Wealth & Money Quote by Roy H. Williams

Williams frames mortality in the blunt language of commerce, and that’s the point: you can dodge a sermon, but it’s harder to shrug off a ledger. “Lives, like money, are spent” turns time into a currency with a built-in burn rate. The verb choice matters. You don’t merely “use” a life; you spend it, with all the implications of exchange, opportunity cost, and regret. No refunds, no rollover minutes.

The second sentence is a quiet ambush. “What are you buying with yours?” assumes you are already making purchases, whether you’ve chosen them or not. That’s the subtext: passivity is still a transaction. Comfort, status, distraction, approval, busyness - these are common “products” people acquire by pouring years into habits and jobs they never interrogate. Williams, a businessman and marketing mind, is also needling the consumer worldview from inside it. If your identity is built around acquisition, he asks you to apply the same scrutiny to the one asset you cannot replenish.

There’s an implicit critique of the modern hustle theology here. Productivity culture promises the feeling of being “smart with money,” but it often produces lives spent on maintaining the machine rather than directing it. The line works because it’s both motivational and accusatory: it grants you agency while making it uncomfortable to waste it. It’s a question that turns every “later” into a line item.