Maybe this was Diogenes's observation.
But this modern society we live in... it's just not structured that way anymore. Most of us live in little silos now: our job and our atomic family.
And we've become so used to depending on it that it looks very unlikely to change until/unless shit hits the fan. Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food or build their own shelter, and even if they do it's far less convenient than just getting a paycheck and relying on the supermarket.
It's often amazing to me that the whole edifice of it functions as long as it does. Sometimes when I'm in the CBD here in Melbourne, I sit there marveling at the thousands of people I see wandering the streets, all of whom are somehow employed by someone to do something such that they have enough money to keep afloat.
And, you know the sad part? A lot of places don't allow you to even try to learn. For example, my current place that I rent has a yard (it's a nice little trailer home), but I'm not allowed to have a garden. They even chopped down the nice tree that was growing in the yard when I first moved in.
Oh, I can certainly try to grow stuff inside in containers, but that means I gotta get containers (which I can't afford) and I get an increased risk of bugs & dirt being in the house (not a fan thanks).
Life is not an optimization problem.
So let's hear it for optimisation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio...
You can certainly grow various fun things in buckets - tomatos, herbs, etc. But you can't survive on it. Not with a small city garden.
And that's the point - in pre-industrial times, you had to survive off what you could grow, and you had a lot more land, which you used most of to grow your own food, and used most of your own time to grow food, and you were fucked at the first bad harvest (though you would likely have been part of a social contract where your local landowner took a portion of your crops to cover for these eventualities)
In post-industrial times, peasants found they could work in factories and earn much more than they could selling a portion of their crop. Countries stopped being 90% farmers. Normal people could specialise, not just the landed gentry who didn't wonder where their next meal was coming from.
And here we are typing to each other on websites.
It's sad if the city or your landlord won't let you have a garden. Gardens are wonderful things. You should try and grow something. But we're in a discussion context of "people don't even know how to grow their own food any more". Thank goodness for that, because if we did, we'd be spending all day tending to our crops, living in abject poverty, at constant risk of starvation, and we'd have no time for computers. Thank goodness for modern agricultural practise.
What can I say? Retail does not provide a living wage.
Money is merely a mnemonic device serving the same purpose, to mark those who did more good than received.
Average person does not know how to grow food and build shelter not because getting paycheck is convenient but because it is more efficient. If we do not want money, supermarkets etc. we'll be back to 10 mln people that the tribal way of life could sustain.
Being employed to get money is not really different from searching prey or edible roots, what is different now is that billions of people who were supposed to die because they couldn't find what to eat, or couldn't get along with their tribe, stay alive and complain that they did not receive more free stuff from complete strangers.
Efficiency is the metric of nature. Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources. Calling it "framing" feels a little disingenuous.
Even a little bit of anthropological study shows this is false.
Wait, that's exactly what has happened, except it has evolved into a more systemic solution (our taxes and social contributions pay for police, courts; bigger accumulated wealth allows for more options...).
We actually have the capacity and capability to house, feed, and clothe everyone on the planet, and then some.
The frame can shift because our capabilities have increased.
You have the choice to stick your head in the sand for a while and try to ignore it, but eventually your sand castle will get bulldozed by a group of people that don't.
I would pay a shit ton to have loving and supporting friends, but this is not how it works. Because loving and supporting friends don't want money in exchange, but your true love and support.
This works for "good" neighborhoods if you replace "good" with "low-crime", as people with a higher income tend to do less crimes, if we count out tax evasion and other anti-society behaviours.
But this is not what it's about. You reap what you sow. You try to increase your value for people to like you and want to be friends with you? This can work, but the price for it is (1) purely extrinsical motivation which more often then not does leave you feel empty and (2) friends who will leave you as soon as your worth decreases, e.g. with age or illness, or if a different person with more value comes around and offers their friendship.
The money would go to the "matchmaker" who would connect people with the right people.
Making friends = paying a service to find friends for me?
About the only time all the pieces fell into place to even begin to see anything else was Revolutionary Catalonia. However, the USSR quickly waged war with it to ensure its demise, and within no more than a few years it was no more. The capitalists who seized all the capital in the USSR under the guise of pretending to move away capitalism didn't want the people to realize that the USSR was still under capitalism all the same. That would threaten the capitalists who controlled the capital.
To your friends and family as well? Or just your employer?
You're describing things that may well be true for a lot of employers, but fall apart outside of that context.
