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For some reason this idea is blowing my mind rn:
People can be roughly fungible, but relationships aren’t fungible.
‘If I didn’t have you, somebody else would do’ (thanks Tim Minchin!) But once I have you, and spend 10 years building a relationship, someone else will not do.
People can be roughly fungible, but relationships aren’t fungible.
‘If I didn’t have you, somebody else would do’ (thanks Tim Minchin!) But once I have you, and spend 10 years building a relationship, someone else will not do.
This applies to other things we connect with:
Houses are roughly fungible, but once I relate to a place as home it is no longer fungible.
Many jobs/roles are worthwhile before you take one, but once you have one, that’s the one you want to build and keep.
Houses are roughly fungible, but once I relate to a place as home it is no longer fungible.
Many jobs/roles are worthwhile before you take one, but once you have one, that’s the one you want to build and keep.
So markets lowkey infuriate us because they treat these things & our relationships to them as *always* fungible, and yet being in the market for a house is different from dealing with the opportunity cost of not moving somewhere cheaper if you’re financially strapped.
Marriage is one way of socially signalling you’re ‘off the market’ and thus prioritising the quality of the relationship over the (crude) ‘market price’ of the individual.
Maybe ‘jobs for life’ used to be this too. I never lived through that to be able to tell.
Maybe ‘jobs for life’ used to be this too. I never lived through that to be able to tell.
Maybe one function of mourning is to prepare the individual to become a new kind of interrelated being, without the social definition, interaction and trust that comes from whatever relationship they lost.
How could you create a market that not just respected but protected the integrity of relationships between things? Between people and their spaces, between different homes/roles/identities, people with each other?
It does matter what unit is participating in the market. Participating in a market as a ‘corporation’ or ‘household’ does shield the interior relationships from market pressures somewhat.
And of course being unsaleable (I.e. being a child, being permanently sick or in need of caregiving, being the idea of clean water) puts you in the weirdest position of all. You are dependent on others’ market interactions but have no hope of influencing your own participation.
