the monetary value of friendship
'friends are worth more than gold when your old'
well it depends who you ask but i am still relatively young, not young adult young, but if i were to drop dead, people would see the numbers below my name and think 'oh what a shame, he was so relatively young'
if age, friends and the current price of gold are interrelated, then the current worth of my friends at best would merely be gold's equal, measured in numbers, notes and the handful of coins gone sticky with dust in the cupholders of my car.
if friends are worth standard australian currency and the only currency i have is loose change, then we can probably work a price out right here. my best friend tim is two dollars. my close friends are each one dollar and my normal friends are all worth fifty cents... but i dont like this fibonnacci logic. i dont like what it infers.
if i was driving an A series train and my best friend was standing on the armadale line and my normal friend was standing on the thornlie line, i would have to decide which line to go down before i got to cannington. if i said, well tim is worth $2 and joe is 50 cents, it would be a no brainer. everyone would understand.
but imagine if the total price on each line was equal. one $2 friend on the midland line, two $1 friends on the ellenbrook line, and four 50 cent friends on the airport line. who would i run over?
pragmatists would say i should save the normies, but if i ran over my best friend or two close friends, i would probably go mad with grief. i would tear my clothes and blind out my eyes and wander the parklands of bayswater being very poetic and outrageous.
on the other hand, if i ran over four people (and keep in mind theyre 50c friends, not 10c friends), friends who i like and who quite like me, i would also feel terrible and everyone would think i was a dick. how simpler it would be if they were all just strangers.
but what if on one side was my $2 friend tim, and on the other was 40 different five cent friends, people i maybe met ten years ago at a colleague's party and never saw again. would i run over forty half-forgotten acquaintances? if i did, i would be in massive trouble, itd be world news.
so i don't think its ethical or productive to value people with divisible numbers. to say one human is one 20th of another is very horrible thinking. if only our currency was prime numbers. if the perth mint started making coins with numbers such as 7, 23 or 61, it would make such train-trip predicaments impossible.
and you may think i am doing the most important people in my life a disservice by only valuing them at $2, but i am only trying to make my case as simple as possible. i know tim is thrifty and would appreciate being $2, but he could be a hundred dollars or a thousand or even one million. it doesnt really matter.
sometimes though, rarely, maybe three or four times in my life, i meet someone who is beyond standard currency. they are worth bitcoin. this is called love.
when i love someone, i imagine it is what normal people must feel when they invest in cryptocurrency. the person becomes all i can think about. i forget the past and become trapped in the turmoil of the present and future. i spend my spare time collating both observable and make-believe data, speculating on whether my future will be a garden of joy or a wasteland of loss. knowing i have the same mental constitution as the guy who wrote 'you are my sunshine', i prefer not to invest.
every bitcoin becomes loose change or the absence of it. i will stick with standard australian currency.
*written july 11 2025