For most casual acquaintances (that some people incorrectly label as friends), it's certainly true.
On the family's side: only parents, siblings, children, maybe some aunt or grandparent. Second distant cousin you saw 3 times in life?
what I'm arguing is that it's not only the workspace where we all are disposable and replaceable. It happens in friends and family context, too.
What to do with this information... I'm not sure. But usually it's a good first step to see things clearly.
What's the problem about that?
I'd rather have my family and 1-2 close friends, and literally no one else, instead of 100 close friends that will vanish as soon as I am not able to bring anything to the table anymore, which will inevitably happen for everyone.
People on this thread seriously need to stop reacting so emotionally to things. Damn. Grow up people.
Instead, it actually is literally about each individual's immediate sphere, which, as you correctly point out, is where it matters. Having 5 true friends in a world with 100 people or in a world with 1 billion people doesn't change anything.
You may feel this way, but it feels a lot different when you learn that one of your acquaintances has died.
I enjoyed a brief intellectual conversation with a professor at the end of a semester. When I returned the next academic year, I stopped by his office for a quick chat, but his name was no longer on the door. The department administrator told me "Oh, he's no longer with us."
My heart sunk. I didn't know him well, he may not have remembered my name, but I wanted to thank him, and now he was gone. Cut down in his prime? He was just an acquaintance to me, he was not my friend. But I still felt that shock and grief deeply.
I asked the administrator how he'd died, and she quickly clarified: he was still alive! He had just been a guest lecturer visiting for one semester from a Scandinavian university and had now returned home. This has taught me not to delay expressing my gratitude for the acquaintances in my life.
Granted, in retrospect, there's not really ever a sufficient amount of interaction you could have had, but if I see someone inside a cafe that I'm walking past, it's worth popping in and at least saying hi or waving from outside.
By the time I reached adult hood I only experienced a handful of deaths of close people, all from old age.
It's not about the quantity but about the quality of friendships and human connection. I couldn't care less about the number of my friends. I do care a lot though about the connection to them.
Rather my view actually came from observing violence - between humans, but also in nature, and deeper still as a product of reality.
We exist in these fragile bags of flesh and bone. To a hungry lion we'd just be food.
And we behave the same - take for example the eating of meat. I'm a meat eater myself so this isn't anything preachy, but consider this - many animals are quite beautiful beings, possessed of their own personalities (we see it in our pets).
But that instrinsic value they have doesn't stop us from turning them into steaks.
On the one hand I wish you were right - I wish the world were beautiful and our souls along with it, and that I could sing that song.
But it doesn't always look that way. And worse still, I think it all started at the level of nature, not at the level of capitalism. We attribute too much significance to the human race when we lay such woes only at our own feet.
Also, it does in fact matter whether a guy is nice.
I did not liked the surgery argument either. Of course you should not operate if you do not know how ... but that is issue of overblown ego and arrogance. Not of the niceness. No matter how awesome you are, there will be things you cant do. And framing a guy into as a useless idiot because he is a carpenter rather then surgeon and thus cant operate right there in the street is nonsense. The surgery issue simply wont happen with honest nice guy. That guy will call an ambulance which is certainly better then trying to operate.
Read article again: it literally tell guys that yes, they should be sociopathic and go get some money. That is manosphere in nutshel.
> If you needed life-saving surgery, it would be great to have a nice surgeon, but you're still going to pick the arrogant surgeon at the top of his field
In around about way, the automatic assumption that arrogance = capability did allowed quite a few cranks skate. The manosphere is fully into that point.
> they fall for those jerks because those jerks have other things they can offer.
Ha! That reminds me that I, somewhat unknowingly, in the past have emulated the good parts of a jerk to be more attractive myself.
What are the good parts of a jerk?
They are: adventurous, spontaneous, in the moment, doesn't take everything too seriously, thrill seeking and confident. It made me much more pro-active as I'm a fairly passive person (romantically speaking) normally. Oh and I still was nice too. And I emulated those things because they sounded fun as well, I just never thought of amping it up a bit.
That is a judgment reserved exclusively to third parties, I’m afraid.
Those are convenient boogeymen that give basically the same advice, just sometimes in very crass and very rude forms.
The advice stood 50 years ago, in 2012, and still stands today. What doesn't seem to stand is that american culture seems to have abandoned holding people accountable and responsible for anything ever.
