Debit, credit: How love and loss look like on life’s balance sheet
In accounting terms, can you depreciate the pyramids of Egypt?
Two years ago, I enrolled in an accounting class for non-accountants and on the second day of the three-day session, the teacher popped that question. This was after he taught us how to compute depreciation cost.
“How about the Mona Lisa or the Rizal Monument?” he pushed further. “Do you depreciate them?”
I never expected the class to be easy, but adding a layer of complexity to an otherwise already complicated concept of “double-entry accounting” seems to please the teacher immensely. He is good.
Nobody in class got the correct answer. But I had a burning follow-up question for the teacher that I never had the courage to ask: “In accounting terms, can you depreciate people?”
The recognition was instantaneous. Somebody in my past life had treated me like a fully depreciated asset when my useful life to him had ended. The sadness had faded now, years removed from the roller coaster ride of being smothered with attention at one point, then getting dumped the next.
It has taken me a long time to figure out how to process the experience or how the entry will look like in my life’s book of accounts. Debit, credit — the perfect pair no less, but as accounting equations go, it balances out in the end. It should, and in my case it did.
But when you think about it, people are easily replaceable, whether in the personal space or in a professional setting.
Roughly seven million people lost their jobs and livelihood in my country in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. They are numbers in companies’ books, each representing an expense to get rid off when the going gets tough.
We’d all like to believe that we are fixed assets whose “acquisition” is not intended for immediate resale but for productive use. The reality is, people are often treated as inventory items or short-term assets that can be liquidated anytime.
When disposing off assets, you record a gain or a loss, the teacher said.
I believe I wasn’t sold directly at a depreciated cost, but was traded for a new asset. And not because the boat was sinking, or cash was short. My net book value in his eyes must have fallen precipitously low in comparison with my market value that when he traded me for a new asset, he did so at a loss.
According to the teacher, the value of a surrendered asset ideally needs to have the same value as the acquired asset, but it isn’t always the case. I can only surmise that he wanted to get rid of me so bad he was willing to incur a loss. But how one values oneself is also subjective. My self-perceived worth is obviously not in equal measure with his estimation; hence, a discrepancy in valuation.
Need I say that I plunged into an overwhelming grief the moment I walked out the door?
“Laugh now, cry later,” Erma Bombeck wrote in “The Glass is Always Greener Over a Septic Tank.” I think I cried first, then laughed later.
In my own book of accounts, the transaction was recorded now purely as a financial loss, or how much cash flew out the window when we severed ties. I don’t like to imagine how I ended up in his life’s book of accounts because it might trigger another round of grief.
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?” wrote Jack Kerouac in his seminal novel “On the Road.” It is that vision of someone receding from view that makes you feel the profound loss.
But many things in life come in pairs — black and white, yin and yang, dark and light, harsh and gentle, debit and credit. And this is where life diverges from business. Life is more fluid — one strand can fall through the cracks, while other parts flow on smoothly or even thrive.
In every fall, there is always room to imagine the contours of a future still un-lived. Debit, credit.
