Meaning and Value
When we think of objects in our lives, it is natural to consider at once how they can be useful to us. "What does this thing do?" we ask. We are in this way exploring how an object's use can result in something we value. From this perspective, an object is a means to an end. We can think of this as a measure of its utility. By identifying a specific, commonly recognizable end, or result, that we might expect, we can measure a given object's utility value. If we expect a hammer to be usable to pound a nail into a floorboard, the question "how usable is this hammer for such a purpose?" makes sense, and we can imagine scoring the answer on a scale, say, 1–10.
This way of thinking about objects is natural, and most consumer review publications operate on exactly this dimension. Consumer Reports, for instance, identifies specific ends — efficiency, robustness, ease of use — and attempts to score objects along those categorical dimensions. So, we can come to view utility, conceptually, as always concerning a means of getting to some externally measurable result. And we can imagine being able to measure how well a given object is able to obtain that result, when used as directed.
The Limits of Utility
But what of design? Design decisions in and of themselves are seldom treated front-and-center by product reviewers, unless they are directly related to usability. If a reviewer expects the reader to consider a design choice that is purely aesthetic in nature, and contributing nothing to ease of use or safety, for example, the reviewer typically avoids or buries their opinion on this question. Certainly, "aesthetic excellence" never shows up as a discrete category in Consumer Reports or The Wirecutter. Some might say aesthetic choices are merely cheap ways for producers to differentiate their wares from the competition. That may be true sometimes, but to make such a conclusion about all design decisions is quickly seen to be lacking in explaining the evidence. Let us consider a couple of examples:
In the current stage of capitalism in Western societies, genericization of design is the leading trend. Cars look far more alike than they ever did, as do most purchasable objects — mobile devices, washing machines, cameras, even houses — all have become more bland, less diverse, more style-safe. Producers have become comfortable in differentiating products based on quantifiable values, which perfectly suits product review publications. This phenomenon also tracks with what we have learned from biological models which concern resource management and glucose expenditure: it is expensive (and unpleasant) to think hard on things; when presented with numerous options, deciding based on quantifiable factors suits our predilection for fast, low-effort cognitive processing.
We continue to refer and to give weight to our aesthetic sensibilities despite the seeming broad shift toward generic, or safe, design choice. This is especially true of objects which we regard as being part of, or reflecting, our identity. Clothes, jewelry, and haircuts are obvious examples — these objects are physically on our bodies, and so can become part of our bodies, and ourselves. Depending on how strongly this psychological identification is made, emotions can run high when involved with a purely aesthetic consideration. I seldom encounter a woman who is entirely indifferent to the color — or even presence — of nail polish applied to her nails; a young man who cares not about the style of his hair is a unicorn.
Defining Meaning
We can now see that there is something other than pure utility — means to some broadly accepted measurable end — involved in human relations with objects, and, more important, to the way we value objects. I propose we refer to this "something other" as meaning. This term fits well with common usage:
Q: Why do you care about that color? A: It makes me feel like myself, and that means a lot to me.
We can easily expand on this idea with examples beyond the aesthetic: what of nostalgia, or "sentimental" value? Surely there is no way to measure this "end" on some commonly acceptable dimension. What we gain here simply reduces to a sort of pleasure, which in turn, when we are pressed to explain it, reduces to meaning. "The reason I've kept this useless doily is that it reminds me of my grandmother — that means a lot to me, and no, you can't take it away." Quickly, we can see how meaning, as a value, differs from utility not just by being an end unto itself, but also by being appraisable only at the individual level. Users of a given shovel will come to agree, in the aggregate, on its usability for digging up a ditch, and thus its utility value, but never will they agree on the value of any given meaning it might offer.
I think of meaning as being autotelic, a technical term to be sure, but helpful. It comes to us from the ancient Greek: auto- (from αὐτός, pronounced autos) means 'self', or 'one's own', and -telic (from τέλος, pronounced telos) means 'end', 'goal', or 'purpose'. So meaning, as it is used here in this essay, is strictly autotelic — its purpose is always targeted at oneself, so its value can only be evaluated by oneself.
