Value-Added Worth and Commodifying the Invaluable

A while ago, on Elon Daberechi Musk’s Twitter, a vendor that I follow posted pictures of the dresses she makes. Stunning is so inadequate an adjective to describe the dresses in question. To take things up a notch, the tailor/vendor gave the clothes names.

Not style names. She named them after actual people.

As expected, the clothes were not cheap. I think the most affordable of the lot went for ₦60,000. Her comments section was filled with people oohing, ahh-ing, and yass-ifying her creations. However, one comment stood out.

“Na why I no dey like all these people wey dey name clothes. Them go name dress Mkpurumma, carry the price hang for one place.”

Know your worth and add tax.

This is one mantra of our 2020s, Gen Z-obsessed, self-loving, personal development-focused realities. We all believe we have worth, are enough as we are, and deserve all the good things we have and want to have-rightly so. Amid this drone of self-help platitudes is the core belief that nothing is beyond our reach so far as we can dream it. In a world that plucks the stars from our eyes and leaches us of basic human optimism early in life, these mantras become mental pick-me-ups that help us put in an extra unit of effort each day.