Life is worth more than property

The morality of disaster says things are worth nothing, life is what matters. In a direct choice that is true, but a house, documents and savings hold safety, memory and years of work, so the loss cannot be cancelled by the right phrase.

A house, a car, documents and savings can be restored. A person cannot.

This seems obvious until the moment you have to leave a home, a business or a city into which most of a life has been put. Then property stops being merely a thing. Memory, safety, status and the proof of decades of work are inside it.

So the order “don’t regret material things” is too easy to give from outside.

Losing everything can be traumatic and have long consequences. Recovery does not follow a single average schedule. A person may not get back his previous income, health and sense of safety.

But when life is threatened it helps to know the order of priorities in advance:

1. people;

2. medicines and survival items;

3. documents and data, if they can be taken safely;

4. property.

Preparation lowers the price of an urgent decision:

• backups;
• a list of documents;
• insurance;
• a go-bag;
• contacts;
• a small financial reserve;
• knowing the way out.

A person attaches himself more strongly to things he considers irreplaceable. A copy of a photograph, house insurance and saved documents do not cancel the loss, but they reduce the power property has over the decision.

Being ready to leave does not require expecting a catastrophe every day. It is enough not to build your safety in a way that makes you risk life itself for the sake of its symbol.

Readiness to leave more often runs into paperwork than into attachment. A person is delayed not by the furniture but because he does not know where the title deed is, where the insurance policy is, and whether the photographs shot on film still exist. The search takes hours that a bad scenario does not have. An hour spent in advance on a list and copies removes most of the delay and also reduces the weight of property in the decision.

Then a simple thing takes effect: what has been copied is easier to leave behind. Attachment to an object consists largely of its irreplaceability, and part of that irreplaceability can be removed technically — before you have to decide quickly.