The Utility-Meaning Spectrum
As we become comfortable with contrasting utility and meaning, and indeed, seeing them as contrast classes, we can now imagine examining objects on such a two-dimensional scale, or spectrum. On one end, the extreme utility, perhaps a hand-axe from our hominin ancestors who first developed these during the Acheulean Industry. No decoration, everything intended to maximize efficacy toward a given end. In the modern era, such objects are discoverable in the context of extremely dangerous activities, in industries such as spaceflight or logging. All choices target means-to-a-very-critical-end efficacy, and expenditure on the aesthetic, for example, is non-existent (as far as we know, but also, most probably). On the opposite end of the spectrum, environments which guarantee safety and comfort are typically home to elements of pure meaning. Enter the province of the wealthy, and encounter wristwatches with elaborate hand-decorated movements engaging hands invisible to the eye, and careful choices regarding selection of wood and marble which are lost to the casual observer, while being keenly meaningful, and terribly valuable, to the resident. I thus propose what may sound at first radical, or perhaps radically reductive, but what I believe to be a powerful perspective for gaining broader understanding: pure luxury is pure meaning.
Luxury, after all, is not restricted to the wealthy and well-to-do. Luxury is available to all, and, most important, is pursued by all. In his reportage on the coalminer society in the industrial heartlands of Lancashire and Yorkshire, George Orwell incisively took to task the moralizing instincts of the bourgeoisie, members of which objected to "wasteful" spending on non-essentials when a typical working-class budget was published in The New Spectator:
"When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the PAC level. White bread-and-marg. and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the Englishman's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread."
— George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier
Desiderata and Experience
So far, I have spoken only about objects. But experiences too are subject to placement on a utility-meaning spectrum. The experience of learning, for good or ill, is often considered in light of some end, and in our day of hyper-escalating educational costs, the utility measurement has quickly become the primary, often the only, measure by which education is evaluated. (How far we have come from the days in which education was pursued for its own sake, unmeasurable on a standardized scale, unsuitable for utilitarian benchmarking.) Meanwhile, holiday destination choices are almost always subject to the ancient aphorism, de gustibus non est disputandum, shifting this experience away from something for which common ground exists, and into strictly individually-relevant value. An attempt to "prove" to someone that Spring Break in Ibiza is preferable to a visit to one's ancestral home is surely the height of folly, as would be suggesting the reverse.
To unite both the objects and the experiences we value, I abstain from bundling them into the popular term "commodities" for fear of introducing term confusion. Marx famously used this term to refer to anything that is subject to trade. We are speaking of that which humans value for humanly reasons, much of which is outside the scope or possibility of trade. Rather, it is more accurate to speak of desiderata — that which we desire, and for which we are therefore willing to pay a sacrifice.
Examples from the extreme edges of the meaning-utility spectrum are helpful for exploring the strict differences between the two dimensions, but most of what we value falls somewhere in between, a grey area, offering us both utility and meaning. Lipstick is a good example of how everyday objects provide both values simultaneously, and underscores just how difficult it is to separate them for analytical purposes. Contemporary naturalistic models might explain the invention of lipstick on utilitarian grounds: a technology, or "bio-hack", intended to manipulate the environment such that wearers amplify the appearance of fertility, mimic self-arousal, stimulate male arousal, signal dominance to other women in this critically competitive measure, and in this way enhance social standing and reproductive success. In some cultures, the wearing of makeup generally is de rigueur, a matter not just of fitting in, but of presenting oneself to society as mature and ready. But lipstick is so much more than that. A specific color is strictly a personal preference, something a marketer will be at pains to promote on shared evaluative criteria. Moreover, the practice of wearing lipstick persists well past reproductive age, sometimes until one's dying breath. Its ritualistic use survives even contemporary professional environments, which fetishize the masculine as a signal of competence, demonstrating its enduring value beyond mere utility. Ritual in general follows this pattern: though we might place it in a pure meaning category, evolutionary biology offers the simpler explanation for its etiology. What has happened, as with lipstick, is that ritual began in utility and became self-justifying — a kind of harness, or scaffolding, for identity.
