How priceless is your life?

Home - Quora Link

Hmm. Interesting question. You didn’t just ask me if my life was priceless. You asked me how priceless you thought my life was to me. But there’s a contradiction there. Pricelessness encapsulates the idea that you can’t attach a value to something.

So I really have no way to give a logical answer to your question. But because we are limitless beings here, I am going to not accept the limitation of logic.

So we are going to detour out of this realm of logic and rigor, and enter into the realm of pop culture. As I sit down to contemplate your question, this song was on my iPhone playlist:

What is Gotye attaching a value to here, and what sort of statement is he trying to make about his relationship? What did he want, what did he not get from her? And how in the world am I going to tie this back to a real answer to your question?

The most important thing in any of our lives is time. So you can define what is most important to us by looking at what we spend our time doing. Gotye himself chose to spend his energy, time, and mental prowess as a musician and an artist, to make this song, a tour de force of explanative muscle about modern relationships. He used every last bit of his soul in creating this masterpiece.

Did you spend the time to analyze it like I did? Nope, because explosive tours-de-force by brilliant musicians are a dime a dozen these days. Which explosive tour-de-force do you want to analyze today? I chose this one because it was playing on my iPhone at the time I wanted to get profound, but believe it or not, this is not the first time I’ve spent hours analyzing this song.

In this song, Gotye is prioritizing connection and compatibility. He went into his relationship expecting a civilized affair where you bare your soul to the other and they bare their soul in return. He’s an artist, he’s used to baring his soul for others to view and give feedback on. It is, after all, part and parcel of the artistic process. But he was completely unprepared for the rawness of his girlfriend’s demands and expectations.

He’s playing chess, she’s fighting a war. Not even blitz chess, he’s playing a gentleman’s game. Baring your soul is, for most people, a grave moment in your life, only to be when you have something absolutely real to gain from it. Such as when you are seriously in love and the stakes are nothing less than the happiness quotient of the rest of your life.

An artist considers baring your soul to be table stakes, something you have to do just to have a chance at an interesting interaction. She’s fighting a war, he’s playing a video game.

She decided that the relationship didn’t work for her, and did what any normal human female living in this day and age would do if she found herself in a relationship that didn’t work for her and she’s just not sure how civilized he’s going to be about a breakup. Completely cut off contact.

Something that’s completely normal for her, that she’s found herself forced to do by other guys she was in a relationship with that were complete fucking brutes, was to him an utterly uncivilized thing to do, literally beyond the pale.

It’s a miscommunication of epic proportions, but totally fucking common. And the genius of this song is that Gotye manages to make art out of it. The relationship that was the genesis of this song happened probably months before the song was fully formed. He went through many iterations of trying to find the interesting aspects of his relationship, and then trying to find an interesting way to communicate those aspects.

So lets pull this back. I’m answering a question to you about how valuable (priceless) I consider my life to be. I spent my time to come up with something I consider to be a brilliant tour-de-force of my own abilities, my own zeitgeist. All for you. Nobody’s going to really read this thing but you, Narinder. I gained a lot out of writing it, but the focus was on you. It could have been focused on something that would actually benefit me monetarily or whatever. But it wasn’t.

I’m never going to get the time back I spent writing this answer to an audience of one, someone I barely know and in all likelihood will never really get to know. So my time is both simultaneously priceless and also completely worthless. Because I can’t think of better things to do with my time than to plow truly excessive amounts of time and energy into something totally meaningless.

I can only hope that this answers your question. It could have answered it so effectively that you’re totally speechless, or it could have made a minor blip in your day. Doesn’t matter to me. That’s how I think about my life.