How many people, at some point in our life, developed a grand dream for the future? And how many of us believed that we would grow to achieve our dreams? The sum total of our future suddenly became intertwined with the expectations that we created before we could develop a true understanding of the world. For many of us, this future identity focused on a particular career choice; professional athlete, lawyer, doctor, etc. In high school, I decided that I wanted to become a nuclear chemist to help solve the world’s clean energy crisis. For some people, that dream became a change of circumstance; to change our financial status, leave a suffocatingly small town, or find happiness through community. For others, we looked towards individuals to serve as beacons that seemed to demand our admiration with unshakable resolve; world leaders, actors, athletes, book characters. Regardless of any specific combination of motivators, these symbols represented the inspiration for our future selves, and became our primary method of individualized self-assessment.
While the world provides limitless opportunities for ways to experience life, the unfotunate reality is that the situation of our early lives and our experiences typically result in limited opportunities, especially when our dreams are grandios; there are only so many politicians, professional athletes, famous authors, and actors. As we grow up, our awareness of this reality sets in and we are forced to face an existential crisis; our expectations cause us to believe that we have no value to the world unless we achieve them. How do we then move on? Do we redefine the value of our self-worth when we fall short of the greatness we hoped to be? This belief, to any extent, is a major contributor to the pattern of general dissatisfaction that plagues the modern generation.
We rarely consider that our expectatations were built on an assumption about the possibility to achieve our dreams in the context of the entire world, and that we haven’t considered all the people who aspired to greatness while never achieving it in persuit of those same goals. What is the “likelihood” that these people, situations, or symbols would amass the amount of influence that they did? Michael Phelps was born in 1985, less than 100 years after the addition of mens swimming to the Olympics. What were the odds that he would be born in the last 130 years? What was the likelihood that he would be in the 60% of people who learn how to swim, or that he would be born with an incredible biological inclination? If we apply this for our own lives, what is the chance we were born into a small town, or the probability of unfortunate circumstances that lead to financial ruin?
The complexity of life doesn’t just apply to our circumstance; our entire life experience is shaped by the probability of our existence, and all the characteristics that define it. The year we are born, our demographics (race, geography), familial factors (education, affluence, religion), and other epigenetic influences are all variations of the environment that impacts how we develop. These factors are correlated with our life expectations, and therefore become aspects of our internal value system for assessing self worth. Lately, I’ve become more and more obsessed with this idea and trying to understand where our individual value actually comes from.
The great delusion of self worth
At this point in my life, I’ve accepted that I will likely never achieve any substantial level of influence; I have little desire or time to pursue anything drastic enough to significantly impact the world. The process of accepting this prosaic reality was its own challenge. Life is often a rude awakening where we discover that our lofty goals and radical dreams require hard work, time, and luck that most of us simply don’t have the capacity for. At some point, most of us accept the sobering truth that our hopes and dreams will forever remain imperfectly fulfilled if we are lucky, or more likely ignored and completely forgotten amongst our other shortcomings. This feeling is shared by the millions of other people who falsely believed that they were destined for greatness, only to discover that life is more than likely destined to be pedestrian by comparison.
This flawed approach to gratitude for the opportunities we have been given is, in many aspects, a fear-driven response born of self-pity. Despite the respectable successes of our lives, we are only capable of seeing the failures that are holding us back, causing life to feel pointless or lackluster. My own experience with this negative pattern of thought was born when I was diagnosed gifted as a child. As I grew up, went to college, and joined the workforce, I consistently failed to reach the level of expectation that I had unfairly given myself. It took years of discontent and a healthy amount of therapy for me to achieve equanimity in my own life, and to understand the truth that anyone is capable of a great life without achieving prodigous greatness.
Over the past few years, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on my personal experiences. I’ve spoken with my peers about their unique experiences. I’ve discovered entire communities of people who were diagnosed gifted, only to struggle with life as I did. I’ve spent hundreds of hours and many sleepless nights trying to better understand the value of my worth and where it should come from in the absense of my unhealthy aspirations. In the end, I decided that the idea of self-worth or the measurability of an individual’s value is itself a delusion shared by much of the modern world.
The culmination of my personal experiences, philosophical ideals, meditation, and a shift in my perspective of life have taught me that there is absolutely no criteria for our lives to provide value, and no requirement to meet it. Each of us provides intrinsic value by simply existing as unique individuals with unique experiences. Together as collective humanity, we become the sum total of everything we are. There are many philosophers, religious leaders, yogi, etc. who have taught this very idea. Here are a few of my personal thoughts.
The probability of our existence
Any modern documentary discussing the origins of humanity will start by talking about the great cosmic accident that resulted in “human life”; how amazingly unlikely it was that conditions were perfect to allow for life on earth, and the luck that they would remain stable long enough to allow evolution to produce creatures of such complexity. It can be very easy to take for granted just how lucky we are that any human life exists, simply because it appears to be constant from our self-centered perspectives. In truth, the sheer implausibility of our existence only becomes more absurd the more you think about it.