Case Study: Horology
The world of horology provides us with a variety of examples in which utility morphs or becomes supplanted by meaning. Consider:
During the "quartz crisis," thousands of Swiss firms went out of business as a result of the invention of the low-maintenance/high-accuracy/low-price value proposition of quartz movements, a market initially commanded by the Japanese. In the 1990s, surviving firms were able to position mechanical movements as desirable — not by providing a utilitarian value proposition (they never could come close to doing that), but by presenting a mostly meaning-oriented one. There is no way to convince the unconvinced to purchase a timepiece with a mechanical movement, yet the 2025 global market for mechanical wristwatches was estimated to be $50–$65 billion.
The utilitarian purpose of a wristwatch is to tell the time. The fad of skeletonized dials makes this far, far harder to do, yet it "shows off" the prowess of the creators by foregrounding the intricate and difficult-to-manufacture guts. On the flip side, manufacturers now seem to be obligated to include a transparent caseback, even for watches containing the most industrial, utilitarian movements, most of which are usually covered up by a large, hulking disk called a rotor.
The tourbillon was invented by Abraham-Louis Breguet specifically for pocket watches, which spent all day in a single orientation with regard to the force of gravity. By periodically rotating the balance wheel's cage, Breguet hoped to cancel out gravity's force over time. Today we see the tourbillon's presence in wristwatches, objects which by definition are constantly moving with respect to gravity, and smoothing out this force naturally. Once again, this complex and expensive mechanism is prominently presented to the observer, without contributing additional accuracy for the use case.
Sophistication and Effort
One might come to view meaning as somehow coming to us, arriving at our doors, capriciously choosing its recipients, or perhaps being inherited from our families. But such a view misses a critical distinction: as with preference, meaning is often directly related to sophistication, and as such is a function of effort. Consider the Fine Arts: it takes years of effort to appreciate what goes on in a professional ballet performance. This effort does not necessarily need to be expended on dancing itself, but on acquiring knowledge needed for sophistication of taste. Eavesdropping in lobbies during intermissions provides ample evidence allowing us to distinguish the tourist from the aficionado, even if we ourselves don't "get it"; the language alone alerts us to the case.
The requirement of effort, and specifically, the effort to learn deeply about a subject, often through hands-on practice, is a difficult and expensive one, and its rewards far from obvious and never immediate. This perhaps is one reason we can observe what I call the athleticization of art, that is, the privileging of athletic achievement and spectacle over artistry. One can scarcely experience a professional ballet performance without being subjected to spasms of gasps and applause, often in quick succession, as the audience is enraptured by the physical difficulty of the technical elements of the performance. Observing the audience alone, one might be forgiven for believing it to be witnessing Olympic gymnastics. The 16th-century art form has devolved into a sport — something amenable to measurement. This is observable across the arts; witness the frustrations of older orchestra members, as soloists are selected for dazzling technical ability while pandering to cheap emotion through incessant swaying and spurts of messa di voce, sprinkled liberally and arbitrarily throughout.
Consider too the pains to which writers must go to tell a story whose plot requires, and rather pivots, on the presence of such sophistication. Productions of Amadeus must explicitly inform their audience, in the most heavy-handed, didactic ways, of the superiority of Mozart's music over Salieri's. It's not that we wouldn't get it by listening to the differences (most of us wouldn't); the producers don't bother including a single note of Salieri's music. They know we won't get it, because they don't get it themselves. As with past orthodox religions, a priest is needed to explain "the meaning of the Latin." This is superficial meaning, washing down on the masses, like rain, to be perfunctorily acknowledged, but never fully absorbed in all its richness.
To understand that, in many cases, effort is required for obtaining meaning, is to begin to see the double-whammy that is affecting the Fine Arts today. It's not just Baumol's cost disease that is in effect (the economic theory which predicts ever-increasing relative costs for fields which are not susceptible to technology's productivity gains). Unlike its other victims — law enforcement, social work, nursing — the performing arts, haute cuisine, and perhaps even the Humanities in their entirety, require something else: thoughtful, intentional, diligent effort, practiced via careful repetition — what the ancient Greeks called meletē (μελέτη). You can expend no effort, break a leg, and appreciate in all depths every second of your nurse's talents; not so with a performance of a Chopin nocturne.
