Value

A cock, having found a pearl, said that a grain of corn would be of more value to him
Pierre Leroux

How often we forget that those things that we place great value on, another man might find completely useless. One man's treasure is another man's trash. I'm always intrigued by that episode of Antiques Roadshow when people have found things in the garbage that turn out to have an estimated worth of tens of thousands of dollars at retail or at auction. The truth is that we each value different things in different amounts.

This means that the monetary value of some thing is no reflection of it's worth to you. All the cost of something shows is the cost of producing it and society's general agreement on an estimate of it's worth. So what you find most valuable might be pretty cheap. It's not always about buying the most expensive thing. In the end, it is about buying whatever is going to be most useful to you in fulfilling your own individual goals.

No matter how beautiful and how difficult to produce a pearl is, a cock would have no use for it. He just needs something to eat. We need to be less judgmental of other people's taste in things. If a person works in some dirty factory, he has no use for fancy dress shirts, no matter how much better he looks in one. A cheap t-shirt might be much more valuable to him because he can wear it at work. We all have different needs and goals and so it stands to reason that we all need different things in order to fulfill those. Price is not the ultimate indicator of some thing's value to you as an individual.