Made with the harsh but necessary truth today.

You might not like hearing it but it will set you free from ideas that are causing you pain and suffering and distress, and that is my mission.

Perhaps this makes me the X-est of Gen X’ers, but I truly believe that this is the sort of wisdom I should be transmitting to young people.

They won’t get it from their Millennial parents, that’s for sure.

Anyhow, here it is :

Some more thoughts on the subject :

1. When you think of it, changing the “price” of something from nothing to anything is an increase of infinity percent. That’s why people react to it with such outrage and indignance. It’s like suddenly being charged for air. Any positive number is infinitely larger than zero, so percentage wise, it’s one heck of a price hike.
2. The psychology of “free” things is a lot more complicated than you’d think. Get people accustomed to getting something for free, and not only will get super pissed off if you start charging for it, they will have come to think that they are entitled to get said thing for free forever. That somebody owes them this thing that they did not pay for or do anything to earn. That’s what happens when an item or service is given the market value of zero. People don’t think it is worth any time or effort or money to acquire, and that of course they deserve the thing because surely they have sufficient status or worth for something of zero value.
3. Imagine an office where, every morning, when the workers enter the break room, there’s a big basket of various muffins there. And this goes on for years. Then, one day, there’s a sign on the basket saying, “Muffins, 25 cents” and a can with a coin slot to use to pay. And people are livid. How dare someone try to make a profit off their FREE muffins? What’s next, charging for tap water? Again, the social market value of the muffins has been set at zero. It doesn’t matter than anyone can afford a quarter for a muffin. It’s still an infinite rise in price.
4. My sister Anne once tried to supplement her income by making jewelry out of wire and beads and selling it at craft fairs. And they were not selling at all, and my sister could not figure out why. Then one of the ladies who was a long time craft fair veteran told Anne what the problem was : she was charging too little. People, by default, assume things are worth what they are being charged for them. My sister had, naively, used the honest businesswoman formula to arrive at a price – her costs, her labour, plus a fair profit. And people assumed that her cheap jewelry was, well, cheap jewelry, and therefore below their status. When she starting charging ten times more, she sold everything she’d made. Sadly, this was too harsh a lesson for my idealistic sister so she didn’t do it again.
5. You might think. “Those silly people not buying her stuff when it was cheap!” but I ask you : if you saw a shiny new car with a sign on it that said, “For sale, $50”, your first thought would not be, “wow, what a bargain!”, it would be “What’s wrong with it?”. You, too, would assume it’s worth what is being charged.

For me, this kind of thing is obvious. And while I also would feel weird charging people really high prices for stuff I know ain’t worth it, I would do it anyway because I am greedy and want the damn money.

Perhaps I will do a little talk on the difference between actual value and perceived value and its role in capitalism.

More after the break.

---

Passing it along

I feel like doing more vids along the lines of the one I did today.

I’m quite happy with today’s vid. I know it won’t necessarily be my most popular vid but I feel like I got my points across fairly clearly and without too much repeating myself.

Plus, I didn’t repeat myself.

I suppose I am entering the didactic phase of life which is when old people get the urge to share what they have learned with the young and thus give the young people some of the benefit of your wisdom and experience.

And that’s fine as long as you know that they probably won’t listen.

Slowing down to listen to old people you don’t relate to at all give you advice that does not seem remotely relevant to life as it is right now for people of your generation is not something that is going to appeal to many young people.

Reminds me that I should be trying to do hyper-condensed versions of my vids so that they can g out into the world as YouTube Shorts and/or TikTok vids and/or Instagram Reels and maybe stand a chance of catching on.

Anyhow, even I, as a young person who totally believed that I could learn a lot from old people and really wanted to benefit from their wisdom, found it hard to listen in practice.

I didn’t have the patience for the slow and sometimes painfully indirect way old people communicated. Raised by television, I was the classic short attention span Gen X kid.

Now it’s us dealing with the iPad generation. What goes around comes around, eh?

So we try to pass our wisdom along in hopes that they won’t have to make the same mistakes we made, but realistically, the best that we can hope for is to give them some useful context for the mistakes after they make them.

Oh, so THAT’s what that old guy meant.

Still, progress happens. In many ways the new generations do learn from our mistakes in the aggregate if not in the specific. The things we say might not live on but the changes we make to the system and society do, and so the kids of today benefit from our wisdom whether they like it or not.

And that’s good enough for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.