I had a conversation with a friend in Houston who was aghast after visiting the filling station and paying $3.01 per gallon for gasoline, I chuckled. While an almost inconceivable price in Texas, here in California $3.00 gasoline is a distant memory that if even so much as dreamt about is likely to inspire a wet dream or two. In fact, our current $5.09 is an actual boner killer for me when I fill up my fahrvergnügen sedan. The person who had used the pump before me on my last visit (sounds so dirty, doesn’t it?) drove off in his lifted F-250 behemoth truck after filling it with more than $150 worth of gasoline. Now that’s gotta suck.
Suck as it may, being raised in a capitalist society, it has been especially engrained in my psyche that scarcity of an item increases its perceived value. This is a fundamental concept of modern economics so deal with it. Prices rise and fall depending on what is currently popular or needed and how easy it is to get your hands on. Blood diamonds, gold, cocaine, palladium, heroin, semiconductors, good lovin', crude oil, and as we learned in the pandemic, even things like toilet paper and bleach can fall in short supply, increase in perceived value, and end up costing more than we are comfortable paying. Sure there’s manipulation here and there but we are led to believe it is not only a good way of thinking and a good system, it is actually THE BEST in the whole world and others should envy such a system.
While this system may make sense when it comes to tangible goods, what about the intangible? Should the same capitalist principle of when supply is low and demand is high the cost goes up also apply to intellectual and emotional things as well? How about love? Love is all around us and, arguably, in plentiful supply but what about “that one true love,” is there such a thing and if so does this type of love have more value? Let’s assume it does, what then can give that one true love even more value if we are to assume that scarcity increases perceived value? Emotional and physical unavailability? Though this does explain the very existence of the Lifetime TV Network, 80s pop music, and country music in general, it will likely be as unfulfilling as dating a department store display mannequin (which actually did work out for Andrew McCarthy - or at least a character played by him in a 1980s movie but I digress). Look at our society’s love affair with its one true love, crude oil, the centuries old darling in dwindling supply and cause of countless conflicts…I mean, how’s that working out? Why do people keep making stuff that is dependent on things which are in short supply? Why do we innovate and improve products by using even scarcer things? It’s time to both lower our standards of love and start thinking about using things which are plentiful when we invent stuff…and by plentiful things I don’t mean getting all kooky with atoms, I mean obvious things like powering vehicles with human and animal waste. Poop mobiles. The collection systems are already in place, no deep drilling needed. Any accidental discharge or release of the biofuel wouldn’t be a months long catastrophic disaster like an oil spill, it would just be a shitty couple of days at the beach.
Is there a moral to this story?
Yes, there is. There are actually three. Think before you innovate. Lower standards allow more opportunities for happiness. Get a pet rock to be your rock.