This morning I read an article that impacted me in such a way I’ll likely spend the holiday weekend ruminating over it. It also hit home how we humans will go to every length to put ownership and a price on anything and everything, including talent. We created a system to assign price tags to our heads. It’s ruthless when you deconstruct it.
Inside a Creepy Global Body Parts Business is an investigative reporting piece on how body parts become sterile commodities as they are harvested, processed, assigned prices, distributed and marked up at great profit. Immediately, I began to see parallels to talent as a commodity.
We obsess over grades in school, career paths and success and consider it a failure to not reach objectives and goals in our personal and professional lives. Based on supply and demand, salaries and wealth easily become a status symbol and who we are.
It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, the struggle to get ahead, the desire to achieve affluence and keeping up with the Joneses, we fail to see that in the end we are all equal in the most organic of ways. In death we are stripped of our sex, race, ethnicity, disability, age, social class.….
Why don’t we live our equality in death in life?
In death there is no difference in the value of body parts, no matter who they belonged to, a peasant farmer or a wildly successful CEO, to include the dura mater. The value is €9.70.
Next time you call a customer service hotline, have impatience with the cashier at the grocery store or roll your eyes at the wait staff, remember… at the end of the day we’re all worth the same.
