闲人

Values are created by the stories we tell ourselves. How else do we get people who decide it's a worthwhile pursuit to spend their lives training themselves to put lumps of rubber into a net, and other people who value watching people doing that and express their appreciation with little bits of government printed paper (or bits and bytes of data, for these times).

I would like to say it is important to understand that things don't possess intrinsic value and people evaluate things differently. Yet in saying so, the word "important" is meaningless. Importance is only meaningful in respect to a context. Oxygen isn't important, it is important to aerobic organisms who wish to live.

So the above phrase, to me, is important in the sense that it is necessary to understand each other and the world. Too often, we argue without realizing that all our basic assumptions are different. If one person solves an equation with the assumption that x=1 and the other begins with x=2 and they arrive at a different solution as a result, any argument about their differing methods of solving equations and which is better is ultimately useless, because their conflict isn't about methods but about assumptions.