The Value of Others Quotes

“This is why no one thinks, “I’ve determined that a particular good would be greatly instrumental in helping me achieve an important self-relevant goal: not only because I anticipate that the benefits associated with acquiring it will significantly exceed the costs, but because I can also conceive of no better way of achieving the same goal to the same extent with a different good that could be acquired with comparable resources at an equivalent cost-benefit ratio.” Instead, they feel: “I need this,” or “This is the one,” or “Wow! I love that!” The feelings behind these statements accomplish the same goal more elegantly than awareness of the valuation process ever could: they communicate to the individual (and potentially to others) that a particular good is subjectively valuable.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“Traditional marriage understood this, and its most enlightened response to this difficulty was to treat these frustrations and disappointments as an opportunity to self-transcend:

"Your wife no longer has sex with you? Excellent! Use your involuntary celibacy as a chance to examine your own carnal attachment. Your kids leave you no time for yourself? Wonderful. Use your maternal responsibility as a means to overcome your residual selfishness. You're no longer satisfied with your relationship?Phenomenal. Use your dissatisfaction as an opportunity to realize you are entitled to absolutely nothing in this life. And this perspective isn't necessarily wrong. Marriage did demand that people self-transcend - at least as long as they couldn't get out of it. And while it may not have been exactly what people wanted - the argument could be made that it might just have been what people needed in order to mature into fully functional adults.

The issue is that willingly entering into difficulty because it can be used as an opportunity for growth is about as appealing to most people as running a marathon on their day off [...]. Most people will run a marathon (or at least to the point of utter exhaustion) if they are forced to start and prevented from stopping. And among such people will be those able to create a virtue out of necessity and who will helpfully explain to anyone within earshot that running this far is an excellent opportunity to 'grow up.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“women mate and date for gain (because they can). As a result, resources generally flow from the man to the woman in heterosexual relationships. And in every culture that has ever existed on this planet, it is the servant (i.e., the employee) who takes the money. Women’s role as employees in the sexual marketplace is not the vestige of oppressive patriarchal social structures: it is a necessary consequence of their hypergamous tendencies.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“Our culture sings an endless paean to romantic love. We hear it in our music. We see it on our screens. We read it in our books. When people haven’t been in love, they wonder if something is “wrong” with them. When relationships don’t have a “spark,” people complain that “something is missing.” When people “fall out of love,” they believe it’s grounds for divorce.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“People often say that relationships take work. This isn’t technically true. It’s more accurate to say the amount of work a relationship requires is inversely proportional to the goodness of fit. It’s possible to make water flow uphill, but it takes a great deal of effort and energy to do so – effort and energy that could be more productively expended elsewhere. It’s a much better idea to take advantage of the natural tendencies of water so that its organic motion is effortlessly directed toward your goals.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“This is extremely important to understand. Value is only created at the point of transaction. Until a transaction is executed, value remains entirely hypothetical: it becomes actual when the goods change hands. And once it does so, value becomes anchored at that price point. So an athlete who signs a $300 million contract is worth $300 million. If the same person could have signed a $500 million contract, he would have been worth $500 million; if only a $10 million contract, then only $10 million. The fact that someone believes the athlete in question is worth less than he was awarded is just as irrelevant as the fact that someone else might believe he is worth more than what he accepted (including the athlete himself). He was worth exactly what he was paid, and until he was paid, no one (including the athlete himself) knew exactly what he was worth.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“That said, these standards are not entirely culturally relative, either. Certain attributes tend to be associated with beauty archetypes across time and place – such as lower waist-to-hip ratios in women,⁠1 higher shoulder-to-waist ratios in men,⁠2 and higher facial symmetry in both⁠3 – which strongly suggests that our perception of attractiveness is (at least partly) rooted in our biology and maintained through evolutionary pressures of sexual selection.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“Applying the concept of value to human beings – and the relationships they form – can be unsettling and contentious. It’s unsettling because we would prefer not to think that some people are more valuable than others, and it’s contentious because we tend to disagree about what might contribute to those differences in value. However, we can largely avoid both issues by remembering that value is always assessed in relation to a personally relevant goal. For instance, a plumber is neither inherently more nor less valuable than a cardiologist. However, if your toilet backs up, you’ll be calling one and not the other. This decision is not unsettling – it’s common sense. So to understand why individuals enter into relationships with certain people (and not others), it is extremely useful to identify the goal they are attempting to achieve. This is equivalent to asking the question: What problem of living are they attempting to solve? Fortunately, the bi-directional relationship between problem and solution helps us answer this question. That is, because your toilet is clogged, I can predict that you’ll call a plumber (and not a cardiologist) – and because you called a plumber, I can deduce that you had an issue with your plumbing (and not your heart).”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“Traditional marriage understood this, and its most enlightened response to this difficulty was to treat these frustrations and disappointments as an opportunity to self-transcend:

"Your wife no longer has sex with you? Excellent! Use your involuntary celibacy as a chance to examine your own carnal attachment. Your kids leave you no time for yourself? Wonderful. Use your maternal responsibility as a means to overcome your residual selfishness. You're no longer satisfied with your relationship?Phenomenal. Use your dissatisfaction as an opportunity to realize you are entitled to absolutely nothing in this life. And this perspective isn't necessarily wrong. Marriage did demand that people self-transcend - at least as long as they couldn't get out of it. And while it may not have been exactly what people wanted - the argument could be made that it might just have been what people needed in order to mature into fully functional adults.

The issue is that willingly entering into difficulty because it can be used as an opportunity for growth is about as appealing to most people as running a marathon on their day off. [ ..] Most people will run a marathon (or at least the point of utter exhaustion) if they are forced to start and prevented from stopping. And among such people will be those able to create a virtue out of necessity and who will helpfully explain to anyone within earshot that running this far is an excellent opportunity to 'grow up.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others