The Price or Cost of Quality of Life!

Everything around us has a price. Reading the The Price of Everything (Amazon affiliate link) and @bobburg’s blog post A Deeper Look At Price vs. Value I really started thinking on how we value our lives.

How we tend to prioritize things over the most important thing we have.  In The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter a whole chapter is dedicated towards the Price of Life.  He quotes French Novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery and how he wondered why “we always act as if something had an even greater price than life when self evidently Human Life is Priceless.

I think that everything starts from taking away value from our own lives and not knowing how much we are worth. Sometimes it is difficult to know simpler things such as how much we are worth to an employer or to a client on a project. Understanding the price of life as whole from various aspects complicates things even more.

There are main things that take away from the quality of life such as pollution and crime which take away our safety, mental, and physical health.

I think many of us  if we run our own business or work for another person need to really work on demonstrating how valuable our life is.

We lose Focus on the value of Life on mainly material things.

If you run your own business you want new clients, new projects, new service lines, new products, new income sources, and overall for your business to grow.

If you have a job you are thinking of a promotion, bonus, or a salary raise. In all the previous options we are really focusing on material goals, on most ocassions these material goals become a priority over things we should value more.

Using the example @bobburg used in his post A Deeper Look At Price vs. Value “A person will exchange their money for that which they feel is of equal or greater value than the money they are exchanging it for.” I question myself do we always value life at an equal or greater value. Interesting how something that seems so complex can be explained in few words.

Do you know how much you are worth?

Have you like me fallen into the trap of giving greater or equal value to other things over the quality of life?