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“I have been thinking a lot lately about how we can become a more value driven society rather than a profit driven society.” – Jeremy Day
And so I’ve been pondering value. What is value? How do our values manifest in our culture?
How do financial, political, personal, social, ideological values differ? How are they similar?
It became clearer and clearer that “the answer” doesn’t lie in our definition or agreed qualities of value. The answer lies in our perception, in our measure of value. We quantitatively measure value – what holds worth or is of benefit – with money.
And there is where we’ve made our mistake.
Anyone who has been in a relationship knows. Sometimes you just want to break something or scream or get some dang alone time.
And while there are loads of people looking for the perfect “get-a-relationship” tips or “spice-up-your-relationship” pointers, the “rock-your-relationship” basics are largely overlooked.
Hence, breaking dishes.
So what, dear god, is the basic relationship necessity? The thing that, if you have it nailed, means better sex? The thing that, if you do it before you get married, means you won’t spend a seeming eternity in marital hell?
You ever see that guy who used to be a high school athlete, but he’s packed on 50 lbs. and a beer gut?
You know…the guy who still thinks he’s an athlete even though he can’t run a block, much less a mile?
That guy is us.
They had piled into the church on a bitterly cold December night. Man after man after man, until all 75 were sheltered inside.
They brought nothing but their open hearts, their willing minds, and their hopeful dreams for the future. They arrived with nothing but themselves because they had nothing but themselves. Yet they left with cookies.
Bags and bags of cookies.
Cookies baked by the women of the church. Cookies bagged by the men of the church. A rare taste of home for the men of the residential drug and alcohol recovery program.
Photo by Brooke Williams
Not every scientist delves into the mysteries of the electron or classifies heretofore unknown species. Anyone who questions, who examines, who extrapolates – is a scientist of sorts.
Malcolm Gladwell is one such person, a social scientist (or as Wikipedia denotes, ‘pop sociologist’). He has written some insanely insightful books, the most recent of which is Outliers: The Story of Success.
When I was in my junior year of university, I – very responsibly, I thought – took a personal finance course. The teacher was a CFO of a fairly large and successful corporation and I figured “Yeah, this guy knows what he’s talking about.”
He proceeded to tell us that we were stupid for paying for our monthly expenses with cash up front.
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