Daily Musings
We instinctively think that age is the determining factor when it comes to maturity and wisdom, but it’s really experience. Two 40 year old people. Both married with kids. Both work full time. One never went to college. Never left the country. Never left their hometown. Never left the house they grew up in. The other got their bachelors, and then their masters, at two different schools, in two different states. Lived abroad for a few years. Then relocated 2,000 miles away from where they grew up. Both 40 years along in their journey, but with vastly different ideas of what shapes the world.
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I went to target today to buy reusable bags to store my dogs food in. They didn’t have what I wanted, but I found a really cute valentines day card for my fiancé. It had Winnie the Pooh on the front holding a jar of honey, and on the inside it said you make everything sweeter. I scanned the card at self checkout and was stopped in my tracks when I saw the card was $12.99. I called an employee over and asked him to remove it. I said I couldn’t pay $12 for a card. That’s insane. He flipped it over, pointed to the Disney logo and said, that’s why.
That night I was debating going to see a screening at The First Unitarian Society in Denver of the documentary Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk. I wanted to support the movie, but, for various reasons, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to the Unitarian Society that night to watch it. So I checked if the movie was streaming anywhere. Sure enough I could rent it for $5.99 or buy it for $12.99.
For $12.99 I could own an award winning documentary and important piece of investigative journalism, or one Disney Valentines Day card. How we value goods and services, and what we are willing to pay for them, always amazes me. The cost of one Disney Valentines Day card is also the equivalent of 18 pasture raised eggs. The cost of one Disney Valentines Day card could fill 2.5 bags of food at Food For Thought in Denver, which is 5 - 6 pounds of food for a food insecure family to have over the weekend.
Recently my brother told me that Jake Paul made $93 million dollars for his last fight, while Alex Harold made $500,000 to free climb the 11th tallest building in the world, and the tallest building in Taiwan. I think what we’re willing to pay for and how much we’re willing to pay is one of the greatest indications of where we are heading as a society.