what is a life worth

Really, what is a life worth?

A life can or cannot be meaningful to its possessor. From that an individual derives a  life's relative worth.

A life can or cannot be meaningful to others. From that an individual derives a life's relative worth.

A life has to eat in order to survive. A life must find an occupation that compensates it for its labors, its time, its mental and physical investment.

In the interplay of the three, the personal factors of self-interpretation ebb at a sense of identity by the minute, through the hours, day in and day out. Outside of the friends and social contacts a self keeps, there exists this sense of self, informed from without and projected from within.

Speaking as a person who is evaluating his life I have to wonder how in the world I can survive on my friendships. Because no job wants me. No, they want experience, hard work, physical ability. I have no experience outside the books I read and the classes I took. My hard work is dissolved by so many instances of self-doubt throughout the day that I merely struggle against it. My physical abilities are limited through age, body size, and self doubt, such that I cannot perform satisfactorily at the jobs most readily available.

Left to my own devices or to those furnished for doing a job I work amid a haze of thinking. So I spend my work day dreaming of being and doing something else. I fantasize. And that chorus of doubt echoes through my mind as I work.

What good is it to be intellectually gifted and physically fit in a world that wants results, experience, promptness, and the self-motivated applicant? The fog of self-doubt occludes me from any measure of success. Financially, I have nothing to show. Emotionally, I have nothing to give that I haven't already spent on pitying myself. Physically, I am wrapped in a ball, a fetus of self loathing.

In the world of "can-do" self-starters my life is an affront. It is an affront to those who share the economic realities of money, bills, and family support. "Snap out of it," they may say. Or "grow up." I despise any discourse, armed with medical science, that may want to materialize my own self-absorbed sadness into a treatable illness. I am not ill. I am.

It is unfortunate that I am in a world that demands "I do." Doing is something that I am participating in at the moment, but this, like most of my doing is simply for me, and provides no added worth, no skill, no demonstration of ability that the average employer has neither the time nor the inclination to assess in a job application.

What separates me from the employed? Not much really. I suspect that like my previous jobs, those who found jobs used what connections they had to support an assessment of themselves that made them appear 'reliable,' 'useful,'  and 'appropriate' for an employer. On this topic I have done something. I have turned my back on an occupation handed to me by my father and my brother.

They 'why' here is illuminating. I did it because it doesn't 'speak' to me, nor does any other occupation currently 'speak' to me. I've fooled myself in the past that I would enjoy this or that occupation, but the wisdom of hindsight showed that I simply squander my opportunities out of a self-absorbed self-loathing. I want to fail, over and over again.

Does such an activity tell us anything about my sense of worth? Sure. But it is framed by a world that requires us to present ourselves by a criterion of worth to an employer who seeks employees in specific occupations. This spiritual death that I feel, this empty feeling of complete uselessness is shaped by my actions to find meaning and worth through an occupation. Yet none of these occupations speak to me.

Jobs, occupations, and applications depress me to the greatest degree imaginable. They force me to take stock of myself, and I have done so on many occasions in order to frame my experience and abilities for a cover letter. The way that occupations are mediated by a vast bureaucracy of clicking, filling in fields, and sending documents to addresses amplifies my solitude. And for all the self-negating hatred and doubt that each job, in its endless variety of phrasing how I am not qualified, I am pushed further into a state of self-doubt and depression.