One of the troubling trends in today’s world is the increasing willingness to treat everything as a commodity, as something to be bought and sold. The words “monetized” and “transactional” are widely used to describe this trend. I am old enough to remember a time when the personal computer was an exciting new thing, when the internet was a new invention, and the web was envisioned as free for everyone.
Fast forward 50 years and much of the web has been monetized. For one thing, one-third of all web traffic is porn, and untold millions of dollars trade hands every day for porn as a commodity. The giants of social media such as Facebook and Google are driven by advertising revenue. Long gone are the innocent days of the web as a benign environment for the free exchange of views. Algorithms instantly convert any click or search into an ad that immediately shows up in your newsfeed.
At the root of this commoditization is human desire. Almost anything that human beings desire can be turned into a money-making opportunity for someone—whether it be entertainment, distraction, drugs, sex, or even peace of mind.
Regarding peace of mind, I was one of the early adaptors and leaders of Western Buddhism in the 1970s. In those innocent days, we freely came and went to temples and retreat centers, and the only interest we had was in spiritual transformation. Fast forward 50 years and now there is a whole industry of Buddhist retreats for which people pay a hefty price tag. In the words of one sociologist I heard speak at a Buddhist conference, Buddhism primarily serves “urban elites”—i.e. people with education and money. Among Buddhists today there is a sincere effort to reach out for more diversity and inclusiveness, but the economics of enlightenment as yet another expensive commodity remains a barrier.
All that said, there are still qualities that most people eagerly desire that are immune from being a commodity. The three I want to discuss today are friendship, respect, and humility. These are all qualities that you cannot buy-in at the grocery store or have shipped to you from Amazon. Almost by definition, they are outside the realm of a commodity.
Three Qualities Immune from Being Commoditized
1. Friendship
Friendship is freely given and mutual; that’s part of what makes it friendship. You can’t hand someone $100 and say, “Here. Be my friend.” Friendship is also based on mutual trust. Someone is your friend because he trusts you, and you trust him. The minute money enters the picture the relationship becomes “transactional,” to use an overused word. Some people live their whole lives based purely on transactional relationships: I scratch your back, you scratch my back. Such people are friendless, but they seem not to notice it, or think that being a friend is just another way of being weak.
2. Respect
Friendship includes respect, but respect stands on its own as a quality that cannot be bought. Like friendship, respect is freely given—by others to you, and by you to others. It is no accident that while porn consumes so much of internet traffic, there are no websites (that I know of) offering you respect. Respect is earned, and not in the monetary sense. It is based on admirable behavior over time, and is a quality of mature character. “Character” seems almost quaint these days, an echo from the distant past. But true character is timeless, and most people instinctively sense when a person is of good character.
3. Humility
You can’t “want” to be humble. You can’t aspire to own it like a new car or a pair of Nikes. You can’t take a course in school or watch a Youtube video to teach you how to be humble. Humility is not a thing, it is the absence of a thing, namely pride or arrogance. It can’t be faked, either. We have an expression for that: false humility. We live in an age of ego, or even–in some authors’ estimates–an age of narcissism.
Your worth as a person these days is measured by how many Twitter or Instagram followers you have—or so people imagine. Actually, such a measure has nothing to do with character. In fact, if you could magically search and find people who command little social media attention, who are not well known, who live in obscurity, you are more likely to find people of true humility. They are a hidden treasure, part of the unseen community of people of wisdom who uphold the ancient values in spite of the glossy veneer we have painted over so much of modern life.
Friendship, respect, and humility: these are values that men, in particular, cherish and seek out when they can, because they are aspects of male relationships that are intrinsically valuable and satisfying. Let’s not be distracted by the glossy veneer. A true friend is worth untold thousands of Facebook likes.
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This post is republished on Agents of Change on Medium.
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