What makes a flowerpot valuable is the attention and care that looking after it demands. If you owned only two sets of clothes and had constantly to wash, iron, mend and repair them, you would not only see a different kind of value in those clothes, but would also carry in your heart a sense of respect toward them.

Social networks have expanded our number of friends into the hundreds and thousands, yet at the same time they have transformed the meaning of friendship in our minds: low-cost friendships requiring little care, produced in bulk and functioning much like every other disposable thing in this cheap, low-maintenance, high-consumption world, so that we can have more of them.

But has this consumer world, freed from the need for care and maintenance, actually given our lives greater happiness and meaning?

The truth is that the less we find anything valuable or sacred in this world, the emptier and less valuable we become in our own hearts. What we strip of value outside us also empties us within of value and self-respect.

Aydin Areta