You Get What You Pay For
When someone needs their car fixed and they have a friend who is a mechanic they don't expect their friend to fix their car for free. Their friend may offer them a discount or even go so far as to offer free service but fixing cars is valuable. They wouldn't be simply expected to do it for free. That isn't the case with all valuable services. When someone is sad and needs their spirits lifted they call whichever friend they have who's best at making people happy. That person might be just as good at lifting spirits as the mechanic is at fixing cars but they aren't going to get paid. They are going to take care of their friend for free. That's what society has taught us should be expected. Pay people who take care of machines. Don't pay people who take care of people. What kind of world has that way of thinking created?
It has created a world where the people who care for our children are paid less than the people who care for our toilets. We push the resources of the world towards technology and away from people. We have become unbalanced. Smartphones are upgraded every year while the homes in which the elderly are cared for often haven't changed in decades. Our priorities are skewed. Machines are wonderful and make the world a better place but they aren't more important than the people whose lives they're supposed to be improving. The people who care most about other people have too few resources to do the jobs the world needs them to do and we have suffered for it.
Our society regularly sings the praises of capitalism. It is the engine of innovation. The invisible hand of the market steadily and efficiently makes the world a better place. And yet, for the things which matter most to many of us, we keep that engine of innovation away. We don't let the resources flow into the hands of people who would use them to create better ways of caring for other people. Instead we create systems in which those caring people are kept dependent on the engineers and bankers and real estate tycoons. The invisible hand lifts up the people who care for machines while the people who care for people are left behind.
The solution is simple. Pay them. Acknowledge that the world needs people who care for people and pay them. Acknowledge that you need people to care for you and pay them. The next time someone cheers you up, gives you relationship advice or inspires you to do something you should pay them. If paying in cash feels too uncomfortable at first then offer to take them out to dinner or buy them a gift. Just somehow acknowledge to yourself and to them that they did something valuable and that you should compensate them for it.
Likewise, when you do something emotionally or spiritually valuable for someone else treat it just like any other valuable thing you might do. It may be uncomfortable at first but brave pioneers like Amanda Palmer and Joana Nastari have begun teaching others how to ask that their value be acknowledged. There is no more shame in asking to be paid for caring for people than there is in asking to be paid for caring for machines. If it feels awkward, ask your most self-confident friends to give you advice on how to assert your value respectfully. Then pay them. You will become more comfortable asserting your own value as you pay others for the help they give you.
Together we can shift the unbalanced focus of the world away from machines and back towards people. Whenever someone does something valuable pay them. Whenever you do something valuable ask to be paid. Stop treating the people who care for machines as more valuable than the people who care for people. If we rebalance our priorities and shift resources back towards the people who take care of people then we'll see as many wonderful new innovations in the realm of empathy as we've seen in the world of technology.
The old saying is true. You get what you pay for. Look at the world around you. Think of how it could be a better place. Then pay the people who can make it one.
