The Problem With Basing Self-Worth On Productivity

“How do you know that you have self-worth?”

When a solid thirty seconds elapsed and still no coherent answer came to mind, I knew that I had work to do. Whether or not this was going to be a potential interview question asked of me as a contestant in the 2019 Miss BC Pageant (hosted in British Columbia, Canada), it was clear to me that beyond being able to confidently answer an interview question, I needed to be able to answer this question for myself.

Why? Because I knew that for the rest of my life, it would be impossible for me to feel confident, empowered, and like I have the right to use my voice to effect meaningful change if I did not believe that I was worthy of being there in the first place.

As I approached what would be the most challenging, terrifying, intense, and overwhelming weekend of my life as someone who has been very sick and debilitated by Central Sensitivity Syndromes for many years, it dawned on me that after years of isolation, being predominantly housebound, and not doing anything our society seems to be traditionally productive and valuable (like pursuing a successful career, traveling around the world, doing volunteer work, raising a family, achieving higher education and so on) I was suddenly going to be in a room with 50+ women who were all doing these amazing things while I was lying in bed contending with symptoms. (Yes, I know I should not compare but I am human and the thought naturally crossed my mind. The point is not that I compared, the point is the action I chose to take as a result of it).

It brought to the forefront this concept and question of Self-Worth. How did I know that I still have self-worth? How could I possibly stand beside these women and still feel like I was enough? What is self-worth? Where does it come from? How does our society, environment, upbringing, and social conditioning all influence how we perceive our self-worth and value as human beings?

I had to look back on my life and where it seemed like I was deriving my self-worth from and what that moment of my 2014 Big Crash (becoming fully debilitated by the chronic diseases and losing everything that I was working for in my life) taught me.

I remembered the identity crisis I went through when I lost my ability to work, take care of myself, take care of others, volunteer, and simply be a productive member of society. I felt WORTHLESS. In the eyes of what this world had taught me, I had no value. My life had no value. I could do nothing and so I was worth nothing. That feeling threatened my life many times over.

And that is when I realized: so many of us tie our SELF-WORTH and VALUE to our level of PRODUCTIVITY. We internalize this message that to be deemed as worthy, we must DO THINGS in order to feel like we are worth something. We must achieve enough in order to feel like we are enough. And the fallacy of this is that if our self-worth and value depend on being productive, we will NEVER feel as though we are enough and thus we will never feel fully worthy.

Allow me to share with you the rapid, unedited stream of thoughts that flowed out of me one morning:

June 13, 2019

So the logic behind it is...by definition, productivity requires continuous action in order to achieve an even better and even better and even better result. To stop altogether would be considered zero productivity.

I think as we grow up, the true meaning of self-worth is obscured. We grow to associate self-worth with productivity. Being better, doing better, having more. This is the foundation for why there’s even the phenomenon of the rat race that we’re all trapped in.

To break free from that rat race requires understanding that self-worth doesn’t come from anything that we’re striving for or have set as goals. When we’re born, we’re born worthy. We’re already born with intrinsic self-worth.

When a baby is born, we don’t see it as worthless. We innately feel like this newborn is precious and of immense, immeasurable value to us. Why? It’s literally not doing anything that we, as older human beings, consider to be necessary for feeling valued and worthy. The baby does nothing but exist and yet it’s of value.

We all start out like that. We are all born worthy and valuable. The only difference is that this knowledge is obscured by social conditioning and thinking patterns that have been passed down but not questioned and therefore not dismantled as they need to be.

The baby has infinite potential, that’s why we as adults value it so much. In that pure, untouched state, we can see that boundless potential. And then we forget and it gets obscured the older the baby (and thus ourselves) gets.

But that infinite potential and value we’re born with doesn’t go anywhere as we get older; they don’t lessen, they don’t increase. They’re constant in their infinity. But like I said, this potential and value become obscured by all the distractions and false truths that this world inundates us with the more we’re exposed to it.

And going back to the question of “How do you know you’re enough?” - I said that when we’re born, we’re born already enough. But it’s profitable in a capitalist society to feed people the lie that they are not enough in some way. Creating this feeling of lack generates this need to then fill ourselves so we don’t feel like we’re lacking something. So we pursue things, we aim to be productive, we buy things, we pay for services that make us feel like we’re moving forward and getting closer to making ourselves feel like we’re enough.

We’re in this world that’s telling us we’re not enough. We’re believing we’re not enough. We’re acting in ways to remedy this feeling of not being enough. And if we believe we’re not enough, then we believe we’re not fully self-worthy. Because at the foundation of feeling like you lack self-worth is the belief that, in some way, you’re not enough.

All this to say: imagine what this world could be if we never forgot that from the moment we’re born, we’re born worthy, we’re born being enough, we’re born with endless potential?

We then wouldn’t fall into the traps of doing things that keep us thinking and being smaller than we intrinsically are. We wouldn’t care so much or be motivated so much about the grades, the resume, the job, the salary. We would be free to really live out our higher purposes, to not act in order to obtain wealth and material things.

We wouldn’t act because we feel the need to in order to prove ourselves (eg, feel the need to work so hard and appear so busy to gain respect in the community). We’d already know that we are enough just as we are, which then frees us to act simply because it creates joy.

Any resistance we feel to fully accepting this truth is a result of our human nature. We don't like change; accepting this requires us changing our whole belief system and how we view life, the purpose of life, and how our world has been constructed.

It creates a subconscious fear: to fathom that we are infinite potential makes us fearful because we then have to let go of everything we know and every way we've been operating up to this point. And it's kind of like what was said in the movie The Matrix: most people wouldn't leave the Matrix if they had a choice. It's comfortable being in the rat race because it's what we know.

But what we know is wrong. It’s time to change this mindset. It’s time to reclaim the truth that we are ENOUGH right now. We are WORTHY right now. Period.