How many minutes of life is a cup of coffee?

When I lived in Chiang Mai, I loved working from a different café every morning.

Coffee was usually sixty or seventy baht, the cafés were beautiful, the beans taken seriously, and in many places you could comfortably sit for hours.

Back then I often thought coffee in Chiang Mai was really cheap.

Then one day, for no particular reason, it suddenly occurred to me:

what if I earned a Chiang Mai salary too?

A cup of coffee seemed to take on a different way of being priced.

Not 60 baht, nor however much that converts to in yuan.

But: how long would I have to work to buy it?

And after buying it, how many minutes could I earn back?

Later I roughly looked up a few cities I’ve lived in or stayed a while, and converted the price of an ordinary local coffee against average net income.

Assuming 160 working hours a month, a cup of coffee is roughly:

Dubai, 14 minutes.

Kuala Lumpur, 18 minutes.

Chiang Mai, 28 minutes.

Penang, 32 minutes.

Tbilisi, 49 minutes.

Yerevan, 50 minutes.

This is of course not a rigorous piece of economic research.

The average wage isn’t everyone’s wage, and one cup of coffee can’t represent a city’s cost of living.

But I still really like this little conversion.

Because it suddenly shows some very familiar things from another angle.

A coffee in Dubai is twenty-something dirhams, and I always thought that was expensive.

Sixty baht in Chiang Mai, very cheap.

But price it in working time instead of money, and the result flips.

Only then did I realize that when we travel or live abroad for a while, we very naturally say:

rent is cheap here. Taxis are cheap here. Eating out is cheap here. Even the coffee is so cheap here.

But “cheap” has actually never been an adjective that belongs only to price.

It also depends on: how much you earn, and where your money comes from.

Especially for digital nomads.

The income may come from Dubai, Singapore, Europe or the US, while the spending happens in Chiang Mai, Vietnam or Georgia.

So when I thought Chiang Mai’s cost of living was low back then, I of course wasn’t wrong.

It’s just that if I said it again now, I might add a few words:

Chiang Mai was cheap — for me, at the time.

It sounds like just a bit more qualification.

But it seems I also see a bit more.

The same café menu, placed in front of two people, has exactly the same prices.

For one person, it’s a coffee ordered without a second thought.

For another, it may be half an hour of their life.

Thinking about it later, “how much is a cup of coffee” really does seem to have many answers.

It can be 60 baht.

It can also be 22 dirhams.

And it can also be —

a few minutes of yours.