Let’s consider the very basics of human biology. Most people learn about human reproduction at some point during their childhood. We know that men and women each provide a portion of their DNA at conception. When we begin to think about the likelihood that each of us exists in the context of biological reproduction, it becomes clear how truly unlikely it is that you or I are the exact human that is alive and reading this right now. The probability that the exact sperm fertilized the exact egg that created the zygote that would become who you are now is already so small that we as humans struggle to truly comprehend it. The “unlikelihood” doesn’t stop there; if we think about the likelihood that our biological donors were selected, that probability becomes comically infinitesimal. For the historically traditional couple (with a man and woman), what are the odds that those two people would meet, mate, and combine their DNA to produce you or I? That probability is dependent on every decision that both donors have ever made. They too were born of the same unlikelihood in terms of biological reproduction; therefore you are the compounding unlikelihood of your entire biological ancestry.
But even that level of detail only begins to consider biological complexity. We all know the saying “nature versus nurture”, which hints at the fact that, as humans, we are more than just the unique combination of our individual DNA; we are also a product of our environment, the way we are raised, and every conscious or unconscious decision that we make. Who we are is continuously changing as we participate in new experiences, make new decisions, and create new life of our own. And let’s not forget that we also have an impact on those around us, thereby inextricably linking the state of our own existence to the connections we have with others (humans, animals, and even computers).
Hopefully this hints at the probability of individual existence in a way that would make anyone appreciate their opportunity to live. At this point, we can (in some capacity) begin to comprehend how sheerly unlikely it is that you exist as the selfsame individual that you are within this universe; with your exact combination of DNA, experiences, beliefs, talents, ailments, etc. You can begin to accept the fact that the combination of everything that makes you “you” is so unlikely as to be only “explainable” as an improbable cosmic accident or happenstance.
The truth is that you’ve probably already understood this on some level; throughout your life you’ve likely considered how different it would be if things had been even slightly different. What if I had stayed in a relationship with that ex? What if I had kids? What if I had chosen a different career? Human ego typically obfuscates the true scale of infinite possibilities by accepting most of this unlikeliness as baseline fact (which we promptly ignore). To better understand our value, we have to tackle a problem as old as humanity itself; to deconstruct our ego and the “truth of the self”.
Individuality: the truth of the “self”
It’s always easier to discuss complex subjects when there is shared common ground. To start, let’s go back to the basics of human reproduction and simplify our earlier example to a particular union between two individuals that results in the conception of you or I as their offspring. Accepting the implausibility that you are your exact combination of chromosomes, let’s consider the following question:
What if one of the millions of other sperm had fertilized the egg? Would the person that exists in your place still be you?
I think, for most people, our gut reaction is to say “absolutely not”, for (as mentioned earlier) much of what makes us unique are our cumulative life experiences, and our DNA coding has an observable impact on our lives (e.g. intelligence, attractiveness, illness). However, it is my personal opinion that, with more consideration, the question is a bit more difficult to answer definitively. In this theoretical example, the person in our place still has (at least) half the same DNA via the egg’s chromosomes. This means our “alternate” would share similarities with us in many ways. We can see this to a lesser extent in traditional biological siblings, and to a greater extent in the existence of identical twins. Obviously, this does not make them the “same” person as us, but there is some non-zero amount of sameness that cannot be ignored at the DNA level, and there are likely additional similarities in our shared environments and mutual experiences.
To complicate the question a bit more, imagine (through some microscopic shift in cosmic chance) that your “mother and father” each conceived a child with a different partner, but that the same exact sperm and egg that resulted in you contributes to the existence of these two unique individuals. Would you no longer exist? Would part of you exist in both entities that were born to two disparate families? I think, at this point, the idea that we are our DNA becomes more obscure and we cannot ignore the fact that who we are (at an existential level) must be largely influenced by our experiences in life. In order to decompose this idea of the self as the combination of these experiences, we will consider another line of thinking.
You’ve entertained my notion that your existence is the combination of the probability of your DNA, as well as the likelihood that your parents, through every decision they made in life, would eventually bring them together at your moment of conception. As their offspring, the path of your life is equally incredible; each of our lives can be defined at the highest level as the combination of every decision at each moment given the specific state of our being: DNA, environment, external influences, and other hidden factors. This means that, at its most complex, what makes you “you” consists of the combination of every decision you have ever made, with the current “state” of your life at that moment. You would not be the exact same person if you had made any decision differently any more than you would be exactly the same if you had even a single different nucleotide in your DNA. The realization becomes clear that who we identify as is significantly more shallow than who we are. What we are is the absolute accumulation of all probabilities for our genetic combination and sequence of experiences and decisions that aggregate into a continuous set of discrete states that we cannot even begin to fathom the dimensionality of. However, who we identify as is significantly less complex; we would likely accept the belief that we are the same person if we had instead chosen a different shirt to wear today, but that we are distinctly different from a version of ourselves that would choose to step outside and murder an innocent person in cold blood.
