What Do We Value?
What do we really value? I use the word “really” here to differentiate what we say we value from our behaviors and choices that reflect what we really value.
In a consumerist economy, money is the measure of all things: time is money, credentials are money, efficiency is money, status is money, health is money and so on. Money is what we really value because it’s the universal Valuable Thing.
Not having enough money to pay our bills ruins us, so having enough money to pay our bills is inescapably valuable. But what we do with our money reflects a much more complicated picture of what we really value.
We value money so we work a lot of hours to make more money, so we’re under time pressure and tired so we spend hundreds of dollars on take-out food each week that eventually ruins our health, which is what we say we value but don’t actually value more than money.
In a consumerist economy, the “market” sets the price of everything, so price is the measure of all value. But price is not actually equivalent to value.
If I spend 10 hours growing $25 of vegetables in my yard, and I could make $25 in an hour of paid work, then the “market” considers this a waste of valuable time because time is money and money is what we really value because it can buy everything.
Actually, money can’t buy everything. It can actually only buy a narrow band of things and experiences in the very wide spectrum of human life. If I chose to work the extra hour and buy tomatoes at the market, the tomatoes are tasteless because they’ve been selected for hardiness and a long shelf life to be attractive after shipping.
The soil they’re grown in is likely a low-nutrient factory-farmed desert, so the tasteless tomato also has low nutritional value. Neither the taste nor the nutrient content is in the “market” price, and so the value of taste and nutrient content doesn’t register, as the “market” lacks the means to measure these qualities.
In this sense, the “market” is itself valueless, as are all the prices it generates.
If I value taste and nutrient content more highly than the tasteless, low-nutrient tomatoes I can buy with money, then I have to grow them myself, because that’s the only way to insure I get what I really value.
There is also a pleasure in the experience of gardening and harvesting food. There is no “market price” on these pleasures, because they’re not for sale. We can buy a “pick your own” experience in some locales, but this is a consumer experience. It isn’t the same.
We use power tools because they’re efficient. I use a power saw in many cases, but I also really value hand tools for a variety of reasons. One is safety. I’ve seen many injuries in construction work and experienced many myself. So the modest inefficiency of using a handsaw yields a very valuable thing, at least to me: I’m not going to chop my finger off with a handsaw.
The other reason I value hand tools is the experience of using them is uniquely pleasing. Nobody saves up money to pay for a consumer experience of the joys of using a handsaw because time is money, and so on.
What we really value is what we see other people valuing, and so we want what they want. Nobody wants a selfie of themselves using a handsaw because it’s not the observer’s experience that’s valuable, it’s the experience of the person using the saw that’s valuable, and that can’t be posted on social media. And since it can’t be posted on social media, it has no value.
Except to the person experiencing the pleasure of using the handsaw.
If I use a human-powered pole saw to trim a tree rather than climb a ladder with a power tool, I’m not going to fall off a ladder. This is more valuable to me than efficiency or money, because money can’t buy back the health you’ve sacrificed making money and being efficient.
Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals, families, enterprises and governments. This is another way of saying there’s no such thing as community.
Yet there is a very big difference between living in a place devoid of any real community and living in a place with some measure of real community. So to say that community / society doesn’t exist doesn’t reflect reality. It’s a nice ideological sound-bite, but it doesn’t reflect actual lived experience.
Many places–perhaps most places–are now devoid of any real community. They’re hollowed out, homogenized, commoditized “markets” dominated by corporate outposts selling something. Those who really value a non-synthetic community can’t buy one in a corporate outpost or online. They have to value it enough to help make and sustain it by contributing to something other than maximizing their own income / private gain.
There is no “market” for community because it’s inefficient and informal. There’s no consultant to hire to bring “market forces” to bear. There are profitable non-profits that tout “community” as part of their marketing pitch, but this is ersatz, phony, fake, an Ultra-Processed Life package designed to get more money.
Many ironies become visible when we ask, “what do we really value?” We no longer have the time to walk anywhere, so we become unhealthy and then need more money to buy medications that don’t actually restore the health we’ve lost. Meanwhile, the daily walk we don’t have time for is the “miracle cure” that can’t be distilled down into a pill.
People seem to really value retiring early, so they focus on piling up a large sum of money so they can stop working and live a life of leisure. But what does one do with leisure? Consume more?
What if what we really value is meaningful work? Can we buy that with our retirement money?
As a techno-market-consumer culture, we’re enamored by a future in which robots grow all our food, teach our children and care for our elderly, a future in which all the humans with no meaningful work are rendered worthless, a message reinforced by every Universal Basic Income (UBI) payment they receive to subsist.
As our lives become increasingly unhealthy, stressed, anxious and stripped of meaning and value, techno-market-consumer culture herds us onto the Ultra-Processed Life consumer conveyor belt with all its ironies:
Work more, buy more products and commoditized “experiences”, eat more convenience foods, become unhealthy and then buy as many “wellness” products and services as we can afford, and if can’t afford enough, then we need to work more to make more money, and that increases our unhealthiness and so we need even more “wellness” products.
This conveyor belt offers many things for sale, but few have any real value, for what is most valuable cannot be bought. It’s not for sale, and the “market” lacks the means to even recognize its value.
What do we really value? This question leads us to examine our behaviors and choices, as these reflect not what we claim to value but what we really value. And if this self-examination leads us to reconsider what we really value, and change our lives accordingly, it is truly valuable.
CHS NOTE: Perhaps something here may change your life in some useful way. Please note that my weekday posts are free and I reserve my weekend Musings Report for subscribers, as writing is my only paid work/job. I am honored by your readership and financial support.