Rare By Thomas Paine Analysis

Children are often told that there can't be a party everyday and you can't eat your favorite food for every meal because it would ruin the joy and transform it into a mundane occurrence. The parents and caregivers have a point. "Rare" is often synonymous with "special". Have you ever thought about how the availability of a resource is often used to measure its value? Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, the document that fueled the American Revolution, believed "That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value." This proves to be true in many areas of life. We appreciate that which is common less than that which is rare, and value is all in the eye of the beholder, so to speak, …show more content…
The value of wealth is quite blatantly determined by how much of it a person has. Hand a homeless person and Donald Trump each $50 and they will react very differently. Gold, the original currency, is only valuable because humans say it is. And we only say its worth something because it is rare. The element gold is a pretty useless metal, but it practically, single-handedly populated California during the California gold rush. People who had none sometimes even became desperate and literally killed for it. Arguably, time is much more important than money ever can be. Time, and life, can theoretically go on without wealth, but there is no use for money if there is no time to earn or spend it. Universally, it is near-death experiences that make people value life and the limited time they have to be alive. Our time among the living needs to be viewed as scarce and able to be taken away at anytime in order for people to value it. There's a reason the phrase "live like there's no tomorrow" is so well-known. As soon as people perceive time as being limited, they are more motivated to make the most out of it. And no one appreciates life and time like those who have almost run out of …show more content…
So is value. Nevertheless, psychologists have identified that there are somethings we all tend to deem valuable. They found that one of the best ways to convince people to buy something is to claim that it is of limited supply or that purchasing the product is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Everyone is scared of missing out on something important. If it is scarce, people feel it must be important. Whether it's because it is of limited supply due to so many other people seeing its value and therefore then buying it, or just for the sake that if it is ever needed or desired in the future, it won't be available then. In chemistry, the limited reactant, the reactant that you have the least extraneous amounts of, or will run out of the quickest in a chemical reaction, is the most important component. The limiting reactant determines how much product will be created. Someone can have all the hydrogen and oxygen in the world, but without enough carbon, glucose can't be produced. All animals and plants use glucose for energy one way or another. So even biologically, from the tiniest scale of organic compounds to the grand scale of entire ecosystems, the amount of the scarcest resource there decides the success of the whole