Things and Money

We've been keeping a ledger. I'm curious to know what the relationship is between things and value. Some highlights:
Fresh mango (sliced, in a cup): 20 pesos
Three street-vendor tacos (fried, with hot verde sauce): 30 pesos
Dairy Queen cone: 25 pesos
Warm breakfast for two: (mollete, smoothie, rancheros bagel): 100 pesos


And while a popular adage insists that you can achieve priceless affects by buying just the right combination of things, I always wonder about the relationship between that priceless affect and the component things at its foundation--whether they involve financial cost or not.


If you get the same affect (and I mean "affect" like a[as in apple]-ffect, a synonym to feeling) from a three dollar taco lunch as a lunch much more expensive then why would you not spend less? If you generate a positive affect reading a blog, then why go through more effort doing something else to achieve the same feeling?


I'm generally of the opinion that the three-dollar taco is the way to go.

Linking spending to the priceless moments in our life encourages a false outlook on affects in which one must be willing to pay the price, so to speak, for pricelessness (even while certain advertisement seeks to insinuate something less vulgar), but it's the worse kept secret that value as defined by the market is not an effective model for how we achieve positive affects. These positive affects come spontaneously, *usually* more often when we're living our lives according to a Higher Plan (please note that the prior statement comes with reservation), but nothing about this process can really be quantified. Living right, whatever that means, makes the biggest impact, and I really do believe in a God that hasn't left us in the lurch in this regard, But these priceless affects just happen when they do. The best way to prevent their often manna-like appearance on the doorstep is to consider their attainment as something you can control by leveraging intermittent bursts of energy towards the feeling or trying to buy it like one would a ticket to Disneyland.


Of course it seems rather disingenuous for someone who claims to be cheap to decry the relationship between spending and positive feelings while vacationing in Mexico (I mean, even if I did barter down my pension costs in advance, schedule the trip around cheap plane tickets, buy three dollar tacos, etc,), and I would probably generate a fairly ugly affect in my audience right now if I tried to wax all Ted Kaczynski or Tyler Durden about the relationship between money and happiness while I ate a ripe mango on the beach. So let me just say, as someone who is at least ostensibly kind of cheap and vacationing in Mexico, that the mango I ate this morning in the sun, with my feet in the bath-water ocean, with that smell-of-salt breeze--that seemingly first-world, middle-class privilege--was pretty great.


The affect wasn't earned, though,

and for everything I spent, I didn't buy it either.