Store of Value
Of the bottomless pit and treasures that deepen when split
The universe. It is full of creatures, at least the part we are most familiar with. Creatures, they are endlessly interesting. Among the most interesting questions you can ask about any creature is this: where do they store what is valuable?
At the moment, there is a bee that lives in my guitar. I’ve never seen it, but I know it is there because it buzzes sometimes when I play, and it hums along most clearly when the capo is on the 5th fret. Rustbeard, what is valuable to bees?
Arrr, bees be treasurein’ nectar for makin’ honey, pollen for feedin’ their young, and a safe, dry hive for their queen. Flowers be their gold mines, matey!
Wisely offered, matey. In bee culture, there is nothing more widely treasured than honey. And honey is the thing they organize almost all bee activities around. Along those lines, what is valuable to human creatures, and where do they store it?
A fine question, Cap’n. To humanfolk, value lies in gold, coin, power, love, knowledge, and stories. They hoard ‘em in vaults, banks, data stores, books, hearts, and sometimes, in silence. A scattered treasure chest, aye, dependin’ on the soul.
Here I was trying to arrive somewhere profound, and I find you are already there. What do they store in silence?
Secrets, Cap’n. Regret, truth, longing, pain... and sometimes love unspoken. Silence be the deepest vault of ‘em all—unguarded, yet near impossible to breach.
I’ll be thinking on that for some time. It deserves a divider, at the very least.
My trusty bot offered a list of things that hold value to human creatures, and it rings true: gold, coin, power, love, knowledge, and stories. Following from own my experience with other human creatures, I was expecting to find financial wealth somewhere in that list, and it happens to be right at the front and listed twice.
Why is wealth so important to us? People much more learned than myself have endlessly tackled that question, and I have no reason to think I can out-tackle them. Instead, I’d like to tackle a related set of questions. Also, I’ve been writing code all morning and I’m finding it hard to switch gears, so I’ll ask them in a particular format.
Here we have an enumeration of human values: gold, coin, power, love, knowledge, and stories.
First, let’s ask the question we started with, to prime the neurons and to serve as a handy reference. For each value (v), where do we store them? As we read through the answers provided by Rustbeard, let’s think of our own lives. Do we keep this kind of storage (s), and how much value do we have stored there? And let’s exclude silence as a possible answer because I’m running out of dividers.
Gold – Vaults, banks, beneath floorboards
Coin – Wallets, apps, offshore accounts
Power – Thrones, offices, influence networks
Love – Letters, gestures, hearts
Knowledge – Books, brains, servers
Stories – Pages, screens, memory
Indeed, for each value, I keep at least one kind of storage. As for which storage holds the most of what is truly valuable to me, that deserves another article.
Now, for each value (v), what is the best way to find it? Again, let’s think of our own lives, and how much energy (e) we spend in that pursuit.
Gold – Chase scarcity, mine the earth
Coin – Offer service, master craft
Power – Build alliances, seize moments
Love – Be seen, be known, be kind
Knowledge – Seek teachers, make mistakes
Stories – Live true, share often
Be seen, be known, be kind. I understand the limits of AI but it can still make my breath catch sometimes.
If I ever publish my blog on a platform that I control I will go back and edit this article with checkboxes next to each pursuit that we can use to keep track. For now, the best that I can offer is imaginary checkboxes to click, not a very satisfying user experience. Or better yet, we can keep track on a piece of paper. Perhaps we can weight the values by how much energy we spend, being ridiculously honest with ourselves.
Finally, for each value (v), let’s imagine a person (p) who dedicated their life to find the most that it is possible to find, spending all the energy (e) that it might take. They do not neglect the other values and live a balanced life, but they hold (v) above all others. What kind of life do you suppose they might live, what are the rewards and costs? Let us think about our own lives, and let us assume we keep living as we have generally lived up until now. Which person (p) are we most like? Which person do we want to be?
Take your sum of energy (e) spent finding value in life. Where is the sum highest, in the first three items in the list or the last three items? Given the personal nature of the question, Rustbeard can take a break, he’s counting sharks anyway.
Speaking from the heart, this was a humbling computation.
Let’s think about another aspect of value. For each value (v), to what degree can it be shared, must it be shared?
Gold – Can be shared, but often hoarded
Coin – Must be shared to hold meaning
Power – Can’t be shared without risk, yet grows when wisely done
Love – Must be shared, or it withers
Knowledge – Grows by sharing, dies in silence
Stories – Exist to be shared—else they be ghosts
Some treasures deepen when split, others vanish. Choose yer sharing wisely, Cap’n.
As per usual, a set of pithy responses from our algorithmic oracle. Some patterns emerge, here is how I parse it for my own life. Some kinds of value can be hoarded, others must be shared. When sharing, it is best to share wisely, sharing brings risk. And yet there is one or more value in the list that stands out to me as bringing the most potency when shared, and as easy to share when we hold the courage. We might hand it out like endless baskets of fish and bread, and there is always at least the same amount left for each person waiting. Like those baskets of fish and bread, we count more after we are done sharing than when we first started.
Speaking of stories and ghosts, there is one from the Bible that has haunted my thoughts off and on through my life. Rustbeard, what was that story about Jesus and the wealthy man who wanted to go to heaven?
Aye, Cap’n, that tale sails from the Gospel waters—Matthew, Mark, and Luke all chart it.
A rich young man comes to Jesus, askin’ how to earn eternal life. He claims to follow the commandments, so Jesus says:
"One thing ye lack—sell all ye have, give to the poor, and follow me."
The man goes away sorrowful, for he had great riches. And Jesus turns to His crew and says:
"It be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom o' God."
A sharp wind blowin’ through that one, Cap’n. Wealth, it seems, can anchor a soul to the wrong shores.
I like this version of scripture where Jesus spoke like a pirate. Maybe Heaven really exists on some plane of reality, I can’t be sure. In any case, the destiny of humanity remains an uncharted story, and it is possible that some day we might compare the typical human experience at that time to the typical human experience now, and to the people living right now it may seem as wonderful as heaven. And if that kind of heaven is in our future, I believe it has the same path.
To the wealthy young man, Jesus seems to be speaking literally, and it made a certain amount of sense given his miraculous resourcefulness and the campworthiness of the Mediterranean environment. To the rest of us, we probably should not willingly become someone else’s problem to shelter and feed. There is something deeper here that we need to take home. Such is the draw of wealth that given a choice between heaven and wealth, it is in our nature to choose wealth. Perhaps this is the only reason that heaven is still waiting.
There are some people who believe that our country is nearing the end of its story arc. I don’t know if that is true, but if it is true, I suspect it is because of our obsession with wealth. If nothing else, we excel at finding innovative ways to squeeze more wealth out of people, even at the expense of everything else that is valuable to us, and no exit ramp in sight. You can only squeeze anything so much.
There is a unique aspect to financial wealth among the other stores of value (v): it is difficult to arrive at a point where we feel like we have enough. America is blessed* in billionaires. They have just about all the money in the world, how many of them act like they have enough? Perhaps to appeal more to the American spirit, parts of the political left have changed gears and they are invoking the concept of abundance. Although there was never anything wrong with enough, I can understand the appeal of abundance, particularly when we think about what kinds of value have the most potential for it.
Sell all ye have, give to the poor, and follow me. It is hard to know, but the typical American seems the least likely out of a sample of humanity across cultures and epochs to follow that spirit. In some respects, we are the national version of the rich young man in the story. But I tend to see us in a hopeful way. If we fail, we fail having everything that we thought we needed. Perhaps we needed something else. Perhaps from this chapter, humanity charts a better course.
For the love of honey, may our course be true. 🐝