I want the innocence of not knowing the price of anything. Instead, all I see now are numbers wherever I look. As if it’s not enough that each of us is tagged with a registration number at birth (as though any of our births actually registered on the world, or would ever register), that in an ageist world the one number we can’t change and can’t shed brands and binds us, that countless women labour under an arbitrary measure, our weight, now that I am all grown up and earning my keep I’ve somehow added another number to the calculus of summary judgement: estimated “individual net worth”.
“High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs)”, I am told, refers to “individuals with more than $1000000 in liquid assets to manage” (so says investopedia.com) But how about the Low Net Worth Individuals (LNWIs), then? What exactly is it about them that makes them worth-less? In terms of what? “Worth” is variously translated as value, price, cost, significance, utility, virtue, appeal, merit, stature, consequence, importance, calibre. I hate it that modern capitalist parlance has purloined the meaning of the word ‘worth’, and I hate myself for buying into it (forgive the pun). As if all the things that set a human being apart and make the angels soar for joy at his deliverance could ever be reduced to the amount of liquid assets at his disposal.
It seems like all we do these days is to try to make ourselves feel better by wishing miserable envy upon the world. We’ve all become frantic bunch of walking numbers, really – hours lived, hours remaining, dollars made, dollars spent, systole and diastole, hour-glass and scythe. Some days it strikes you harder than ever that everything in nature tends towards dissolution and decay. Faulkner puts it better than I can when he describes Man as “a problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire”. This is not the world I want, but this side of heaven, it almost seems like I am foolhardy in my desire for more.
But really, all I want is the freedom of not knowing the price of anything but God’s sacrifice.
“High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs)”, I am told, refers to “individuals with more than $1000000 in liquid assets to manage” (so says investopedia.com) But how about the Low Net Worth Individuals (LNWIs), then? What exactly is it about them that makes them worth-less? In terms of what? “Worth” is variously translated as value, price, cost, significance, utility, virtue, appeal, merit, stature, consequence, importance, calibre. I hate it that modern capitalist parlance has purloined the meaning of the word ‘worth’, and I hate myself for buying into it (forgive the pun). As if all the things that set a human being apart and make the angels soar for joy at his deliverance could ever be reduced to the amount of liquid assets at his disposal.
It seems like all we do these days is to try to make ourselves feel better by wishing miserable envy upon the world. We’ve all become frantic bunch of walking numbers, really – hours lived, hours remaining, dollars made, dollars spent, systole and diastole, hour-glass and scythe. Some days it strikes you harder than ever that everything in nature tends towards dissolution and decay. Faulkner puts it better than I can when he describes Man as “a problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire”. This is not the world I want, but this side of heaven, it almost seems like I am foolhardy in my desire for more.
But really, all I want is the freedom of not knowing the price of anything but God’s sacrifice.
posted by leah | 9:12 PM
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