By Alexandros Sainidis
Values are an element that guide humans their whole lives. It doesn’t matter how the circumstances forming the decisions change – values will guide an individual in a flexible way. Through deep and transformative processes those values can evolve. Even though values are not the same as economic and market values, people also seem to value products and services differently depending on their era, geography and stage in life. Consider the following two extremes:
On the one hand you have a Byzantine merchant tied to the essence of material. Imagine carrying goods from one empire to the other. The logistics are terrible. The horse is not a truck but a living organism. Travel is slow enough to have a larger duration than a season. The family misses the merchant. Bandits may attack him. The goods can easily become spoiled. The whole journey has an effect on the merchant’s perception of value. As the process is slow, the merchant has a lot of time to digest their surroundings and circumstances. The merchant is witnessing the very delicate details of material. The road is vibrating on the saddle of the horse, the windy weather whips his back instead of the horse’s; diseases are depleting stamina. All of this while the merchant witnesses the product’s decay. By the time the merchant arrives, all those circumstances and risks taken have formed the price of the product delivered. Anachronistically, we would call these “market forces” in an oversimplified way.
On the other hand you have a Swedish child born post-Covid. The child grows but never experiences stealing a banknote from the father’s jeans pocket. That’s because there is practically no physical money in Sweden and all payments are done digitally. There is a very apparent problem with that: people don’t take money very seriously when they don’t feel the pain of paying with a 50 euro banknote. It is a way for people to keep money in the banks and consume more for the economy to move. As payments are that easy, the child assumes that production of goods is as easy a process as payment.
Both experiences significantly affect the perception of value, ownership and loss – a slow material merchant and a fast digital, even virtual, child. When the merchant reaches his destination, his whole journey affects the way he will communicate, negotiate and ultimately exchange value for value. While this perspective is very materialistic, we have to consider: does the opposite experience, the one of the child affect, future decision-making? Can the future citizen learn their proper reactions to stakes? This highlights the need for an education that actually links tangible and intangible, though it’s unknown whether education can cover a gap so deep and intense – even education that comes from parents.
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