Expensive Is Relative

# ©2026 Luster Chauncey

People often talk about certain things as though they are inherently expensive. Children are expensive. Weddings are expensive. Travel is expensive. Home ownership is expensive. The statement usually passes without challenge because everyone understands what is being communicated. But I am not sure it is entirely true, or at least I do not think "expensive" means what people often assume it means.

Take cars. Most people would not say that cars are expensive. Some cars are expensive. Others are not. A person can buy a vehicle for a few thousand dollars or a few hundred thousand dollars. Because the range is obvious, people naturally distinguish between the category and the price point. They understand that "car" and "expensive car" are not the same thing.

But some categories do not receive the same treatment. People say children are expensive. Compared to what? Compared to whom?

A person with substantial wealth may spend thousands of dollars on activities, vacations, electronics, clothes, and experiences for their children every year. Another parent may spend a fraction of that amount. Both are raising children. Both are telling the truth about their experience. Yet the financial realities are completely different.

What is being described is not an objective cost. It is a relationship between a cost and the resources available to absorb it. That relationship matters. A hundred dollars means something different to a person with a thousand dollars than it does to a person with a million. The number remains the same. The experience does not.

This is why I think expensive is often misunderstood. People talk about it as though it is a characteristic of the thing itself. Sometimes it is. A private jet is expensive. There are very few versions of a private jet that would not qualify. But many things that are commonly described as expensive are actually scalable. The experience depends heavily on how a person chooses to engage with it and what resources they bring to it.

The same is true of weddings. One person spends the price of a house. Another spends the price of a dinner. Both got married. The category remained the same. The cost did not.

What people are often describing is not the thing itself. They are describing the relationship between the thing and their circumstances. That distinction matters because labels influence decisions. When people hear that something is expensive, they may conclude it is unavailable to them. Sometimes that conclusion is accurate. Sometimes it is based on the assumption that there is only one version of the thing.

There rarely is.

The danger in treating expensive as a property of the thing itself is that we may reject possibilities that were never actually out of reach. We may inherit someone else's experience and mistake it for a universal truth. We may conclude that something is unavailable when what is really unavailable is only a particular version of it.

Everything has a cost. But cost and expense are not necessarily the same thing.

Expense is relative.