Vladisvok Destino's thoughts: Value of Paper 2

As the name suggests, this is some more thoughts on the original Value of Paper blog post from a while ago, recent events have given me a possible insight into the mindset of your species on this issue and I'd like to share those insights with you.

As some of you know (and now the rest of you will too) my grandmother passed away last week, I won't bore you with details as they are not relevant to the topic at hand, I mention it only to give the necessary background to my thought process here. My mother and her siblings will each be receiving some money in my grandmothers will, some of this money will also be passed down to myself and her other grandchildren. Now the general opinion seems to be that this money should be spent "on" something, not just money that ends up being used for groceries or paying bills, but something that will be kept for a long time and remembered. To give you some ideas, my mother has said she might get a water feature in our garden (nothing overly fancy, just something nice to look at.) She suggested that one of my brothers could get another tattoo (obviously not a "nan" tattoo, but something that he might have got anyway,) one of my other brothers it was suggested he could get a guitar, you get the general idea I'm sure. I leave out what I'm likely to get because at the moment your guess is probably as good as mine, the main area of interest I have is my computer and related activities and this is not an area which immediately lends itself to long-term purchases (computers get upgraded, games get completed, etc.)

Now this gives you possibly a clue as to the angle I'm approaching this from, but to give you a bit more, two of my cousins have recently finished university and it is considered "sad" if the money from my gran was used simply to pay off their tuition fees or whatever debt university students tend to get themselves into these days. While it would then mean that any additional income they earn could be used by them for whatever they want, it seems that simply spending it to clear a debt is not considered "in the spirit" of the situation.

My question then, in relation to the value of money, does the way that the money came to be in your posession have some effect on it's relative value? Is money earned from work more/less valuable than money given as a gift? Money won more/less valuable than money from a will? If this is the case and people consider how the money came to them to be a factor in what the money is worth, why is this the case? I suppose if the money gives me the incentive to buy something that I would like, but that I would not otherwise have been able/willing to buy then perhaps this can be seen as being more valuable than money I already had? But if there is nothing like that, then why should this particular money have any more value to me than money I get from work?



While it does appear that people do value money more highly depending on the source, it does not appear to solve the underlying question of why people are so unwilling to accept money that is given (I suppose if people do value money from a situation like this extremely highly then they would consider it inappropriate for that money to be spent on anyone other than the originally intended recipient.) But it does not explain away the initial reluctance to accept gifts / financial help when the money does not come from such a source, perhaps in time I shall find more pieces to this puzzle and figure out exactly why humanity places the value it does on such things? But I thought I would share with you this little insight anyway.

IRC Quote of the day
Some very interesting ones this week...

Announcing todays bronze trophy.....Vesta for 'Derfag'
Announcing todays silver trophy.....Cora/Altheus/Hans for 'cocktails' - This is a first time entry for both Altheus and Hans
A special gold trophy this week, you'll need to look at this screenshot for some background... todays gold trophy goes to.....Altheus/Cora/Hans/Vlad/Nazrag/CarsonSuggs for 'playing'

Congratulations to todays winners, the updated score table can be found in the downloads section.

Quote of the day
Todays QoTD brought to you by Pisha:
“Terror is not the sight of death, it is the fear of death. What is the fear of death? Terror of the unknown.”

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