But we’re not only greedy for money. We’re greedy also for youth. Most of us would do anything to get back the resilient, flexible, less creaky and more hangover-resistant bodies of our teenage years. Why isn't there a Viagra-style product that renews wasted knees? Is it really possible that they put a man on the moon using technology less advanced than a modern nostril hair clipper, but yet we can't cure baldness? Isn't there a valid socio-ethical case to be made for allowing teenagers, who sometimes need cash, to sell the occasional spare organ to pensioners, who sometimes need fresh young tissue?
Most of all though, we're greedy for time. Hands up who wouldn't like some time back? Just think about how many millions of precious seconds we've squandered watching advertisements, queuing for nightclubs, holding on the telephone waiting to complain about non-existent broadband connections to gum-chewing script-reciting call centre agents who couldn't care less anyway because they're just about to jack it in (and really, can you blame them?).
The latest statistics – I know they’re the latest because I just made them up – indicate that the average adult male has seen all of the James Bond movies at least twice. That’s twenty movies, times (say) ninety minutes, times two viewings… or 3600 minutes, or 60 hours, or nearly four days if you allow for eight hours’ sleep each day. When we're older, like possibly next week, we'll really wish we had those days back. Seriously.
Or even right now: take two of those hours at a time and imagine you'd spent them at a practice or training session. You could have reached some grade or other on the piano, gained a belt of some indeterminate hue in karate, heck, you'd nearly have a pilot's licence. Fidel Castro has claimed that his famous iconic beard is simply a by-product of expediency: he reckons he saves three days annually by not shaving. I hope though that he puts those days to good use, and doesn't just get wasted and watch Formula 1 racing, or something.
The eminent US film critic Pauline Kael wrote damningly of the late-80s SF movie Robocop (which was perhaps a little gory for its time), "I want my money back, I want my time back, but most of all I want my innocence back." It's a clever summation, but for me it isn't her punchline about lost innocence that's most memorable. It's the lament for wasted time. When you know neither the day nor the hour, as we don't, it seems a shame to waste even a single second on something you hate, be it shopping for shoes or accidentally answering the door to canvassers.
Ms Kael is wrong about Robocop though. It's a great movie, a classic of its genre. I must have seen it at least eight times.