“There’s always a bigger fish.” – Qui-Gon Jinn

The first time I remember becoming aware that what I thought was “big”, was relative, I was in Honduras. It was early 1990 and I was deployed on a counter-terrorist op. As we were moving from the airfield to our bivouac area, I noticed a big hilltop estate, completely walled and gated. It was adorned with a huge satellite dish (an old school dish, the kind that pre-dated Direct TV and Dish). I asked our translator who the lavish villa owner was, surely a plantation owner or corporate big wig.

“Huh, that house up there? That’s the house of a retired U.S. Navy Chief.”

“What?” The mansion and estate was owned by a retired E-7, the same pay-grade as a Marine Corps Gunny? Full retirement pay for a Gunny, at that time, was about $2000 a month. What is NOT that big in the U.S. ($24,000 annual income), was HUGE in Honduras. That Chief figured it out, and he’s not the first; I ran into several hundred of those guys in the Philippines.

On the other side of the coin, during the time I was personally protecting one of the richest families in the world, I was assigned to the wife during a shopping trip to Manhattan. Prada, Bottega, Louis Vuitton, were just a few stops on the tour of seemingly endless luxury boutiques. Places where the retail clerk wears white cotton gloves to handle the merchandise from the display case, or off the shelf.

After hours of careful study, my protectee had decided on a handbag, it was ostrich skin. Oh, the price? $30,000.00 (yeah, you read that right, 30 GRAND). The wife looked at me during checkout and said, “You know Andrew, that’s somebody’s mortgage payment.” (And in the circle she travels in, it most likely was – in my circle, more like the price of a car.) For her, it wasn’t even like two hundred dollars. It’s all relative – the business empire, built by her husband, produces over a thousand dollars each and every second, of each and every day, and doesn’t take any days off.   (How he built that from literally nothing is a case study in itself.)

Does that shock you? Bother you? Did you find yourself saying, “I would never spend that much on a handbag!”?

Did the Navy Chief’s story shock you? Bother you? (The local Hondurans were thinking about the chief’s house, the same way you were just thinking about the handbag.)

Most of the entire planet lives on less than two dollars a day, they would most likely be shocked and bothered by your purchases and life style as well. As Haymitch, from the Hunger Games would say, “It’s all relative, sweetheart.”

I choose to aspire to being able to buy my wife such a purse, instead of decrying the extravagance of it. Just as my two cars and my 3000 sq. ft. house, with two flat screen TVs and indoor plumbing is extravagance to most of the population of Earth.

The next time someone (or you) use language like, “This is a really difficult problem,” or that something is “Expensive,” – try asking (out loud) “Compared to what?”

Boo yah!