Luxury Is Meaning
Earlier in this essay, I proposed that pure luxury is pure meaning. But if we agree that, to attain the deeper, more sustainable, and more rewarding value from humanly meaning, effort becomes a necessary requirement, how then can we square this position with the popularly held and quite natural connection between luxury and ease? The term luxury, of course, has many usages, some even conflicting. Is this specific tension truly just a case of irreconcilable definitions? In this case, I think not.
Karl Lagerfeld was known to sometimes refer to what he called "real" luxury, by which he meant a sort of freedom from enslavement to possessions or self-image. He would say, "Luxury is the ease of a T-shirt in a very expensive dress." But is it, really, if the wearer doesn't care?
Luxury is commonly understood as comfort, ease, or the ability not to care, perhaps about something required by some traditional norm. This is the freedom that Mr. Lagerfeld was likely referring to. But what kind of freedom is it, that relieves us of the greatest value that human life has to offer? In truth, this sort of freedom is in fact enslavement, in this case, to the strictly utilitarian rewards of comfort. It is by tying oneself to specific difficulties, setting challenges for oneself, being ever unsettled for not understanding something as deeply as one perhaps could, and maybe even feeling discomfort in wearing a specific outfit in public and still pushing through that feeling regardless — this is where freedom lies. For here we are describing the freedom to obtain that great humanly value that is never accessible through ease, but only through arduous, habitual, sustained effort. This is a way to demonstrate to the world, and most important, to ourselves, that we retain our own agency under the alienating and instrumentalizing tendencies of civilization. To recall a profound but unfortunately tainted idea, freedom is indeed forged from work.
The Economics of Scarcity
Economists of necessity use price (exchange value) as a proxy for the sacrifices humans make for obtaining their desiderata. This works tolerably well for utilitarian goods, whose value aggregates across individuals and submits to statistical treatment — means, distributions, predictive models. But meaning resists these tools entirely. Its value varies so wildly and unpredictably across individuals that no aggregation captures it; no mean can tell us anything. The economist's toolkit is not just imprecise here — it lacks reliable predictive power, for when it comes to how much individuals will pay for pure meaning, even if that meaning arises from scarcity alone, it cannot forecast when, where, or at what price any such transaction will occur. Still, producers need not tie their decisions to the economist's prescriptions; they have marketers, after all, and so have some control over the levers driving price. The goals need not be captive to identifying a set of like consumer profiles, if one is able, at the end of the day, to sell.
The simplest way to add meaning to a desideratum is to make it scarce. In fact, scarcity produces two benefits for the producer. First, it increases utility by telegraphing status by way of price. But scarcity also has meaning unto itself. When something is rare, even if it isn't currently desired by the market (which in turn evaporates any status signalling potential), it can mean a tremendous amount to us. Because meaning can be created by individuals, a rarity can be meaningful to one, and meaningless to another. We imbue the scarcity with value, and this phenomenon is as purely human — of the human — as any other.
We said that meaning is autotelic, a term establishing its intensional bounds: its value terminates in the self. But it is also autogenetic — because it can be expanded through meletē, it originates from the self. If we follow the perspectives this essay advances, we might arrive at a somewhat radical sounding consideration, for marketers of some distant (or not-so-distant) future. Rather than reducing the friction to desiring and obtaining new products, or else setting a false friction of scarcity through price inflation, they could, somewhat counterintuitively, induce consumers into engaging in more friction through investing effort, and in this way, becoming much more like partners than peddlers. This could be effort to learn, for example, about the history not just of the product, but of the product's provenance, and of the historical context of that provenance. To learn to race, and race well, prior to purchasing an exotic automobile, or to learn to design and repair the machine, as aficionados used to do routinely in the past. To learn to create and restore, prior to purchasing art. The risk, of course, is that the payoff for both buyer and seller is delayed. But what of the reward, at a time when luxury brands are skirting an existential crisis, and art, sport, and financial speculation are barely discernible from one another?
— A. Yampolsky, Los Angeles, February 2026