I’m reading Osamu Tezuka’s Dororo, about this wandering pair of orphans. At this one part, they come across a lagoon and take a bath that’s a long time coming. I got to thinking about how expensive simple pleasures are, really, if you want to buy them. To replicate something like that in a spa in NYC will cost you a lot of coin. I remember when I drove with a family from Taipei to Hualien, and we took a short detour to the coast where there was this small dock. We sat down at a stall and ate grilled freshly caught squid. If I wanted to get that at a restaurant in the states it’d be an expensive meal. It’s said that money can’t buy (x, y or z), some simple pleasure, but it seems to me like you can, it’s just that there’s a real markup to reproduce the truly genuine aspects of the experience. And actually, that’s what expensive things are. In the end, it’s an interesting cost-benefit analysis because those expensive things are then things you can find cheaply, if you have the time, which you probably don’t, because you’re spending a lot of time to make money to buy cheap things.