A Visit to Nothing

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!

(From Antigonish, a poem by the American educator and poet, William Hughes Mearns)

We went to visit something that wasn’t there.

It’s a place known for its absence — The Big Hole, the site of the Kimberley diamond mines in South Africa. Once diamonds were discovered here, tens of thousands of treasure-seekers flooded into this remote place in a remote continent in the late 1800s. The Big Hole has the distinction (if you can call it that) of being the largest man-made hole in the world dug with manual labor — picks and shovels, with dirt removed one bucketful at a time for each 30-foot by 30-foot claim. Over 49.5 million tons of earth were removed, and over 14.5 million carats of diamonds were pulled from the ground. This is the land of Cecil John Rhodes, who consolidated all the claims and founded the De Beers Group.

Diamonds are not rare, but diamonds are valuable. They are valuable because people say they are. Buyers are willing to pay for clarity, cut, colour, and carat size. And mined diamonds are much more expensive than lab grown diamonds, even though the lab diamonds are chemically and structurally identical to mined diamonds. Why is that? Because people believe they are more valuable, despite their being indistinguishable from lab diamonds without specialized analytical equipment.

That got us to thinking:  How do you decide what’s valuable? Do you take other people’s word for it? Is Bitcoin, something with no physical existence valuable? How valuable?

And it’s not just about money – it’s also about time.  How we “spend” our time is a reflection of what we value.  An economist will say something’s value is what someone else is willing to pay for it, either in time or money – it’s the demand part of supply and demand.

But demand is a state of mind. You decide if you’re hungry enough to pay $10 for a bad hamburger. You decide if driving that fancy car will give you so much joy that it’s worth $$$$$$. You decide to spend your time doing X instead of Y, because X somehow has more value to you.

The real question is: how do we decide what’s valuable to us, as individuals, as families, as communities, and as civic society. How do we find the diamonds in our lives, rather than just the holes?