Worth and Value

A few months ago, an online post is famous about having her kitchen in almost all white and her appliances from the very expensive brand, SMEG. Among the online comments that I remember was, “How does she manages to keep her kitchen so white?”. I remember because I had the same thought. Turns out, or I believe so, that she spends a lot of her time cleaning before and after cooking, and has special arrangements for cooking. I think she has another outdoor kitchen, maybe. Point is, it is such a chore to keep her kitchen glitzy and ‘grammable, that the question comes to my mind: Is it worth it?

My view is not, but certainly hers might differ. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to keep her house like so. I then thought about my own life, about my daily chores and then I realise that there are things that I do, that people will see as too cumbersome. Even in my home, my view and my wife’s are different in certain aspect. For example she prefers to wipe the stove top every night, whereas I think it should be wiped when it gets ‘dirty’. Her view is that it gets dirty every day when it is used, but I think that is a bit too much troublesome and not worth the effort. But of course since I am the man in the house, I wipe the stove top everyday.

Relatedly, a post on reddit talked about how he/she finds it ridiculous or hard to believe that people spend GBP50 weekly on doing their hair. Someone else commented that that is cheap, and they spend around GBP200 per hairdo. Seems like that these two people have different value on the activity of colouring a person’s hair. I agree on the first comment, but who I am to say how a person should spend their money. Clearly to them, the service is worth the price.

Even within ourselves, we have different values and change our opinion on what we think is worth it. We might had no qualms on spending large amount of money on an activity (like entertainment) years ago, but would not balk if we were to spend half the price. Our values have changed. We have seen different situations where we think is more spending our money (or time) that we don’t see the value (or not as much value) on a subject, as we had before. Our priorities have changed. And this doesn’t take years; sometimes your value changes within days. Take an example when how you spend a lot during pay day, and how you spend during the last days of the month, where your salary is a distance away. Quite different right?

So if a person comes along and say something or do something that you think is not worth it, maybe stop or pause a while before commenting on it. You might have a different opinion. Or at least, you’d stop being harsh.

Thank you for reading.