Every morning I wake up, I ask myself:
How do I be someone valuable to society, and how do I create things that are valuable to society?
Ever since I was a child, I think that this question has been a part of me – the part that wants to create something that’s of my own in service of the world in which I live through imagination, thought, and the machinations of a mind that will not sit still.
Some may argue that choosing to make a difference is a matter of disposition.
I don’t want to give to society. I want to live for myself!
Why should I care about what other people think?
I consider people entirely able to make such statements and accept that they exist don’t disagree with that – human beings are different and naturally abide in different worlds; bearing different personalities, we approach the world through myriads of different lenses built from different world views, cultural backgrounds, and educational experiences.
In such a world, might someone not argue that becoming societally valuable is merely one of many pathways. Surely that is an overgeneralization?
Personally, I feel that that is not so, purely because society is a large and far-ranging concept. Rather than an abstract and faraway entity, it is something that is close and begins from those closest and dearest to us before it extends outwards into the world.
Society is fundamentally made up of individuals – our friends, our family members, the people who make up the sum and total matrix of people whom we know and love, and those whom we have yet to know whether near and within our communities, or far away and outside of them.
To bring value to these people and by extension to society is not so grandiose as ending climate change, eliminating inner city crime, or resolving budgetary constraints on a macroeconomic scale, even if those things are desirable – To share laughter that enlightens your spirit is to be societally valuable – to make others cherish you through your words, thoughts, and actions is to bring social value – to create products, ideas, thoughts, and things that inspire others to take action, to make a difference, and to think just a little differently is to bring social value into being and to create something that is meaningful to society. On all levels and in all ways, the barrier of entry to contribute towards society is not so high, and it certainly suffices to play one’s role well as a son or a daughter, a father or a mother or a friend, alongside the numerous other things that a person might choose to do in their careers.
In all likelihood, even if for some unlikely reason we were unsociable and cold or we knew nobody in this world, the ability to create societally valuable things is a key component of survival in the world. Creating things that people value is the key reason as to why people would sacrifice resources for that thing, whether time, energy, or money – it is the reason that people take part in exchanges to mutual benefit, which is impossible to do if one doesn’t discover traits, attributes, or qualities that allow them to be beneficial to the world at large in the social context in which we live, especially in a capitalistic context where survival rests upon the exchange of resources and growing them to meet our ever-increasing set of wants transformed into needs.
There are so many different ways to satisfy the needs of a person in a capitalistic context that command their instincts, willpower, and personal volition together as part of a project of building something that is unique to themselves, yet it is not only in service of capitalistic needs that we create things.
I think that I could have written this in more relatable language and with a little more engagement, but this is what came out of me today – I’ll write a little more later 🙂
