I have been wondering recently about the value of people, especially myself. I am far too critical to believe that every human life has inherent value. Successfully continuing to breathe just isn’t enough. So what does give a person value?
Things like “character” and “personality” are so nebulous and subjective that I don’t even know how to properly consider them as possible suppliers of value for a person’s existence, and I refuse to believe that wealth or physical attractiveness are how a person should be measured.
One could argue that people derive value through their work, and for many people that may be true, but that has an inherent problem. There are, at this moment, too many people for everybody to be meaningfully employed. Our country desperately scrambles to create more and more “service” jobs that mostly cater to the middle class' desire to be treated as if they were people of social importance and the Sisyphean paper pushing our increasingly bloated corporate bureaucracy generates. Not everybody has the ability nor opportunity to be a doctor, firefighter, farmer, etc. Our technology has guaranteed that only a fraction of the population is necessary for actually essential jobs. So, what about all of us who simply don’t have what it takes to be great nor the opportunity to be essential? I would like to think that value can be derived from something other than one’s career which, let’s face it, is usually just a way to put food on the table. If I accept a person’s work as their value I myself am currently value-less.
Social impact is another route, but a lot of how capable a person is of influencing those around them, for good or ill, depends upon simple charisma. Should a person’s value really be determined via popularity contest? Intelligence and cognitive ability could be argued as a measure of value, but of the people I know some of the most intelligent are the least successful and happy. My own intelligence has routinely been more hindrance than help to me. Creative talents are another highly subjective criteria and the cultural value for any given skill waxes and wanes with aesthetic fads. For example, the only creative endeavor I could truly claim to be gifted in is poetry, an art form which has only ever enjoyed brief moments of popularity before falling back out of style yet which has never had the dignity to just curl up and die.
So I find myself, a misanthropic college drop-out unemployed shut-in, struggling to find any way in which I can truly call myself a valuable human being. I cannot believe I am the only one