The Cracked article comes from a very neoliberal, self-optimization hustle-grind culture: work on yourself so you're worth more for others: an incredibly, if not exclusively, extrinsic motivation. While OPs article seems more focused on your internal presence, your relationships and being with people, not for people. Cracked says to work hard and complain less, produce more so your skillset is more worthy to other people. OPs article says to practice presence and true connection.
The only thing I can find that connects both is that they have a mindset of anti-passivity, but that's all.
Ahh, edit: thought you replied directly to OP, that's why I thought you meant that the Cracked article is similar to OPs article. Sorry!
There's some truth in there about in case of a serious emergency you mostly need competence over empathy. But, to me, it's always love, empathy and connectedness that wins. Why are you commenting on HN? Is it for bringing value in return for money or services or material goods? I don't think so. It is about human connection. In absence, life or death makes not much difference anymore.
Your mention of "return for money or services or material goods" shows you didn't get the point of the article; the author plainly explains why it isn't about money in #4.
Gerasimov? Is it you?
for the op, it might not define you but it does define you for others.
Don't let capitalism do this to you. Not everything with value is paid in this system, only things which make the buyer more money.
Ultimately, out there, people value you by just 5-6 things and almost never they are your beliefs or personal values.
So your respectful challenge seems to be missing the point. Your beliefs are not challenged here. But you cannot change how other people value you.
This is such a rigid world view that is demonstrably wrong. I won't even argue with you because others have already pointed out why this cannot be true elsewhere.
What I will say is that I hope you're doing alright.
Much of human behavior is not explained by economic incentives: for example, many elderly people are cared for by their children out of a love or a sense of familial duty.
Religion has varied continuously throughout human existence. Its not the foundational requirement here.
The evolution of "gods" is obvious in retrospect as well (a tale of some good deeds passed on through generations gets added to with every retelling and suddenly Joe who gave a child an apple and protected it from a rabid dog was walking around feeding everone and killing dragons that stole everyone's sheep).
I recommend reading literature, philosophical and historical works from more than 2000 years ago.
Your message almost sounds like it has an agenda.
As an older Black guy I’ve seen how both corporate America works and religious institutions. I’ve seen much less discrimination in the former than the latter.
A good example of what tribes did better vs civilization: if you can do anything to help the tribe survive (I am a good hunter, you can create good bows), you are a prized member. If you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.
But the real thing that makes the comparison fall apart is that with machines people have less utility and people today "require" more resources- can an individual today do anything meaningful to help the tribe survive? And by meaningful, we necessarily tie it to positive economic impact, which is very hard to achieve at lower paying jobs or jobless when we look at things that get paid for by the tribe such as like healthcare cost.
That's a nice sentiment, but do you have sources for the claim that tribes universally "loved" non-productive members just because they were kin?
However, decent human beings do not value other human beings purely on the basis of their economic contribution. Someone might be a net cost, but a decent society still looks after them.
Nature is ableist. Humanity rises above it to the extent that we can, but ...
Nature is ableist in a lot of ways… if you had diabetes in some ancient tribe you’d basically be screwed. But if you had an amputated leg, I dunno. You could still be the best flint knapper in the tribe.
I mean, think of your extended circle of friends and acquaintances, your 100 “closest” friends. In particular, think back on the community grew up in, if you’ve subsequently moved to a tech hub that accumulates rare talent. I bet picking through your hobbies there are a couple potentially useful things that you’d be a top-tier contributor in. Most people are really bad at almost everything they don’t do, after all.
I’m not going to engage in some prehistoric idealism. The past was pretty brutal. But we’d probably all die by getting little infected cuts, not because we were abandoned by our tribes.
Indeed it seems that there really are two "modes" for human civilization; one where human beings are scarce and valuable, and one where they are abundant and cheap. The West has spent the last 400+ years in the former mode, as the plague decimated Europe and they spread into the vast new world, where humans were so scarce they had to be forcibly imported via mass enslavement, and wage earners could demand a premium. Now that globalism has brought us all onto the same stage as the Eastern masses, things are starting to feel pretty crowded.
But if you are even allowed to grow up and become an individual, things might be somewhat better once you are part of the in-group, but that does not factor in the fact that human empathy has an overall tendency to switch off if you're not. Even if you're loved because you're kin, your neighboring tribe might still kill you, or you and your kin might kill them, for entirely petty or cynical reasons. The prehistoric bone record supports this as well, seemingly human-weapon related reasons is the most common cause of death.
