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For the past few years, I have reading books that are about society as a whole and how we view things. Like... All About Love by bell hooks, The Agony of Eros and The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han, The Stranger by Camus, The Metamorphosis by Kafka. I read them in between my comfort reads because I want to read for fun, but feel it's important to read to learn to expand my horizons and articulate things better. And one thing that is reccurring is the idea of people as commodities. This is not a new idea, but it is one I have not thought about enough before and makes more things make sense to me. Under the lens of humanity's history, it explains a lot.

When a person in a community is reduced to the idea of being an asset or a hindrance, kindness dissipates. Under the lens of seeing people for their "value" to the market and society, it makes sense that people easily take rhetoric that is dangerous and normalizes it. Commodifying people is how many of history’s tragedies were allowed to happen. Fascist propaganda was allowed to grow rampant, people were allowed to spew hate with no consequence, and swaths of people removed. And the sad thing is... what is value anyway? In a warrior society, value looks like a tall white man with a firm voice that can command a room. When value is reduced to simple archetypes that dominate who controls the narrative, we look other way when the "warriors" commit atrocities. Who defines value? Who balances value? Who controls what we care about?

And most importantly, how do we as individuals allow ourselves to be swayed by societal values? Because to some extent, we’ve all been wired in the past few generations to be transactional too, no? Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on marketability, has turned even love and connection into commodities. Packaged with desirable traits, traded like goods. How many people have we dismissed because they are not the warrior or mother/lover archetype? How many people did we not help or nurture because they could not give me the things from our sad (and cliché) wishlists of attractive traits? How many times do we use people and allow ourselves to be used in turn to be someone's disposable dopamine rush because of an arbitrarily high value we give them? How many times do many of us vote a certain way because "we worked hard and don't want resources to go to THOSE PEOPLE?"

I really want to reject that now. I want to give and love and care with my big ass heart. I want to give freely. I want to give to myself first. I want to feel I allow myself the grace to not be a commodity to any friend, colleague, partner because I deserve dignity too. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to toss the ledger in the trash where it belongs. So that we can finally build a loving community, loving relationships, loving families. To give for the joy of it and letting that joy set us free.

Even the smallest person can change the course of the future
– J.R.R. Tolkien