Pictures

A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say. If you were to go to a museum covering more modern history, you’ll see black and white pictures of all sorts of things: families in front of their houses, men digging ditches and working in coal mines, and many other things that we get the amazing opportunity to see with our own eyes how it actually looked at the time. When you go farther back in human memory, there are only fragments of pottery, arrowheads, and crumbled walls to tell the stories. There is much more left to be guessed at, and we’re not sure how it actually was back then. Pictures, then, are surely a marvel of the modern age, preserving the present for our children’s children to see in the future. What a marvelous thing indeed!

Here we need to pause for a moment and look at some basic economics. I firmly believe that all subjects are somehow connected with each other, and to fully understand one you need to draw from another to sharpen your view and aid in your pursuit of truth. Basic Economics 101: When there is a surplus of products, price falls. When there is a shortage of products, price rises. This is commonly called the Law of Supply and Demand, and it governs all areas of commerce. Suppose for a minute that on one particular year, rainfall is perfect, there’s plenty of sun, no flooding, and all the variables are perfect and grain yields are outstanding. Everybody has a record-setting year and bags literally tons of grain. What happens? Does everybody around suddenly start eating twice the normal amount of grain? Of course not! They will continue to buy it at the normal rate of speed, but since all the farmers need to sell their grain, there is tons of competition since everyone has plenty. They’ll be willing to drop their prices so that they can sell any at all, and they will be quite fortunate if they sell all of it. Unless there is a shortage somewhere relatively close where they can ship the grain to, it won’t be a terribly profitable year, despite the high yields. Let’s suppose that a few years later, there is just a dreadful lack of rain. Drought plagues the countryside, and barely any grain is harvested at all. Will everybody suddenly start eating half as much grain? Of course not! They’ll continue buying at the same rate. Since there is so little, farmers will be able to charge high amounts per pound, but since they don’t have much grain, they still won’t have a terribly profitable year. The local populace will probably import grain from another region to satisfy the demand, paying a high price while doing so. All in all, farmers won’t be raking in the dough. Years that are, all things considered, pretty average across the board, will provide decent profits for farmers. The best situation by far though, is when most other farmers hardly harvest any grain at all, while you yourself have a bountiful harvest. This is the way to reach record profits for your farming statistics. Supply and demand, as we have seen, greatly affect the outcome of each year’s profit, and thus we see why prices can vary so much.

Bringing it back to pictures, let’s look at it in our modern day. Pictures are by far more advanced than they were before, they have color, can easily be transferred from person to person, and are much more versatile. Have a picture on your phone? You can print it off in any size you desire. The main difference between nowadays and back when pictures were all in black and white though is just the sheer volume of them. Almost everybody literally has thousands of pictures, strewn across their phones, laptops, iPads, you name it. They are everywhere. In other words, the supply has increased dramatically. As we have just learned from our little talk on economic principles, what will that do to price? Demand may have risen some, but not near enough to keep up with the supply. Thus the value we assign to pictures drops significantly. They don’t mean much anymore. They’re a dime a dozen. They’re worthless. Or are they? We know deep down inside there is some meaning, some significance there, and so we keep taking more, trying to get more of the worth we know is there out of it. But it doesn’t work. We drown ourselves in our own pictures, and never think to stop. When are we going to look at them anyway? When was the last time you looked through all of yours? It’s probably been awhile. You might not see them again until you’re eighty. What will your kids do with all those pictures when you’re gone? Who knows, it’s hard to say, but they’ll most likely be looked at once or twice, then stored in on some hard-drive somewhere and eventually get lost in a dusty box somewhere. What was the point of it? To capture a moment in our lives that we enjoyed, wanted to hold on to. But life is too big for that, and you’ll never get it all, no matter how hard you try.

So what are we to do? Stop taking pictures? Far from it! The answer is to only take a few. Enough to remind you of stories, of things that happened and so forth, but few enough that it’s manageable. Take some time to live in the present, and don’t dwell too much in the past. Do this and I’ll guarantee that the few pictures you do have will be cherished for years to come.