There are few topics more thoroughly explored in fiction than the intrinsic value of the self. For many stories, the central theme can be boiled down to "if this person was/did 'x', what would they be worth?" Redemption stories all fit this mold—counting the cost of past mistakes and making a judgement one way or another about whether or not the person can be saved—that is to say, whether or not they are still worth something. Most stories use death as a central stake for the main character—whether that death would be their own, of someone they loved, or even of the entire human race. Though it's taboo to suggest that the value of a person is in any way quantifiable, the vast majority of the decisions made in reality and in fiction are predicated upon a subconscious understanding that there is such a value.
I am, of course, completely unqualified to speak to what that value is. If millennia of storytellers haven't managed to nail it down by now, I certainly am not going to do so in a single blog post. What I think is most relevant is this:
We live in a world that regularly assigns value to human life, accurately or inaccurately, and makes decisions based upon calculations using these fabricated values.
This happens all the time. In war, the numbers of soldiers on either side of a battle are compared by generals in making decisions about strategy. In corporate finance, the earning power of workers is quantified and the value of various demographics as targets for product advertisement is a very central question. In politics, both the votes and the donations of supporters are quantified by officials. In hospitals, the cost of care for critically ill patients is compared against their chances of recovery—and their potential for being able to pay the hospital back. Everything is a numbers game, and as much as we hate to think of ourselves as a statistic, everywhere we look we are treated like exactly that.
Ironically, as soon as we consider our quantifiable value, we generally feel a lot less valuable. If we accept that what we are can be reduced to numbers—our extrinsic value—it is easy to lose sight of what else is going on in our lives. Those things that make us valuable to the people we know and love—and even more so, those things which make us valuable to ourselves—are not so easily quantifiable. If we accept the lie that society tells us—that anything which cannot be quantified is functionally a 0-value—then we will quickly arrive at some very wrong and very dangerous conclusions about our self-worth.
If we express worth as a sum of what a person has done, is doing, and will do (i.e. the whole of their lives seen as a whole), the vast majority of the information in the algorithm is missing.
Most people have a pretty good idea what they've done in the past. Aside from some errors in perspective and selective memory, we know the sort of person we have been up until now. Our current endeavors are, for most people, central in our minds every day, so these are likewise relatively known. However, since no one can know the future, anything which we might one day do or achieve is fundamentally unknown. Life has a way of taking unexpected turns, for good and for ill, and there is not a person alive today who has an accurate picture of what the rest of their lives is going to look like.
Even saying so, this algorithm focuses on the function of an individual, rather than the individual themselves. It has been suggested that outward actions are implicit of inward reality, and therefore that those who do bad things or who do not add anything of value to the lives of those around them suffer from an internal bankruptcy of value. This, once again, is a subject better explored in fiction. Suffice to say, however, that even if all the values of these equation could be known, I don't think we would arrive at an accurate quantitation of the value of a human being.
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
You've probably heard something like this before, but a direct and cursory pass at it with logic makes it sound rather suspect. Various religions have been making this claim for millennia, using it as evidence for the existence of the soul—or vice versa. Interestingly enough, however, this concept actually has a significant degree of scientific backing in the phenomenon known as emergence.
In short, emergence is when a large number of small "parts" come together and exhibit behaviors that were unexpected based on the properties of those parts. Emergent behavior shows up all over the place, from zoology to computer science to cellular biology. It is why an ant, which has no actual brain and no ability to plan, can work together with hundreds of its peers to construct complex nests and even build bridges across large gaps. (Look it up, it's crazy.) It is why a computer that runs, fundamentally, on a bunch of 'on' and 'off' signals (1s and 0s) and logic gates can perform such incredible feats of computing. It is also why a system of molecules that know nothing and want nothing and are subject only to the whims of polarity and electromagnetism can perform all of the sophisticated functions that make life 'life'.
If I didn't lose you in the woods there and you're interested in learning more about emergence, I would recommend you check out the Kurzgesagt video on the subject. You can find it here.
All of these points seem to add up to one thing:
A person has an intrinsic worth that emerges as a function of the unknowable life-sum of their extrinsic worth. As such, it cannot be quantified or understood, at any time, even by themselves.
Maybe I'm going out on a limb on this one. Maybe I'm just trying to wrap this blog post up in some kind of cohesive way even though I am completely out of my depth with my selected topic. (Wouldn't be the first time that I bit off more than I could chew when it comes to writing.) But the point is this:
You are valuable, even when you feel valueless. You are important, even when you feel unimportant. You matter, even when you think that you don't. Even when you are at your lowest, you are more than your current state. You are worth more than the fruits of your entire life combined—and you will never know how much that is. Nobody will.
So love yourself. And when it feels like you can't—and I know it isn't always easy—just remember that what you have done and can do and will do isn't all that you are.
Deep, deep water. So good!