You can also examine your own emotions to get some idea of our evolutionary environment. Loneliness hurts, to the point where it has measurable negative health impacts equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes each day. Your brain is screaming at you not to be lonely, but why? Well, in our ancestral environment, being excluded from the social group meant death, so most individuals that did not have a profound and visceral fear of that happening got their genes consistently removed from the gene pool. For loneliness to be that big of deal, being excluded must have been an easily available option. If everyone loved and accepted everyone unconditionally, this emotional state would simply not have evolved.
Humans quickly become extremely brutal once the environment necessitates it, up to and including cannibalizing your own kin. Infanticide and murder of both ingroups and outgroups is historically commonplace because it was also commonplace prehistorically. Even modern tribes, that live in relative abundance, are still brutal in many ways to this very day.
But of course, when you look at any group of individuals in a tribe survivorship bias will dictate that it all looks nice and rosy. But you might want to check the skeletons in the cave before you pick that as your conclusion.
there is a lot of conjecture in your overall post, but I think this is a fair takeaway you put at the end.
Evolutionary history is of course always difficult. I think the loneliness part comes mostly from the kurzgesagt video on loneliness, as well as some other stuff here and there. Rate of infanticide is roughly correct with quick Google. Rest of tribal stuff is from a variety of books and high school social anthropology. I think I actually have the "reasoning for infanticide" part from sex at dawn, of all places.
I'm always scared to run a deep research service to find the counterpoints after I type this kind of stuff out, but feel free to do so for me and dress me down. At least survivorship bias is a classic that's pretty much always worth keeping in mind on any topic.
To pick one mere point where you might have chosen to value life otherwise:
> They're not a rare thing like say, gold.
You mean the gold that's a relatively common chemical in the universe? You're comparing the elementary particle formed by astronomical processes to somethings which (even if metaphorically) exists only within organisms so complex we have yet to find signs of similar complexity in the universe.
What you say is cold, but hardly truth.
Perhaps we're immensely valuable - sparks of divinity. Perhaps we're not - mere bags of sentient meat.
I don't know which of those statements is more true. Either/neither/both?
Not valuable to what or whom?
> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Disposable and replaceable to what and whom?
The Planet doesn’t care whether we exist. But then again the planet would not need to replace us either. So what could this be about?
Only humans want or need automation of human labor. Are there then some special kind of humans that are entitled to (by might or other means) the output of the “disposable humans”?
It is other way round. The sort of person who sees themselves as their job only are good when they are well off.
That sort of person copes badly with when being poor. Having no self to draw from outside of work and feeling like constant failure in unsatisfying work leads to issues like alcoholism, violence, gambling.
This is only true if by "value" you mean monetary value. Your personality and humanity may not be valuable to the person paying you to do your job, it still has value for the people around you.
Apologies for the long-winded context, but I think it's important to address your point. You're alluding to some kind of intrinsic, self-evident value, and I would like to challenge you on that. Prove to me that this value exists. Prove to me it can be measured. To pre-empt your reply, I don't think you can. You might value a person in a certain way, but you can't ensure everyone else does. In fact you even accept this in your last sentence. A small group of people known to that individual would value them more than the other 8 billion people on the planet. Which is more or less what the person you replied to was explaining.
Why does any of this matter? Do you require a person proves their utility to you before you hold the door open for them? When a child falls and scrapes their knee, do you ask about their grades in school, or parents net worth, before lending them a hand?
My point: human society is deeply interwoven with sentimental behaviors that make zero sense in economic theory. You can try to apply all the models you want to model human compassion and it will get you nil.
But that doesn't mean we should optimize that out of societies. I think it's the most wonderful part of our societies, and if we were to remove it, we'd stop being humans.
If you're going to make the claim that people hold intrinsic value, people are going to challenge you for proof. Holding a door open for someone and asking questions doesn't necessarily indicate value. It could indicate personal interest. Empathy. Projection. Self-interest. The concept of altruism doesn't necessitate the belief that other life holds value at all. Altruism by its definition is giving without the expectation of return.
I think you make a good point re culture and tradition. Humans like many "valueless" activities. Some of these are hardcoded into our psyche through evolution. Some are for sentimental reasons. Some are religious. Some are enforced. Some are situational. Etc. I am not suggesting we eliminate those. I am simply agreeing with the top comment which is that we cannot force people to place any value on them. Some people do not see value in those traditions (or in other people). There is no objective way to prove them wrong.
