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by soylentnewsorg 1713 days ago
you gave people who know you your time, your thoughtfulness, and your acquired and honed skill. those are not cutting boards - they are photographs of a moment.

anywise, the way to solve your issue is to give them a second cutting board - then the first one becomes a non-scarce commodity and both will likely get used.

2 comments

That will absolutely work; I'm exactly like that - if I have one (1) of something I will over-cherish it and never use it. If I have two (or more), I will now comfortably use one knowing I have a spare.

Not logical, but I haven't broken the habit yet :)

How is this not logical?

Abundance turns people into wasteful, inconsiderate assholes. This is true on so many levels, I am struggling to understand what is your point of reference

This reminds me of how farmers in the Middle ages did many things that lowered their expected crop yields but also improved their worst case scenario.

It does make sense if you are trying to minimize risk to use cheap disposable tools when times are good and reserve durable long-lasting tools for when times are bad.

As crude as this comment is, 100%.

As a species, we are obsessed with RARE. We will willfully kill animals, to the point from abundance to rare, and only then, we will then spend millions to "protect" that rarity.

its so backwards, but such is life.

I mean, for the sake of argument, what's the alternative? Protect abundant resources and use rare resources? Use rare and abundant without discrimination? Or don't use anything / huddle in a hole and die?

More seriously - I think we went very fast from my post of "If I have a unique hand-made-with-love gizmo I will cherish it" to "having things makes assholes" and "we love to willfully kill animals for no reason". And that's fine, we all have our priorities and passionate topics and axes to grind, but I'm a bit sad we didn't get to explore that specific interesting tidbit of human psychology before reducing it / switching to one of the top-10 massive issues of the day...

a species is not a thing. it's a concept - a thought. a concept doesn't do anything, because it's thoughts. so a species cannot kill an animal. a species cannot spend millions to protect. because thoughts cannot perform an action, because they're not a thing.

what does happen is a group of people, which is a thing, kills animals to the point of them being rare. then another, opposing group, spends millions to protect those remaining animals.

i'd expect something like this from a reddit post, where I often see, usually on redneck antivax subs i visit for entertainment, things like: reddit is hypocritical. because the redneck is not capable of comprehending that different people, with different opinions and actions both post on the website.

it's so backwards to think that, but such is some people's life.

I don't think it's necessarely backwards. If you spend your life almost hunting to extinction and then protecting a species, you'll always have something to do.
I like this perspective. I think it applies well to many things we collect.

I've been collecting fountain pens for more than a decade now and I've observed that new collectors end up buying their "trophy" pen only to have it remain uninked and kept in a drawer someplace. It's only a few more years later, when another "trophy" is inevitably collected, that both pens see use.

Similar story with watch-collectors - some people buy their grail, then leave it in a safe.

There's a big mismatch between people who have "pristine" watches, and those that have seen life and suffered the inevitable scratches, dents, and damage.

Yeah. I love watches but I decided I'm not going down that road. That's why I wear just a Casio. Though admittedly it's a $1600 titanium Casio with DLC coating and sapphire glass.. but it's still just a quartz watch and in the grand scheme of things not a huge deal if it gets dented or smashed. Wear it every day, everywhere. Really the only thing I regret about it is the integrated bracelet. Can't replace it with a cheap nato strap when the pins fall off and links vanish in snow.