True-Life Stories That Will Explain, Once and for All, What Is More Important — Things or People

A guy comes to visit an acquaintance and sits on her bed wearing his street pants (jeans that haven’t been washed for a month, and the dude had been hitchhiking).

His friend screams like a wounded bird.

At first, the guy doesn’t understand what’s wrong at all. When he figures it out, he exclaims, “Things are more precious to you than people!”

Another guy (this is a story from my life) helped his acquaintance with renovations. For example, he painted the windows. He doesn’t bother to lay down newspaper, and he has never even heard of masking tape. The glass gets covered with paint, and there is paint everywhere on the floor. His acquaintance is unhappy.

The guy is offended — he came to the rescue and he worked hard! And she grumbles something about disgust, instead of thanking him. Things are more precious to her, than people.

Another guy comes to visit and throws his bag down on an antique table, which contained either a hammer or some kind of pick-axe. He had come straight from work. It was a black lacquer table, with an intricate carving.

His friend isn’t happy for some reason. It seems like things are also more precious to her than people.

A wife is nagging her husband: he pushed someone’s car out of a clay pit without taking off his cashmere coat. The wife doesn’t understand male fraternity and her husband’s strength. She also has her priorities wrong. She feels sorry for things, but doesn’t care about people.

A daughter, who is a high-school student, changes her clothes and throws them right at her feet (she saw it in a movie, and this gesture looked gorgeous). Her mom sadly picks up her black silk shirt from the dusty floor. A complete indifference to existential problems and a pathological preoccupation with material things is written on the mom’s face. It’s completely obvious that things are way more important to her than people.

“But these are just things,” these people say. “You can’t focus on them so much.”

No, my friends. These aren’t just things. Each one of these things costs more than your life means way more than you think.

The guy just sat on the first thing he saw near him. But his friend will have to take this duvet cover off, wash it, dry it, and change the bed. She was actually going to spend some time reading, but you brought her a whole evening of mess and physical work as a present. He didn’t come empty-handed, so good job.

The second guy painted the window, and it took him an hour. But he created 6 hours of work for his friend — she’ll have to spend time removing the paint from everything around. Yeah, he helped with the repairs so much.

And about the guy who ruined the antique table, can you even imagine how much this table is worth? And how much is it worth now, with its dented look? And how much will the restoration cost? He took this money away from his friend with just one movement. And I’m not even talking about the fact that this table is ancestral or that it might hold significant meaning.

And about the husband, who messed up his cashmere coat, the money that was spent on the coat could’ve been spent on his wife. Now, a new coat will be bought for him, and this means that his wife won’t get anything for herself again, she’ll have to manage without something.

The mother who was picking up her daughter’s clothes from the dirty floor also bought them at the cost of some effort on her part. She earned them, paid for them with a piece of her life. And now, she will devote another piece of her life to organize her daughter’s things.

There is an old song about a vulgar, soulless, and wingless woman who obsesses over junk. And to us, who are inspired and sincere, human relationships are more important. Not all that material stuff.

But, my friends, a person who doesn’t care about things, doesn’t care about people either. This is a fact.

Bright Side publishes this story with permission from the author, the blogger Malka Lorenz