. . . Even in the twenty-first century, we still can't buy true love, respect, or fulfillment. If we're lacking them, we can't buy sane parents, successful siblings, or sensible children. We can't even buy decent replacements for biological adaptations that go wrong--artificial eyes, brains, hands, or wombs. Our bodily organs are the most value-dense items that we can call our own. They are beyond price, but we take them for granted until we lose them through accident or age. If you were going blind through macular degeneration, how much would you pay for another ten years of sight? If you were suffocating from emphysema, what would you pay for another one hundred clear breaths? If you were infertile and wanted children, how much would you pay for working sperm or eggs of your own--not just DNA from an unknown donor(65)?
Our inherited legacy of adaptations is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of year of product development. They are so reliable, efficient, intricate, self-growing, self-reparing that no technology comes anywhere close to matching them. The human genome is the ancestral vault of riches, the secret Swiss account. It is very important for consumerist capitialism to make us forget this, to take for granted what we owe to life itself. Beyond our true necessities and luxuries--our bilogical adaptations--we get only a little added value from market-traded products.
Ultimately, the fundamental difference in our existence is not between being rich and poor, but being alive and not alive, breathing and not breathing. This is why people focus on breathing during meditation. . . Fools toast each other's wealth, wheras sages toast each other's health(65-66).
~Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior Geoffrey Miller
