Rethinking Value

The words get conflated all the time, price, value, cost, and truth be told there are differences between them that we fail to see at first glance. As a matter of fact many concepts we hold dear derive from the confusion. It's as if our verbal tooling has failed us and thus tricked us into making the wrong assumptions.

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When I think about price, I think about spending, I think about consuming. This is to say that when I've considered acquiring something, whether it's an experience or a physical item, if the first thing to jump into my mind is it's price, then it must mean that the experiential value, that the true worth must not be that great.

Maybe as I've gotten older and I've gotten more comfortable with these abstract thoughts and removed the somewhat fake veil of cost and price, I've come to appreciate things in a whole different way. You could say that even though I'm not ready to be a minimalist per say, I see their lifestyle as something worth admiring. To me the thought of being able to carry everything you own on one suitcase, sounds like a utopian concept for freedom.

You see not everything can be made into a commodity, it's simply not possible. I can't turn a sunset into an asset I can sell, I can't turn a smile into a token, or a laugh, but these experiences have a lot of value, possibly more than an expensive cappuccino at the finest of restaurants. So, with this in mind it's somewhat easy for me to see how wrong I've been for so many years. Believing that having the power to purchase, meant having the power to live right.

This is not to say that I'm living in some detached absolute, or that I'm working towards it, but more that this somewhat reflective state of mind I keep on coming back to, is the attempt to find my balance, my center. Of the thousands of things I've acquired, used, destroyed, and lost, none of them have ever given me as much joy as experiences.

Funnily enough this thinking is very connected and aligned with my experience with cryptocurrencies. I keep on revising my ideas on what it means to be successful in this space, and as much as I would love to have some financial security, that financial security alone could not provide my life with meaning, with true joy.

This may be abstract, but it's very real... and if I'm lucky, you know exactly what I mean...