Thoughts on Millions

I recently found a place where you can submit a question and other people vote to give answers. It's a great tool, and given the book about the million-dollar friendship that I'm writing, I wanted to find out exactly how many people decided for the friend or the million. So, I submitted this question: "If you had to choose between the following, which would you choose? You can't have both. $1MM or your best friend."

Of 80 potential answers, I got over 30 responses which is a great response rate (39%; typical response rates are under 10%. No, I've not run the tests to see if this is a statistically valid sample; I'd bet good money that it's not.).

Ergo:
Number of people who would choose the friendship: 16
Number of people who would choose the money: 13

And some comments:
- "The cash (in the hottest of seconds)."
- "What kind of person would give up a friend for $$?"
- "A fool and his money are soon parted."
- "A million dollars buys a lot of friends."

And here's my response to that: wow, really? I wonder if I fielded something like this in another culture (Belize, maybe?) whether the response variation would be similar or different. Or if a bigger sample would yield a clear winner over the other.

And then I think: For those who would choose the money, would less than $1MM do? What about $500K? Or $100K? Or just $50K? At what price does the threshold become too low and the friendship is suddenly more valuable than the money?

What would it say about you if your friends knew that your friendship could be bought for $213,987.68? A penny less, and you'd say no.

And for those of us, like me, who wouldn't give up a friendship for money - at least theoretically (I'd much prefer never to have to test this theory) - what would make us give up a friendship? What's acceptable? What's not? And who, pray tell, gets to make that decision?

Lest I get on my soapbox, it's perhaps a good time to say that Tawanka had some great thoughts about the worth of life that I posted recently.

Amen.