But this is assuming we share the same set of axioms?
It sounds like you don't accept humans having intrinsic value as a core axiom. However, I do, and it makes zero sense to me to try and "prove" such a notion.
I realized this first when I travelled Latin America as a young person. It was quite surprising to me never to get asked about my job but often about a family thousands of kilometers away and without any chance for the stranger speaking to me to ever meet any of them.
Only if you see yourself defined by the friends and family that surround you it suddenly makes sense.
In German we have a word called "Zweckoptimismus" that would translate to purposeful optimism. It is the optimism of someone who knows the world isn't good, but accepting it as bad would make it even worse, so you operate under a defiant optimism without ignoring the reality of the world.
Wait until you get to the part of philosophy that hinges on this being an invention of our own making. Human beings have decided that human beings are disposable. Just like we decided that gold was valuable (and to many, more valuable).
That's not insightful, that's just circular reasoning, and it fails to explain normal human behavior.
Does a child have no value to it's parents because it's "easily produced"[1] and "disposable and replaceable"?
[1] I imagine OP has never given birth
I don't disagree though. Everything is physics, and physics is applied math
In the first world we have a ton of excess value so we can do things like homeless shelters, charity, socialized medicine, etc.
But if we suddenly don't have that excess value to spread around and it becomes either I eat today or you eat today and I'm the one who farmed the wheat and made the bread -- me and my family are going to eat today.
We go back to "fair" very fast.
I still disagree though, the relationship between scarcity and generosity is very complex.
And as an aside, homeless shelters and socialized medicine are cheaper than the alternatives in developed nations, so I would argue those are the sign of good governance rather than excess value. Although that depends on your definition of value...
Over time the imbalance compounds. I spend all my effort improving the mechanisms of coercion and extraction. You split yours between survival and production. I get better at taking you get just good enough at surviving to keep producing. The system stabilizes around that balance with you allowed enough to survive, but not enough to escape the cycle.
We have had extra excess because for a little while enough of us didn't think in the hundred thousand year old way you wrote. But the 'modern' tech bro world isn't able to get away from the hundred thousand year old thinking. And generations of progress potentially erode because the systems of power guiding them haven’t evolved beyond ancient incentives with all signs now pointing to new locked in systems of control instead of shared prosperity.
...which is what exactly? My best guess is that you're implying "normal human behavior" is unconditional love and support? That's an idealistic view that doesn't hold true for everyone (even in the first world) as GP pointed out.
I think this idealistic type of mindset, which seems to be a collective agreement to blow smoke up each other's asses, has done a lot more harm than good. You get thrashed between the reality that everything is conditional and the ideal which is that you're unique and special just by existing, with the latter being delusion IMO.
Why play piano at home when you could use that energy to work? Why go to the bar and pay more for a drink than you would at home?
Because of this, equating all human value to monetary value doesn't accurately reflect the world.
You don't need to have had children to have loved people and to have lost people, and to fully understand the depth and weight of those things.
I was only commenting on the "easily produced" comment. I don't think I've heard someone describe pregnancy and childbirth that way ;)
They were making a point that it’s much easier to generate a human being than it is actually generating economically meaningful value. One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process, and the other can (and often does) require years of effort, toil and sweat (all of which can catastrophically fail rendering your efforts moot).
Generating a new human is, indeed, comparatively easy.
Ah yes, and after the intercourse the child spawns, I remember. And then it just leaves and goes somewhere and starts it's own life. No pain, work, food, time or whatever involved. Just having sex and feeling good.
> years of effort, toil and sweat
Would be a shame if that would be needed to produce a human being.
Something like 360-380 thousand births every day. We’re insignificant even just compared to the delta.
Not everyone wants a 1 hr long commute, and since we took away remote work we're stuffing everyone into expensive cities where people spend the remainder of their 50 percent not taken by taxes on housing (and health too in some cases)
It's a disaster.
Likewise not having a smartphone means you're less able to participate in the economy, and can in fact impair one's social life as most things are coordinated via group chat these days.
If you want to go live like it's 1910, that is an option, but unless you're willing to become Amish you will find it socially isolating and surprisingly expensive. It will not fix your economic woes, it will simply swap them for the economic woes of yesteryear and you'll learn first-hand why we developed things like washing machines.
