Net Value

I know a guy who cuts people up for a living. Of course, he does sew them back together again when he’s done. He’s one of the best and they pay him handsomely for it, because when he’s through people can walk again, or run or just shuffle around the house but the common thread here is that their lives are substantially better after they come out from under his knife. There’s another guy I know that is into building systems, specifically those having to do with water. We just blithely breeze into shops and offices and homes assuming that they have running water, useful for drinking and washing our hands and flushing away our rancorous waste to destinations both unseemly and unknown, we care not where so long as it is not near us. This guy knows where that water comes from, how it gets to us, and where it goes when we are through with it. He knows because he designed it all. He is also compensated, not with quite so princely a sum as a surgeon, but well enough.

We value things like health and clean water, and you can tell by the way we pay the people who give them to us. In fact, you can learn a lot about people by the way they spend their money. Americans like the ability to go anywhere we want to whenever we feel like it, as evidenced by the large market for motor vehicles and the oil that fuels them. We like to push our physical limits where sleep is concerned, so there’s money to be spent on sugar and caffeine. We like to be entertained, so we pay the cable company, and we prize our relationships, so we trade our hard earned clams for internet connections, data plans, and the multifarious devices with which we navigate the web and stay in touch. How do we come up with all of this money to spend? By giving other people things that they want, of course. It only follows that if you have something they really want, they will give you more money to spend on things that you really want. Looking at it this way, it’s easy to quantify your own personal worth using dollars.

Calculating your net worth is not as simple as figuring how much you make, though. You also have to consider how much you spend, and how much you save. Take me, for instance. I bring in a governmental check through the GI Bill, but it’s frankly not enough to offset the tuition that I incur. I also do the cooking and grocery shopping, making sure we stay under budget with our food expenses, and let’s not forget child care. I am worth more for this house for the money I save as a child care provider than I could make at a job with my current credentials. However, I also have this nasty book habit that is usually taken care of at the library but sometimes… sometimes the library doesn’t stock what I need. What, then, is my net worth?

Then there’s the question of net value, which is not the same as net worth by a long shot. There are things out there that elude quantification via raw currency, things that we all have, things we can choose to trade or give away in hopes for a different kind of wealth. Time is one. Monarch, middle class or miscreant, we all have the same amount. What is part of the value of a Jimmy Johns sandwich? Is it that it tastes so much better, or is it that it arrives that much faster? Would anyone put up with a dialup connection now, in 2013? I hope to sell a book some day, but I just recently recognized that books are more of an investment than the mere dollar amount because of the time you must spend reading one. Even the fastest readers cannot consume the book faster than the two and a half hours it takes to watch the movie version. Sure, it’s not the full story, but does the full story justify the time? The movie is almost as good, and it is so much shorter, so much more efficient in communicating the gist of the story. Therefore, when I write anything, this blog post included, I have to try extra hard to make sure that you come away believing that what you just read was worth the cost, be it time or money, that I exacted from you. This is why it is so hard to get people who are not friends or family to read your work, and so difficult to get unbiased opinions from those same friends and family. When people you know decide to read your work they are not simply investing time into the piece, they are also investing their time in you, in the relationship, and when they critique it they are taking that relationship into account. Because of the relationship factor I only half believe my friends when they tell me how great my writing is; I am terrified that what they are really saying is “I think you are a nice person,” which is gratifying to me as a person, but not helpful to me as a writer. Nice people don’t sell books. Nice people don’t make people think, or light fires in their hearts; good writers do.

That being said, lavish compliments (deserved or not) inform me that I am valued. Time spent over lunch, a warm slap on the back, a brief exchange of embarrassingly terrible puns, all tell me that I am worth something to someone, and I prize these moments above any amount of paper bills. Frighteningly, this intangible relationship value can and often does work in reverse. Money is always involved, but does it measure the true cost of divorce? A life insurance claim can cover the costs of a funeral, but does it salve the loss of a son? Our relationships can build and destroy wealth faster than a casino on the Vegas Strip.

It is with much relief and just a little wistfulness that I admit; my worth as a writer is and always will be only a small part of my net value.