“Diogenes of Sinope said we sell things of great value for things of very little, and vice versa.”
—DIOGENES LAERTIUS, LIVES OF THE EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS, 6.2.35b
The importance of understanding the difference between the value of the necessary and unnecessary things in life. Let’s look at the examples: a diamond-encrusted sofa costing two hundred thousand dollars and a person being hired to kill another person for five hundred dollars to illustrate how the market is not always rational and people have different values of what is worth spending money on. Diogenes, Epictetus, and Marcus emphasized the idea that the true worth of things is more important than what the market prices them at.
