Intrinsic Value

What is true value then?

I guess true value would be the worth of your life itself. What does your presence mean for the people around you? Are people bettered by you or worsened? What about the space that you inhabit right now? Is it better for you or worse? 

Take that shameless bloody trillionaire for example. So he's worth a lot of money, but what value does his life have, intrinsically? Nearly nothing. Apparently he tried to party with the dirty island folk but even they didn't want him. Simply as a human, he fails miserably.

And speaking of the dirty island folk - what the hell? It was always known that most of our celebs and rich people are Pompeii people, and we knew some of our thinkers aren't thinking right, but this is something else. If so many of them are actually dirty perverts, no wonder this has been under wraps for so long. Our leaders are not just incompetent, but they might actually be evil, and that's just hard to digest. I mean I have seen the normal evil that they're capable of, but this is just… textbook evil. Movie evil. The kind of evil that if it wasn't literally coming from the FBI, we'd be calling it conspiracy theories. Anybody who spoke up about these things would be immediately labeled delusional. Stupid, stupid people we are, to think evil just went away, and now the real problem is your mother's BPD.

As a culture our values have changed so much. Rich friends are assets, poor friends are hopefully avoidable because they just aren't cultured enough. Parents matter for as long as we’re dependent on them, but the minute they’re dependent on us, the relationship dynamic sours terribly. Success is measured by money, not difference made. 

I mean, we can't just stop everything and take sanyas, but maybe we should start measuring our lives differently.

There's so much noise, it's difficult not to get pulled away. Best brands, cheap brands, partying, neon stuff. We think like buyers. We think in terms of consumption. Money is so important - spending it, saving it, being clever about it, not having to be clever about it.

That's the reason home industries are dying out. Because the cheap stuff in the market is so tantalisingly cheap, and the expensive things are so covetable, and really who has the time or patience to really build their own stuff instead of chasing reel capability, especially when both partners are now required to work?

I won't even get into the toll this takes on women because what the hell? Why is it that every time we think we've found the solution for one of our problems just as a society it turns into another trap? 

Maybe there are solutions to this. It'll usually be on the lines of spending more time with family, eating an apple a day (or something that doesn't break the bank), but that's the thing. Everything is complicated. Understanding the need for this is different, making the right decisions is so much harder to do these days. 

But yeah, it would help to think of yourself as a person having intrinsic value instead of chasing fiscal value. Then you can know what it is you really want, and chase a life of peace and build relationships, and maybe build stuff. Maybe then we can go back to real joy, instead of chasing empty pleasure. Maybe instead of numbing to drown out the noise, we can embrace ourselves wholly and allow for some compassion. All of these are words, and in an active life, it's hard to come to terms with this as possibility. 

But maybe understanding the need for it, and finding a way to step back is our first step forward.