To buy, to sell, or to hold

Grandma needs a doctor, nurse, physiotherapist, and an occupational therapist. Grandma takes homemade cupcakes around the corner to Wendy every week because she always swings by aisle nine to grab grandma’s preferred pasta from the top shelf. Every Thursday, Grandma places her bins by the road, as the guy in the big green truck is never late on Friday mornings. Grandma loves seeing Wendy and the guy in the green truck because they remind her that important jobs are still being done. 

I am a portfolio manager. The pandemic has changed everything. We have moved down to the beach house. These days I spend my time looking at the markets, hoping to buy undervalued and sell overvalued assets while holding my appropriately valued assets. 

What if the invisible hand has a tremor and the equilibrium reached is incorrect? I have started to lose faith in the market during the pandemic. The important things in life are not, cannot, and should not be valued strictly by forces of supply and demand. I am a portfolio manager, my neighbour is a banker and my golfing buddies are traders. I hope we make life slightly better but we do not keep individuals alive, in that sense we are not essential. The market can truly determine our remuneration. Everyone needs Wendy and the guy in the green truck. I do, you do and grandma does. The market cannot truly determine their remuneration. A good or service that can be accurately priced by the invisible hand is not truly valuable. If a good or service was truly valuable the calloused hand of the government would intervene and likely place some price control on it to make sure it got to grandma. 

I make a lot of money and thus I am not valuable.  

Reflection 

One of my takeaways from the pandemic is the flawed system we as a society use to determine value. Like many, I watched as individuals classified as essential workers went to their, with some exceptions, low-paid and poorly regarded jobs while the masters of the universe types retreated to one of their many homes and watched as the value of their stock portfolios steadily rose. Initially, I was appalled by this unfairness but then I realised the underlying issue may be that the system used to determine remuneration and value is fundamentally different between the two camps of work. Society tends to view highly paid jobs as more valuable. However, excessively lucrative jobs cannot be truly valuable as if they were and we existed in a fair society, efforts would be made to control their price and thus the amount one can make from providing that good or service would decrease.

As a future health professional, I aim to treat every one of my patients with dignity, respect, and compassion no matter how society values them. I hope to remember that I am valuable; not because of my income, title, or knowledge but because I am human. As I progress through my career, I hope my sense of value is not derived from the competitions I win or destroyed by those I lose. 

I am, you are, we are human, never to be bought or sold but held in perpetuity because we are valuable. 

Themes: value, economics and shopping. 

Your turn - Submit a 600 word piece of fiction below based on one of these three themes and a selection will be placed on the blog. Happy writing .

** This piece was submitted for a competition and the structure involved a writing component and a reflective component. As such it does not necessarily represent the style of writing that all pieces will follow