Material usefulness is when the use of materials helps one to do something and satisfy their needs. For example, businessmen might find a mobile phone very useful because it allows them to communicate and discuss business with his clients overseas, while it might be less useful for tribal people living in a closed community in which they live near to each other. The tribal people do not need a mobile phone to communicate with others, and even if they were living far from each other, they can travel and visit each other because they are not such in a rush to discuss about business like most businessmen do. They have a different life style. For tribal people, the importance of life is to develop survival skills to survive in the jungle; while for businessmen, the importance of life is to earn as much money as they can, and be able to afford their living expenses in the city. This has proved that usefulness depends on the place and the kind of lifestyle one has. Mobile phones would bring little benefits to the tribal people, so it is worthless for them. Materials are often valued objectively, meaning that we judge the value of those materials on how useful it really is, without using our senses and feelings.
Knowledge usefulness is something that we learn and will be useful when applied to real life situation. There are many ways of how we can gain knowledge. Before we acknowledge something, we learn. We learn by experience, perception, and reasoning through language and emotion. Language is the basic of learning; without language we wouldn’t be able to communicate with others. In most cases, our first language or our mother tongue identify where we are from. We learn from something that has been linguistically encoded, meaning we would learn something that is written in a language we understand. With language, we construct questions out of our curiosity, and in attempt of answering these questions, we use logic to create an answer-or a reason. We are always curious, we always want to try new things; this is not a bad thing because we learn from it. From experiencing, we learn new things as we grow. Since we were young, we use our perception to explore new things, or to avoid bad experience we did in the past, and we learn from our experience. I was bitten by a dog when I was small, now when I see a dog, I will run away from it, no matter how small the dog is. This is my perception working; it reminds me of the painful experience I had in the past, and trigger my awareness to stay away from the dog to prevent it from happening again.
Knowledge is vital for living because we need to apply it to everyday use. Those tribal people I mentioned before will learn survival skills, which they use everyday to stay alive. We don’t only learn in school, we learn from our parents and our surroundings as well; therefore, what we have learned might be different from what others have learned. Different cultures teach their people differently, and they have different etiquettes. For example, it is normal for American to put their feet up on the table, while for most Asians, it is considered rude. These etiquettes has no value, but it is important on how we socialize with others. It teaches us morality: what is right and what is wrong; but does morality only depends on the knowledge we have? I do not think so.
Back to the selling families question in the beginning of the essay, would you not sell your family because it is immoral or because you love them? I assume that we all love our families and we wouldn’t sell them just because it’s immoral. I think that morality also depends on our emotions and feelings.
Knowledge is a priceless possession, without knowledge we wouldn’t be able to interact or socialize with people. Knowledge is useful; we use it everyday and in every occasion, it is pretty much the guide to our life.
Emotion usefulness is a thing that will make one satisfied or happy, for example games. Games let people relax and enjoy themselves from the stress of everyday work. There are some things that were useful back then, but not as much as useful today. That is the fact that we can never reach a point where we are completely satisfied. We always want more and more. We have limited needs, but unlimited wants. What we posses now might be the results of our wants; we don’t really need them, but we have them. Those women injected with botox, do they really need them? They inject themselves with chemicals they might not even sure of to remove their wrinkles. They are not satisfied with what they have, they want to look more attractive and younger. This satisfaction makes them happier and more confident of themselves. Maybe they want more attention, but they do not merely need them. I guess this is very useful for them because they are willing to pay such a huge amount of money for this process.
In conclusion, we do measure the worth of things from how useful it is for us. We value anything in the suitable situation it’s needed. For me, the worth of anything is measured in how useful it is to me at a particular time and place in my life. What is useful might change as we grow up. As I grow, I would need different things that will help me on my everyday life. When we remember what happened in the past, we will realize that some things have been useful to form what we are today. In the past we may make mistakes; today we learn from it and we won’t make the same mistakes again (experience and perception). There are memories that would still keep us up when we are feeling down. These are useful for us indirectly; it doesn’t change our mood completely, but it will help us to regain our emotional strength again. Things and needs would always change…and so is the usefulness of things for us.
