The nicest things from nature cost the most!
No, of course not, flowers are wonderful and grow for free.
Some of the nicest things from nature cost the most!
Diamonds are rare. Muck is common. Do we like diamonds because they are rare, and that is the only reason? Would we like muck if it was rare, and pay $50K per kilo?
It is complicated!
My guess is that truffles and caviar are seen as delicious because they are expensive. And we know things like salt used to be very expensive.
But you don’t need many tweaks to gamify a world. Often just one thing that we are told to desire will suffice. In games like Fortnite it is outfits. My kids have had hundreds of outfits but desire the expensive ones they don’t have, that to my eye are no different. And makes the developers hundreds of millions.
Maybe diamonds are intended to be the goal in our simulation. Regardless of how things actually turn out, our world is different to other simulations by only three factors:
- diamonds exist naturally
- they are rare and hard to attain
- we think they look amazing
Someone from another simulation will think they look like a pebble.
So maybe there is a single thing that this world has unique, to randomise the outcome. It doesn’t have to be what we end up desiring for all time, but most likely will be at least for part of our evolution and history.
It could be anything we have ever fought over, like salt and gold. Or it could be something that is really similar to cheaper versions, but we prefer the expensive one, like salmon.