The Cost of Living

Those who place the highest value on innocence are usually those who least posses it, and there is good reason for that.

The certainty that only youth affords would have us condemn this as hypocrisy, but that is the last thing it should be called.

Innocence comes by virtue of ignorance, ignorance by virtue of inexperience, and inexperience by age.

Finally with age comes wisdom by virtue of experience but that same lifetime of  experience also lends itself to bias. Though we would like to think otherwise bias is inherent to experience.

If we are to retain innocence it will be at the cost of experience, and experience is how most of us seem to learn best.

So it seems unrealistic to think while we could not retain innocence for ourselves, we might think we could help others to retain theirs.

It's simply not how it works.

When we are young and inexperienced, we cannot know the value of what we have simply because we have always had it and  no other experience to contrast it by to find its true value.

But then it is gone, for innocence lost is never regained.

Then, we are compelled to exercise the futility of warning the innocents what the cost of their loss will be.

It will of course be to little avail.

Everything costs something and this is simply cost of living.