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(Over)valuing possession
Hardly anything has an objective value, but even our subjective valuation of something may be clouded by a consideration of questionable relevance.
Last week, I shipped a box containing a large number of personal possessions, never to be seen again. Some of them I had been able to see before I dropped them off to be collected by a courier, others I hadn’t even had the chance to look at. It was a distinctly bittersweet moment.
Getting rid of old tat is something we all occasionally have to do to stop our homes from bursting at the seams. By definition, what we get rid of is the stuff we no longer value enough to keep it. Yet, as we can see at car boot sales or on eBay, one person’s trash is another one’s treasure. There are almost always people who perceive more value in the wall clock with the broken chime, a tin box with the image of the late Belgian King Baudouin or a pile of model train enthusiast magazines from the 1970s than the seller. The value of the items is in the eye of the beholder, different for buyer and for seller.
The eye of the owner
But there is another aspect that influences how we value objects. Items can acquire additional value in our eyes, simply by being owned by us. If we offer an object for…
