Value is Subjective

Good god, Neil Gaiman.

I hope schools don't teach people how to be poor. They do that on their own well enough.

But I can sympathize with his point. Breakups are always tough on me, too.

There's a fundamental point of his that I disagree with, though. The knowledge, that he so desperately seems to yearn for, is subjective. You can teach arithmetic, because those problems have one answer. They can't teach you how to love (even though Lil Wayne tries too) because there is no simple answer. You can surprise someone with flowers and chocolate, or you can bring them Chinese food at work. Or you can do nothing (the popular choice( outside of romantic comedy films( which I have never seen( except for one time I watched No Strings Attached because there was nothing better on TV)))

His longing for simple directions for either poverty or wealth, at the first glance, seems naïve. But I think he's really asking how to live with money. How to be a homeless man who returns wedding rings, to be a billionaire humanitarian who donates billions every year.

We can't know what everyone is always thinking. And I'm glad. That could make life very awkward.

I think that school doesn't serve it's own purpose, but it tries to. If the purpose of school is to prepare us for life, it shouldn't be entirely in our career prospects; we need to learn how to love, how to break up, how to reassure someone on their way into the ultimate mystery. But these things can't be taught. You can't even stick a bunch of 8th Graders into a room and teach sex ed without giggling. So. What to say to dying people 101 probably wouldn't work very well.

No one can teach the things that Neil wants to learn. They come through experience, and the things that he wants to know how to do (mostly) aren't things that you should want to experience.

I think that everything Neil wants to learn are the most important things in life. But they come with time. You can't get absolute advice about what to say to a dying person. That advice, I'm sure, would not equally apply to your mother and Voldemort. What a natural stopping point for my rambling.

Prompt can be found here.