Together, all of this supports the idea that we are not simply the combination of our genes, or the exact sum of our life’s experiences; we are not the same as a twin, or different than alternative versions of ourselves whose differences are inconsequential in the larger context of who we believe we are. In fact, the idea of the “self” is merely an arbitrary set of boundaries drawn in some multi-dimensional space that constrain the space where the combinatorial instance of your DNA and all your experiences exist. The level of complexity with which we draw this boundary is the fidelity that we require to disambiguate ourselves from any other individual. If you still see yourself the same if you chose a different meal for lunch today or a different hat, then that particular attribute or experience does not become part of your “self”. How does our desire for individuality change the way we build our identity?
Seeing beyond disambiguation inimical to self-identity
The beginning of life is a whirlwind of new experiences and rapid growth, both physically and mentally. The primary mechanism of learning at an early age is the ability to disambiguate between things. Most people alive today will remember that toy where you have to put different shaped blocks into different shaped holes: square vs triangle, red vs blue, big vs small. This not only teaches us how to understand things in relation to one another, but how to discover useful features of individual things that set them apart. We learn how to distinguish between hot and cold, light and dark, mom and dad, food and not food. As we age, we use this ability to form a foundation of judgment; that is to say, we use our ability to disambiguate to make decisions.
As we grow older, the frequency of our new experiences decreases and we become increasingly inflexible to the process of learning. We form firmer ideals that turn into stubborn behavior and opinionated beliefs. This can lead to closed-mindedness and unjust bias depending on the diversity of our life (especially childhood), and is likely related to harmful prejudices such as racism, sexism, and classism. Consider someone born in a monocultural community, who learns to separate themself from others on the basis of skin color. While people with such biases are undeniably racist (and historically common), the root cause of this ignorance is on some level connected to a deficiency in experience (e.g. with cultures including people of color). Their limited pool of experiences alone cannot possibly teach them to overcome personal prejudice in regards to people with a different culture, orientation, community, or other arbitrary method of toxic segregation. We have seen the evolution of this behavior many times across our history. For people that suffer from this lack of understanding, their entire system of measuring value is skewed by a general lack of awareness for the reality of the world, which cannot begin to fit within such a narrow mind.
So the question then becomes, how do we see beyond this instinctual disambiguation? The goal is to better understand the value of all humans despite things like race, social class, education, religion, background, gender, height, attractiveness, and talent. Luckily, the answer may be easier to uncover than the problem makes it seem. Similar to learning the secret that demystifies a convincing illusion, once we as humans educate ourselves to the evolutionary mechanisms that cause this effect to occur, we can identify its pattern or signature in our own thoughts, and learn to overcome such weakness. We can study the world around us and become increasingly perceptive to inimical bias, which warps our perspective. We can overcome ineffective and harmful ways to disambiguate born of our individual environmental influences.
In the end, the solution is to realize that we are impressionable, and that the value of something is rarely perceptible without true understanding; there are no shortcuts to identifying this value. We need to experience for ourselves, engage with those who we believe are different from ourselves, and be as open-minded as possible in order to see the true nature of the world. We should account for our bias and not just ignore it. We have to accept that the unique circumstances of our youth are very different from anyone else. We must discern how millions of years of evolution-driven cognitive behavior influence the way we perceive the world, if we ever truly want to understand the value of everyone in it.
Value through human exploration
If you’re still reading, you may be asking how this discussion actually helps us have a greater appreciation for ourselves and others. What is the end result of a life spent searching for value if that value existed independent of our aspirations? How do we achieve a mindset that allows us to appreciate our lives without toxic expectations?
This entire post boils down to one central idea on the value of humanity: each of us is the unique combination of our DNA and life experience. The same life is never lived twice. Therefore, every single person changes the answer to a question that has been asked since the dawn of time: “What is humanly possible?” Every life, every decision is an opportunity to continue this infinite game of human exploration. When we see ourselves differently than those around us, it’s simply an artifact of evolution that has taught us a biologically optimal way to disambiguate; on the cosmic scale we are one.
If you are incapable of seeing the value of a restaurant employee that messes up your order over that of a neurosurgeon, it’s only a remnant of an archaic belief based on misguided opinions about the purpose of humanity. If you accept that we all provide value including yourself, it is only the result in inadequate or excessive self-confidence. Personal ego may cause us to cherish that which sets us apart or alienate us from our community, but each person that is, was, or ever will be is similar to us in a non-zero number of ways; we all share commonality. The value of human life has never been in the individual against all others, as we fantasize about in pop culture, but in the idea that, together, every single individual contributes to and expands what is humanly possible. We are all a finite sliver of an infinite game, and our value is that, together, we redefine our own limits.
Thanks for reading.
