You were valuable before you were useful

A baby has no résumé. It has no qualifications, no income, no useful skills. It has never helped a colleague, solved a difficult problem, supported a family or contributed anything measurable to society. It cannot cook its own food or keep itself alive. By almost every standard we use to measure value in adult life, a newborn is remarkably unproductive.

And yet nobody looks at a baby and asks what it has done to deserve being here. We don't need evidence of its usefulness before deciding that its life matters. We don't ask it to earn affection or justify the space it occupies. Its value seems obvious to us, almost beyond question.

Then... something changes. We grow up, and gradually the question of what we are worth becomes tangled with the question of what we can offer. We learn to be useful. At school, there are marks. Later there are qualifications, salaries, job titles, promotions, businesses, houses, awards, followers, recognition. We discover what earns approval and what doesn't. We notice that competence opens doors, that achievement brings praise, that being needed feels remarkably similar to being important.

None of this makes achievement a bad thing. Achievement can be deeply satisfying and becoming good at something is one of life's pleasures. Work can give us purpose, contribution and a sense that our time matters.

But there is a subtle confusion available to us here. We can begin to mistake providing value for having value. The two sound almost identical, but they belong to entirely different categories.

I can provide more value to an organisation by becoming better at my work. I can become a better friend, partner, colleague or leader. I can learn more, contribute more, become more generous and capable. There are contexts in which comparing value is entirely reasonable. An employer should care whether someone can do the job they were hired to do.

But somewhere along the way, many of us take a perfectly reasonable question: What is the value of what I do? and turn it into a much more dangerous one: What is the value of me?

And then we try to answer it with the same evidence. The salary becomes proof. The title becomes proof. Being needed becomes proof. Achievement becomes proof. Even busyness can become proof. If people are waiting for us, emailing us, asking our opinion, filling our calendars, then maybe we must matter.

The trouble with building worth from evidence is that evidence can change. You can lose the job. Someone younger can become better at what you do. The business can fail. Your children can grow up and stop needing you in the same way. Your body can stop performing as it once did. You can retire from a career that spent thirty years answering the question Who are you? on your behalf. You can simply enter a season of life in which you are producing less.

If achievement has been something we enjoy, losing it hurts. If achievement has become evidence that we deserve our place in the world, losing it threatens something much deeper. It could be that this is why certain transitions unsettle us so profoundly. We aren't only losing a role, we are losing one of the ways we had learned to prove ourselves to ourselves.

There is an old philosophical distinction that I find useful here. Immanuel Kant wrote about the difference between price and dignity. Things with a price can be exchanged. Their value can be compared with something else. Human beings, he argued, belong to a different category. A person should never be treated merely as a means to somebody else's end. Whatever we make of Kant's philosophy more broadly, there is something quietly radical in that description.

It seems we have become very good at applying the logic of price to things that belong to the realm of dignity. Modern life gives us endless measurements of performance: Salary measures what someone is prepared to pay for our work. Qualifications tell us what we have learned. A promotion tells us that someone trusted us with greater responsibility. Revenue tells us something about a business. Followers tell us how many people chose to pay attention. And sure, these measurements can help us navigate.

But none of them was designed to answer the question of what a human being is worth. We use instruments designed to measure performance to measure personhood. And because the measurements move, our sense of worth moves with them.

Have a good week at work and we feel capable. A promotion and we stand a little taller. Someone praises our work and something settles inside us. Then the proposal is rejected. Somebody else gets the opportunity. The numbers fall. We make a mistake. We find ourselves in a room where everyone seems to know more than we do and suddenly the internal calculation changes.

It is strange when you compare all of this with the beginning of a human life. Nobody asks what a baby has accomplished before deciding whether it deserves tenderness. Its dependence does not make it less worthy of care. Its ignorance doesn't embarrass us. We don't look at everything it cannot yet do and conclude that it needs to work on itself before it can be loved. We simply make room for it.

Somewhere between being that child and becoming an adult, many of us begin demanding evidence from ourselves that we would never have required in order to believe that child mattered.

Part of the difficulty is that adulthood really does come with responsibility. We cannot remain infants forever. Other people depend on us. We have obligations. There are consequences to what we do. It matters whether we keep our promises, contribute to our communities, care for the people around us and make something of the abilities we've been given.

But responsibility is not the same thing as earning permission to exist. There is a difference between wanting to live a worthwhile life and believing we must spend our lives proving that we are worthy of one. The former can pull us towards contribution and the latter can turn contribution into an endless audition. And there is no obvious point at which that audition ends.

There is always another level of success available. Someone earning more. Someone doing more meaningful work. Someone younger who has achieved what took us decades. Someone more admired, more accomplished, more necessary. If worth is something achievement must finally settle, achievement has an impossible job.

Maybe this is why the natural world offers such a strange contrast. We can stand beneath an enormous tree without wondering what it achieved this quarter. We don't look at a mountain and ask whether it has reached its potential. A quiet stretch of ocean doesn’t appear less worthy than one producing spectacular waves.

Of course, we are not trees or mountains. Human lives contain moral responsibility, choice and consequence in ways these comparisons cannot capture. But what if nature reminds us of something we once understood more easily: existence does not always need to justify itself through output.

Max Ehrmann wrote in Desiderata that we are “no less than the trees and the stars.” I have always found something comforting in that image. That doesn't make accomplishment meaningless. What we make, learn, build, repair, discover and give to other people can make a life extraordinarily rich. But I like to think those things express our value rather than manufacture it.

Long before you had a title, an income, a reputation or anything particularly useful to offer the world, there was a version of you who could do little more than breathe, cry, sleep and reach for another human being. Nobody needed any convincing that your life mattered then.

Everything you have accomplished since may have added enormously to your life. Maybe it never needed to add to your worth.

Baby Mikki

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