I recently had a talk with a colleague about the cost of doing business. However trite it may be to say, you can be screwed out of your investment. Capitalism has sidestepped this unfortunate truth by finding ways to recover that cost on the next go-round, which usually results in a greater cost to the end user.
The cost of microchips go up when a factory in Japan gets flooded. Gasoline ticks up a few cents a gallon because a refinery blows an o-ring. Ice cream becomes worth its weight in calories because of a listeria outbreak. These are the things that we, as consumers, understand about free market economy. Someone experiences a loss and everyone else who is interested in that product gets stuck with the fallout.
Funny how that tends to be true of emotions as well...
I know. Comparing emotions to a commodity... How bourgeois of me.
Think on that for a minute though, and you may start to see some truth in it. Happiness, sadness, even love, are all degrees of responsiveness subject to market saturation, demand, and costs of doing business. I'm sure I've lost you...
Think about someone who is keen on being in love. They get hurt, perhaps several times. They've lost their investment. To reinvest takes [emotional] capital that they may not have, so they have to borrow in the hopes that the next investment will pay off. If it doesn't, they have an account to settle and have lost yet another investment. Their cost of doing business goes up with each failure.
On the other side of that, because of their cost of doing business, loving someone who has been hurt requires a greater investment in the hopes of seeing a return on the same. Had this been a first try, or the other person had not been badly hurt, the emotional capital is more likely there and takes less commitment from a second party to free up the proverbial purse strings.
These are the costs of doing business.
Then there's the investment that one just keeps pouring capital into. The asset has devalued, no one else is interested in it, except that one faithful little soul that keeps it going with everything they can muster.
On paper, this looks like a terrible investment, but that's because it is. At least at the individual level. But there's something to be said for keeping the market strong. Love is occasionally a positive, purposeful action that we carry out in spite of the dividends it does not pay. And sometimes, it simply comes to pass that no amount of active love will bring it back to life.
But was it worth it? In the me-centric society we've cultivated since the 1980's, most people will stand back and declare it a loss. When measured by what it yielded, they're right. Love though, isn't measured by what we get out of it.
No one watched The Notebook and called James Garner a loser. That's because the capacity and endurance of love is judged by how much of it we're willing to give. The strength and power of love is given substance by the shit we'll endure when we know that there is nothing coming back to us.
In that instance, love is beautiful for what it was. There is nothing that says a thing must endure to be memorable, or never fade to have been beautiful. We all have to accept that we're going to lose the things we love. It may go the way of the Dodo because of personal growth, personal mistakes, or even death. What is inescapable is that an end will come for everything we hold dear.
The question that you're asking yourself, "is the pain of loss worth the opportunity to experience the love", isn't really a question. It's a selfish attempt to categorize love as an enduring object. Love, in my humble view is much more accurately realized as a verb than a noun. Ultimately, loving is something you do, not something you own. And when it ends, hurting is something you will do, too. And then you'll eventually stop hurting.
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