IMO the real culprit is the financialization of everything over the last 50 years, and lax anti-trust enforcement. Since the 70s, every excuse in the book has been used to not pay workers more. Your house is now an asset! Your company-managed pension is now a self-managed 401k! You can get loans for everything under the sun, endless credit! Why care about the total cost of goods when you can just pay it off in installments? Anything but actually paying the middle class a bigger piece of the pie so they might be able to buy something with actual savings like we're taught to do as kids. Competition to bring down prices? Nope, we're approving every corporate consolidation from now until the end of time and bailing them out with taxpayer money when they fail! They jumped the shark a bit proposing 50 year mortgages to fix the housing crisis.
It's always sold to the public as "freedom", because the public is/was the most gullible entity. Mediocre people love pretending that they're the masters of their own destiny.
The net effect is that there is no adjustment to lifestyle you can make to offset the rising cost of everything without sacrificing your ability to prosper in the first place. If there were, West Virginia would be prospering right now. You can go full Diogenes if you like, that's all romantic until you get sick, and God forbid you have dependents who look to you for food and healthcare and you tell them that you can't provide it because that would require lifestyle inflation.
To think money is the only thing that is of highest value in our incredibly short lives is a mental sickness.
They didn’t say that? Nor was it even implied? What the hell?
All they said was that EVEN free time is a form of wealth that not all enjoy, and free time does often correlate to how well you can express your care for someone. And they are absolutely, without a single shadow of a doubt, correct.
All I said was if you have to work 3 jobs just to pay rent, you probably aren't going to be caring for many people no matter how much you might want to, simply due to limited hours in the day. Never mind people with actual disabilities.
we are, but that doesn't mean we're not valuable. everything is disposable, everything is replacable.
the idea that an individual human life isn't very valuable and that it's only first-worlders that have trouble understanding that is projection. that is the modern, first world (read capitalist) view of human life. you think you're thinking but you're actually regurgitating the ideology you've received.
There is a definite economic value to it. What does not is your consioisness that you experience since nobody else can use it.
> there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing
> like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it
> on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable
> as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Lumps of gold are largely interchangeable. It's just a mass of gold atoms that we don't differentiate between, so one lump of gold is as good as another. But people are not like that. If you were to painstakingly transform a lump of gold into a beautiful sculpture, it would be worth more than its face value. And if a person transforms from the lump of flesh they are born as into a unique individual, they are worth something more, too. Two gold sculptures would not be interchangeable, to an art aficionado, and two people are not interchangeable in that way, either.
On the gross large scale, yes, we're all lumps of flesh squidging around on the planet; a uniform slimy patina on a tiny ball of dirt. And our various large-scale systems and policies (economic, political, etc) treat people in this way, too, in varying degrees.
But you are living your one and possibly only life (just like everyone else). And you have taken a unique path through that life (just like everyone else), and I'd just encourage you and/or others reading to cherish that, both in yourself and others, even if (or especially if) the systems in which we live don't seem to. It is something that can't be taken from you, because it is intrinsic to you, and that is a value beyond "what someone will pay for."
Just my 2¢
Eventually Jack London writes Call of the Wild and becomes stupidly rich.
Was Jack London the famous author, living off of all the money (writing less popular stories, like White Fang) more valuable because of all the money he made? Was Jack London the hobo less valuable because he didn't write the bestseller Call to the Wild yet?
Or maybe, the entire concept of valuing people off a monetary lens is just bullshit.
Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job is the examined life. It what makes life worth living.
We should be incredibly skeptical of a social system whose default is to have individuals primary identify by the work they do. That necessarily sets people up for continuous identity foreclosure and psychic famine in a self re-enforcing feedback loop.
Frankly it's cringe to primarily identify by profession.
yikes
You've clearly never been through childbirth. Women go through incredible amounts of pain, and good parents make incredible sacrifices for their kids. They're not doing that because they're guaranteed some payoff.
The only way to ease the anxiety in people isn't with fluff about their 'human worth', but rather to help them envision other tangible and plausible ways in which they can provide for themselves.
The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
Hell, let me go even darker: there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Those living in the first world have been shielded from that harsh reality for some time, but it's starting to show up on our doorstep and we don't like it, and due to our inexperience with it we haven't learned how to adapt to it.
It scares me too, but I refuse to be in denial about it.