How do we decide what something is worth? Not what it costs. What it’s worth.
A house has a price. A car has a price. A gallon of milk has a price.
But what about a teacher?
A parent?
A friendship?
A human life?
The phrase that first made me think about value came from an unlikely place: the Watergate hearings of the 1970s.
In the summer of 1974, I was 11 years old, watching the televised Senate Watergate hearings. I didn’t understand most of the legal details. I just knew the senators were trying to uncover some deeper truth while the witnesses often seemed determined not to reveal it.
A few years later I read All the President’s Men and eventually saw the movie.
One line lodged itself in my brain: “Follow the money.”
Even as a teenager with my idealism still intact, I grasped that money and power were at the root of far more than I had imagined. That phrase became a kind of shorthand for me. When something unjust or unexplainable happened, I’d trace the lines backward.
For a long time, I thought “follow the money” was about corruption, finding the hidden motive. And discovering who benefited. And sometimes it is.
But over the years, I’ve come to think the phrase reveals something deeper.
Money doesn’t just expose corruption. Money exposes values.
Before money, people traded things directly. They bartered. Wheat for a horse. Eggs for lumber. Money solved a practical problem. It made exchange easier.
That’s all it was meant to do. It was a tool.
In my years working as a government contractor, I spent a lot of time around budgets, contracts, pricing, and negotiations. Money wasn’t mysterious. It wasn’t evil or virtuous.
It was simply a way of moving resources from one place to another. Salaries. Travel. Software expense. Equipment rentals.
So how did we turn this tool of money into a measure of human worth? Because somewhere along the way, money stopped being merely a means of exchange.
Money increasingly determines status. Credibility. Influence. We even treat having wealth as evidence of intelligence. Evidence of importance.
Evidence of worth.
But does that really make sense?
During the pandemic, we suddenly discovered that many of the workers we called “essential” were the very people we had spent years overlooking. Grocery clerks. Truck drivers. Farm workers. Delivery drivers. Nursing assistants.
When shelves emptied and supply chains faltered, we noticed how much we depended on them.
Yet many of those same workers remain underpaid, undervalued, and largely invisible.
The same is true of caregivers. Parents. Volunteers. Friends who show up when life falls apart. The people who care for the elderly. The people who care for children.
Some of the most important work in society generates little income and receives little recognition.
If money is how we measure value, those realities don’t make much sense.
We say family is important, yet many people spend more waking hours at work than with the people they love.
We say community matters, yet the work of building and sustaining community is often unpaid.
We say every person has dignity, yet we frequently assign value based on income, job title, or net worth.
Perhaps that’s because money has become more than a tool. It’s become a measuring stick. And every measuring stick reveals what we value. The lesson of “follow the money” may not simply be discovering who benefits.
It may be discovering what … and who … matters.
Wherever money consistently flows, values are being revealed. In governments, corporations, communities. And in our own lives.
If someone followed the flow of my money, my time, and my attention, what would they conclude I value? Would they see family? Community? Integrity? Wonder? Love?
What do our spending decisions reveal about who matters to us? About what matters to us?
The phrase that stayed with me from Watergate was “follow the money.” As a child, I thought that meant uncovering corruption. Today, I think it means something larger.
Follow the money and you’ll discover what people value.
Follow the money through corporations. Through churches. Through nonprofits. Through governments. Through your own bank account.
Follow the money long enough and eventually you’ll arrive at a deeper question: Who matters here? Because every budget is ultimately a statement of values. Every spending decision reflects a choice.
Every society, whether consciously or unconsciously, answers the same question: Who is worth investing in?
Because the moment we confuse wealth with worth, we risk forgetting something essential.
Human dignity isn’t earned.
It belongs to all of us.
A human soul was never meant to be measured in dollars.
Some things are valuable because they are beyond price.
And the only appropriate response to them is love.
Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net
Photo by - landsmann -: https://www.pexels.com/photo/elderly-person-hands-holding-coins-20407406/
