and with those viral receipts showing groceries needing 79 percent more work-time than in 1997. Both things are true, and anyone who tells you only one of them is selling something.

Here's the honest picture. Even over the recent, painful stretch from 2000 to 2024, US wages rose 123 percent against an 87 percent rise in overall prices, so the average consumption basket got about 19 percent cheaper in time. Food, cars, clothing, furnishings: all up in dollars, all down in hours. The optimists are right about the burger, the eggs, and the TV.

But the same analysis shows a handful of categories where the time price rose even after that 123 percent wage growth — and they happen to be the ones you cannot skip and cannot substitute: the roof, the hospital, the childcare, the degree. Housing, healthcare and childcare have consistently run far above headline inflation.

So the modern deal is genuinely weird: the stuff of life has never cost less of your time, while the foundations of life have rarely cost more. You can furnish an apartment for a day's wages and spend half your income on the right to put the furniture somewhere.

That's the fight worth having, and the time-price lens is what lets you have it honestly. The doomer who says everything is unaffordable is wrong about the eggs. The optimist who says you've never had it better is wrong about the rent. Precision beats vibes, and precision is measured in minutes of your life.

The lens is free. Use it.

Here's what changes once you adopt it. Every price becomes a question with a real answer: how many minutes of me is this? A $6 latte at $30 an hour is 12 minutes — fine, that's a fair trade for joy. A $1,099 phone at the median Swiss wage is about two days of work; the same phone at the median Indian wage is closer to six months. Same object, wildly different bite out of a life. You'll never look at a “global” price tag the same way.

And you'll start noticing how badly calibrated your own price instincts are, how much your brain still runs on the prices of whatever decade you first paid rent in. Mine certainly did.