Theory of Self-worth, An Introspection

Ok, this is probably the longest I have spent in deciding on the opening lines, which is supposed to capture your attention for the next, I don’t know, say 5 minutes (considering you have a better attention span than me). Reader Discretion, any resemblance to people, alive or dead is purely coincidental. Your weekend is ending.

Supply and Demand

Yes, you read it right. You are a commodity. The faster you realize that the sorrier you will feel for what you are doing. What are the first thoughts that come to your mind? A man on the street selling onions whose price just crossed that of a Tata Motor share? (For the international audience, Tata motors is a really good automobile company) A Street vendor selling Fuma shoes (Yes, it's not a typo), or does it remind you of the exorbitant money you just spent on your kid’s motorcycle which he definitely doesn’t need considering he is in his 12th? All of this happens because of supply and demand and you are no different.

Money is inevitable, no matter how many good deeds you do, when you are on your hospital bed, hooked to an IV, the doctor is peeping into your pocket not your book of good deeds. You might have as well burnt that book to have kept yourself warm. For money to come, you need to give something in exchange for it and the price that the other person is willing to pay for it is what that item is worth. Now all this is simple if the commodity is, say an iPhone. But when it comes to an individual, it becomes tricky. But like every economic activity, it can be dissected into two entities, the seller and the seller. Yes, there is only one entity.

The Seller

Here we talk about you. The one who is all dressed up, looking fresh as if you have just been plucked out off a farm. You enter a room, where there are people across, wanting to see you sell. Now you have to do the most difficult thing in life, decide your price. For this, we need to go back in time.

The origin

You were one year old when you first took a step with your tiny little feet. You were two when you first talked. You were different, you were supposed to do great things, cure cancer, bring world peace, end terrorism, or some crazier superhuman shit that your parents were dreaming about. They decided to put all their efforts into making you the plumpest, most fresh vegetable on the farm. So they put you into the best school in town, almost draining half their livelihood. On your first day of school, you were supposed to realize you were being put into a factory where irrespective of what vegetable you were supposed to be, you will end up being a tomato. But unfortunately, you were dumb, so you started singing rhymes, writing numbers, and learning how to be a good human.

Years roll. You are not supposed to be dumb anymore, because your parents had put you into the best school in town, you were getting the best of everything. But you were still dumb because sinθ/cosθ was supposed to be some θ that you could never memorize. You are now slowly losing hope. Everything was right, you should have started turning to a tomato, but you were nowhere near it, in fact, you resembled a potato more than a tomato.

This is where the market starts making sense. You see all around you, tomatoes being sold faster than potatoes. Everyone loved tomatoes, everyone bought it and you were a dumb potato. Your parents are starting to realize this. They cannot do anything about it since they already have done everything they can. Now it has all come down to you because you are only a few years away from entering the market. Now you have only three options left, either kill yourself and hope at least the next farming season you end up as a tomato or you paint yourself red or try to be the best potato. You picked Option two, that's why you are reading this. Now you start preparing to look like a tomato. You paint yourself red, you put on a green hat, you start shaping up. You are still dumb, not because you are faking to be a tomato, but because you never realized you are a potato.

From Foetus to a foolish young person, all you have been taught is to be something you are not. And you put all your efforts to be something you are not.

Demand

I have been talking on and on about tomatoes, but let's understand why we love tomatoes?

1. You always need tomatoes to cook.
2. They have a defined methodology for growing.
3. They are always sold.
4. Rates are decent.

Now, if we take a sip at evolution, humans always learned to make more of something that was useful to them. From Language to Gucci, once a human knows it is good, he made a lot of it, he found out ways to make the same thing better by doing research and coming up with well-defined processes. One of the culprits of this is Education, the biggest blunder of humankind.

The very word, the Education system, should have been off-putting for us, considering there is a system in it. We call something “System” it is a Finite Automata. It is designed to go from a start state to a defined, determined end state with an irreversible change. So this system was put into place to grow the best tomatoes all across the world. The system was made better by fitting in ways to sort out the bad tomatoes from the lot so as to maximize profit. We ended up becoming a freaking crop. Education should have been a beautiful concept where we learned and explored new things, but here we are, memorizing g = 9.8m/s². You cannot go to school and expect to come out as something special and different, because that's not how a system is defined.

Single Frame of Reference

Think of a water bottle that costs 20 Rupees at the start of a trek, and 50 Rupees at the peak. Now there is literally no change in the commodity other than its necessity. So your worth always depends on a frame of reference. Unfortunately for us, over the cycles of evolution and progress, rather than having a variable frame of reference, we have optimized a common frame of reference that defines an ideal human being in society. Now the problem with this is, humans are not like any other species for which a single frame of reference would have been sufficient. That is because we don't have a linear thought process and our activities are not limited to just eating, sleeping, and saving ourselves. These general behavioral difference automatically creates multiple frames of reference which unfortunately we ignore, hence we are in a cycle to achieve consistency.

Now I want you to broaden your thought process for the next section because it might sound a bit stupid. Let's say, every human tries to achieve this single frame of reference, irrespective of his characteristics. Now over the course of generations, there will be a point in time where every human can be fit into this frame of reference because of a constant feedback loop/micro corrections in oneself to fit aptly. Isn’t that similar to how we can fit animals into eat, sleep and save oneself cycle? This means, over the course, we will be at a point where we are consistent, an elevated state of consistency obviously when compared to animals, but still consistent. History has taught us that consistent organisms always tended to get extinct by the deeds of inconsistent organisms. This can have two possible outcomes:

1. There will be a consistent group of humans that will be dominated by an inconsistent group of individuals eventually driving the consistent group to extinction.

2. There might come a new inconsistent organism that might dominate all the consistent humans and drive them to extinction.

Does that mean extinction is a common outcome of this single frame of reference? Highly likely.

Parting thoughts

I am glad you read till here, gives me validation that what I have written has not bored you and I wouldn’t hold anything against you if you feel what I have written is absurd. But it's high time that we stop evaluating ourselves from a single frame of reference and trying to fit ourselves into the societal norms that are put across this world. Always have multiple frames of reference when you are judging yourself as well as judging others.