Midweek Musings - June 24, 2026
Adding Value; Cottage Cheese Shortages; Dig Out Those Coupons; Muskrats in England; 50 Years of a River
Additive value. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s something that healthy and flourishing people bring into their relationships, communities, and workplaces.
To put it another way, what value do you add to the place you’re in? The people you’re around? If you aren’t adding value, not only are you likely expendable to your employer but you’re also likely unhappy and not flourishing in general.
Now, let me add one massive caveat. We all go through seasons of life and acute moments when we may have very little to offer. Our need for others far outweighs our own additive capacity. Perhaps you’ve been through one of those moments or seasons and know the feeling. Those may come, but it’s worth noting that they are generally outliers in the rhythms and trajectories of our lives. The general pattern for a life of meaning and purpose seems to be one that presupposes that we offer something to the places we inhabit. To put it another way, leave it better than you found it.
That said, the tension is real. Because our culture largely tells us the opposite — that a rich life, a good life, is one in which we extract as much value as we can from the environment around us. Rather than a life of service and mission, this kind of worldview is one warped to bend in on itself. And yes, there are especially overt and narcissistic expressions of this that are readily apparent. Chances are we all know someone who navigates the world this way. But the truth is we’re all breathing the same cultural air and have likely been formed by it more than we realize. We’re all likely more inclined than we realize to have this subtractive value disposition, one where we assume that the quality of life is measured by what we can draw out from our surroundings, our relationships, and from the world in general.
And yet, that kind of trajectory is one that leads to despair, selfishness, and a general nihilism that runs contrary to human flourishing.
I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to diagnose yourself and perhaps identify how this looks in your own life. By the way, one way to do that is to ask the people around you. If they’re honest (and the best relationships are), they’ll give you a portrait of yourself that’s likely complex.
What I’ll do is propose some principles around this idea of additive value. If I’m right about these, I think they have the potential to pay huge dividends in your overall quality of life, professional success, and relational health. And I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I need to grow in these areas.
Your additive value is about more than your paid work. I think most of us immediately jump into the category of work when it comes to these questions. That’s understandable since we spend so many years of our lives in professional employment of some form. And I’d be the first to say to a young professional that if you want to advance in your career, if you want to be given more responsibility and reward, then be constantly seeking ways to add value to your organization. I’ll write another article in the future on that precise topic, but this is the great differentiator between the most successful people in any industry or sector and those that never seem to advance. But it is a lot bigger than our paid work. Ask any youth pastor who makes a difference in a church youth group and it’s likely to be the students who add value, who find ways to serve, who don’t assume an entitlement, who seem more concerned in encouraging and strengthening others than what they “get out” of youth group. The same is true for retirees, of course. Here it’s likely harder, given how much association there is between our additive value and our paid work after decades. Adjusting to life after paid work can be quite a challenge. And, of course, there can be a slowing of pace and even degenerating health realities. But none of those changes negate the reality of additive value. A kind word, a quick smile, an expression of care and concern paired with an act of service; no matter how simple, it adds value and enriches those around you. And no one gets paid for it.
Your additive value will reflect the unique ways in which God has made and gifted you. One of the great evidences of a divine Creator who has infinite wisdom (and a sense of humor) surely is the remarkable diversity of human beings. We all have unique gifts to bring into our social networks and institutions, all of them entrusted to our stewardship by a God who intends for us to leverage them for the good of others. By the way, this is one of the miracles of a free market economy and the wonder of entrepreneurs. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s no singular blueprint for people who start and build companies. The goods or services they provide are so different and the personalities and temperaments of those that take the risk to launch a new venture are just as varied. What they all have in common is the bottom line reality that they add value and the market rewards that. At a more human level, the truth is that God has situated you in a particular place and time, within a specific family, in a precise local neighborhood or community, in a very particular workplace. Part of our human vocation is to steward the unique and diverse gifts entrusted to our care within those very specific contexts.
Your additive value will evolve and mature as you move through life. There is some freedom in recognizing that the value I bring to my family at this stage of life looks a little different than it did 20 years ago. And it will likely look different 20 years from now. What remains constant, I hope, is this inclination or posture of the soul, one that I hope is more concerned with how I can build up and strengthen others than with what I can secure for myself. If the posture is constant, we can then find some freedom in recognizing that the changes that come with circumstances and aging are not impairments of our ability to contribute value but instead new venues for discovery and meaning.
Your additive value has a direct correlation to your own satisfaction, happiness, and meaning. It’s a surprising equation, but I’m confident that the path to a good life is one that invariably leads down the road of addition, not subtraction. To put it another way, there is meaning and purpose tied to cultivation of the good, true, and beautiful. There is life in the generative. Conversely, those who spend their whole lives as value vampires ultimately end up lonely, unfulfilled, and bitter. It’s a sad trajectory. But I do think it accounts, at least in part, for why some people age like wine and others age like milk.
