When supply decreases while demand remains constant, prices rise.
This is at least a partial explanation for why the older people get, the more they value close friends and family.
I was listening to a DMX song on the drive in to the office this morning, and a flood of memories came back. It triggered the sights, sounds, ideas, jokes, and stories from an entire epoch of my life. Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Trips to the beach in South Haven. Lifting weights every morning with some guys before work or classes. The smell of my buddy’s Mazda. Burning CDs.
I sent the link to my brother when I got to my desk and said, “Remember this?” He immediately acknowledged and even though we didn’t exchange any words about it, I knew that he was thinking all the same things I was.
It hit me that he’s probably the only person on earth who would share that whole bundle of memories from that phase of life, or who would feel the same things about the song.
When I was younger, I was mostly surrounded by the same people. Friends, family, etc. Pretty much anyone I knew would have the same shared experiences. As time moved, the number of different people I did different stuff with expanded. Each year, there are fewer and fewer people who share big chunks of memory with me. There are many more people who share slivers – work life for this segment of time, softball for that one year, etc. – but those get smaller all the time as a percentage of my life.
Shared memories are fun. There is a steady demand for them. But the supply decreases as life goes on. They become scarcer, and therefore more valuable. My wife and I have shared memories going back almost twenty years. My siblings and I have shared memories for the first fifteen or so years. Nobody has complete shared memory of course, but those with really big chunks are really fun, and I appreciate them more over time. It allows a kind of joyful or poignant communication without words. It’s telepathy.