Self-worth
Thanks to this evening's MRT accident, my mobile phone has learnt some swear words. While I'm kinda ashamed to admit it, my first reaction to the tragedy was more frustration than sympathy. It wasn't helped by the lady in front of me in the taxi queue, whose comment on learning of what transpired was 'Times are good now. Jump also get $500,000'.
I didn't understand what she meant until dinner, when Mum explained to me that the family of the last guy who killed himself jumping onto the tracks got $500,000 in sympathy donations. Suddenly my irritation was replaced by dark fascination at the perversity of a situation where goodwill drives people to kill themselves.
For many people, half a million is a lot of money. It might be worth more than life. If you were dirt poor with no way out of the poverty trap, and you really wanted your loved ones to live in comfort, you might conceivably judge it a better course of action to exchange your existence for a huge amount of money.
Of course, 'huge' is a relative number. It could be expected that different people value their lives differently (that's one way insurance companies stay in business). When I was studying, we were told that the statistical value of a life is a million pounds. That's about $3 million dollars. I'm pretty sure someone out there could be convinced to jump off a building for that amount of money. If money buys happiness (which seems to be the basic tenet of consumerist society), then there would be people for whom $3 million dollars would buy more happiness for their family than if they'd lived out the rest of their lives.
Of course, life doesn't quite work like that. I'm a firm believer in the importance of intangibles, which probably makes me part of a minority (and my family less rich than they otherwise would be). Still, I think there's something in the idea that money can buy a person's life. I'm pretty sure I have a 'reservation price' above which I'd seriously consider suicide (hint: it's pretty high). And judging by recent events, I doubt I'm the only one.
I didn't understand what she meant until dinner, when Mum explained to me that the family of the last guy who killed himself jumping onto the tracks got $500,000 in sympathy donations. Suddenly my irritation was replaced by dark fascination at the perversity of a situation where goodwill drives people to kill themselves.
For many people, half a million is a lot of money. It might be worth more than life. If you were dirt poor with no way out of the poverty trap, and you really wanted your loved ones to live in comfort, you might conceivably judge it a better course of action to exchange your existence for a huge amount of money.
Of course, 'huge' is a relative number. It could be expected that different people value their lives differently (that's one way insurance companies stay in business). When I was studying, we were told that the statistical value of a life is a million pounds. That's about $3 million dollars. I'm pretty sure someone out there could be convinced to jump off a building for that amount of money. If money buys happiness (which seems to be the basic tenet of consumerist society), then there would be people for whom $3 million dollars would buy more happiness for their family than if they'd lived out the rest of their lives.
Of course, life doesn't quite work like that. I'm a firm believer in the importance of intangibles, which probably makes me part of a minority (and my family less rich than they otherwise would be). Still, I think there's something in the idea that money can buy a person's life. I'm pretty sure I have a 'reservation price' above which I'd seriously consider suicide (hint: it's pretty high). And judging by recent events, I doubt I'm the only one.
posted by lit @ 10:01 PM
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