07/24/02

Pinkey is pretty flip on this issue. I'm not convinced he's taking it seriously. It would be nice if everyone really could bring themselves to give away their extra shit. We all get caught up in a perspective where we see ourselves occupying the middle ground -- sure, some people don't have as much stuff as us, but there are all these people who have even more stuff! This kind of relative valuation obscures the fact that even though we might not have the most stuff, we don't really need a good portion of what we do have.

Maybe one of the reasons we hang on to our old stuff so tightly is because we spent money on it at some point. Money represents work we have done and buying something with money is the translation of our labor into material possessions. The guy who is selling the extra shirt he was given seems like kind of a jerk -- if you can turn that object (the shirt) back into money, doesn't that money represent the labor of the person who originally bought the shirt? This is a fallacy -- the new sum of money represents the labor involved in turning the shirt back into money. You aren't losing anything by giving stuff away, even if the person you give it to profits off of the gift as you can only ever be paid for work. The most you lose is the possibility of engaging a particular bit of labor. ...Now, the amount you are reimbursed might be out of whack, but that's kind of a whole 'nother issue, y'know?

Now I'm not sure that I've made any progress on this thought. Oh well -- these kinds of problems are often extremely circular.