One's "Worth" and "Value"

I can’t seem to shake the thought process behind how I “value” myself as a person. It seems that whenever I am not achieving some kind of accomplishment (like getting better at art or improving my knowledge, etc), I feel more insecure about myself and my worth as a person. My confidence and “human value” seems to be tied to constantly displaying my accomplishments and making sure there is a steady stream of them.  Whenever there is a slowdown, my mood seems to plummet.

I wonder how much of this is innate and how much of it is cultural programming. It’s pretty shitty how the gender stereotypes play out in the West. Women are generally taught (whether directly or not) that their value comes from how pretty they are and how well they can attract a man. And men are taught that they need to be accomplished and get shit done and “look impressive” to be worth anything.

We rarely get the message that it’s ok to JUST BE.

I wish I was content with just being a decent person who doesn’t treat people badly. The accomplishments and everything else would just be the gravy on top and not be an essential part of what my value is. What’s more, it would be amazing to somehow transcend this value/worth-based paradigm and way of looking at people. That’s the ultimate underlying culprit here that I can’t seem to escape.

Although writing it all out like this seems to help a little.

Western Influence

I have never seen this issue summarized in such a clear manner. It's worth a read.

"The West decided what a nation was, determining the boundaries of the new nations. It decided which peoples got their own nation and which did not. The results are as bad as with other Western top-down schemes in developing countries today. The west imposed its map of the world on a quilt of thousands of linguistic groups, religious creeds, tribes, and racial mixtures. The West's drunken parallelograms did not give nations to some existing ethnic nationalities while creating other nationalities where non existed before.

The resulting "nations" started their ill-starred journey with ethnic and nationalist grievances.

The West played with peoples as chess pieces in pursuit of the West's own security aims, frustrating the right of peoples to choose their own destiny.

The political crises that make the headlines today have some roots in past Western treatment of peoples as "pawns in a game." Look behind the modern-day headline and often you will find the machinations of some long-forgotten colonial planner."

William Easterly