So where are you showing up today? How will you add value? Write it down. Hold yourself accountable. It’s never too late to start.
Who Moved My (Cottage) Cheese?
It was toilet paper during the pandemic. Now it’s cottage cheese, as reported by the New York Times:
“A couple of months ago, the cottage cheese at my local grocery store went missing. When I asked the cashier about the outage, she shrugged and said, “It sells out quick.”
Undeterred, I began checking other stores, and was met by the same fate. The cottage cheese stock, particularly the Good Culture brand, was often sparse or gone entirely.
Online, Good Culture fans were caught in the same bind. “It’s like the Hunger Games trying to get any,” one of them wrote on Reddit.”
The article actually documents a convergence of a number of social phenomena, including our collective obsession with all things protein, online wellness influences, and misunderstandings about capital and private equity investments. Happy reading.
It Pays to Save
If you came of age in the 90s or early 00s, chances are you have a memory of a flood of Bed Bath & Beyond discount coupons arriving in your mailbox with regularity. I remember, early in our marriage, when Jeannie made clear to me that one should never pay sticker price in the store, since these coupons were always near at hand.
Turns out some folks have been hoarding those cards, even when the chain filed for bankruptcy. But it seems the tide may have turned, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:
“Redemption has come for the Bed Bath & Beyond believers.
The chain’s once-ubiquitous blue-and-white coupons are worth something again. The turn of events is providing the ultimate vindication for the die-hards who held on to the coupons long after that made any sense.
The homegoods retailer stopped accepting them in 2023 when it filed for bankruptcy and closed its stores. It relaunched online later that year under new owner Overstock.com, which changed its name to Bed Bath & Beyond. The digital version of the store offered coupons for 20% off a single item but didn’t accept the paper coupons that most shoppers had stockpiled.
Now, Bed Bath & Beyond is reopening bricks-and-mortar stores. And the paper coupon is back, with a twist: It’s also accepting old coupons.”
Now you know. Time to dig through that kitchen junk drawer.
Muskrat Love
Yes, that’s a Captain and Tennille reference. And yes, kids, you should know that.
But the good folks at JSTOR have published a fascinating (yes, really) article by Matthew Wills on the invasion of muskrats in Europe in the early 20th century and how Britain responded in particular.
“Muskrats were introduced in England in 1929 to a farm in the Severn River watershed. This was after central Europeans were already loudly bemoaning the advance of muskrats into the vast Danube watershed. The animal farm had a two-meter-high fence enclosing it, half of it underground. The muskrats “escaped almost immediately.”
In just a couple of years, the “Muskrat Menace” was the talk of Parliament and the newspapers. Politicians and journalists, writes Coates, “whipped up an apocalyptic vision of dams and riverbanks bursting, city water supplies sabotaged, lowland tracks inundated, and villages swept away.” Less than four years after their introduction, it was estimated that there were more than a million muskrats on the loose from Wales to Lowland Scotland, prodigiously reproducing and threatening “the embankments of rivers, canals, ponds, dams, roads, and railways.””
As Wills notes, muskrats originated in the Americas and were brought to Europe, where the population proliferated. And the British, with the typical stiff upper lip, took on the challenge with zeal.
“The virtual hysteria over the muskrat invasion resulted in Britain’s first legislation to target a non-native invasive species. Not even the mess of the introduction of thegray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) into Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had sparked that kind of response.
The initial effort to rid Britain of its muskrats, led by Canadian trappers, was unsuccessful. Gassing of the muskrat runs, or burrows, was also tried. Then “Bavarian master trapper Adam Roith” arrived on the scene in January 1933, bringing the technique of trapping them in their burrows. The very last muskrat was killed in 1936, the campaign declared over in 1937. The total body count was… less than 4,500.”
Admit it, you want to know a lot more about Bavarian master trapper Adam Roith, don’t you? I know I do.
50 Years of a River
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Norman Maclean’s novel A River Runs Through It and Monte Burke has a wonderful article in the New York Times on Maclean’s life and work. Documenting how Maclean handled the surge of interest from New York publishers who had previously been uninterested in his work, Burke recounts this:
“After the success of “A River Runs Through It,” a Knopf editor asked if Maclean would submit his next manuscript. Maclean fulfilled what he called “the dream of every rejected author” in declining, ending his scathing return letter with: “If the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole author, that would mark the end of books.””
Fantastic.
What I’m Reading
H.W. Brands, American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington (Doubleday)