Who Taught Us That Being Useful Determines Our Worth?

Do you try and be useful? Ask someone how they are doing, and there’s a reasonable chance their answer will involve how busy they’ve been. Work is hectic, the children have activities every night, deadlines are looming, jobs are waiting around the house, and there is always another item on a list that never seems to get shorter. Even rest can become something we try to fit efficiently between everything else that supposedly matters.

Being useful can feel good. Helping someone, or contributing to a community, can give life purpose and strengthen our connections with others. Problems begin when usefulness stops being something we offer and quietly becomes the way we measure our worth.

Many of us absorb the idea that being needed makes us valuable, without ever consciously choosing to believe it. Achievement earns recognition, productivity attracts praise and helping other people makes us feel worthwhile. While sitting still, needing support or having nothing obvious to contribute can feel strangely uncomfortable. Somewhere along the way, what we do can become tangled up with what we believe we are worth.

We Learn the Language of Achievement Early

Children encounter measurement almost everywhere. Grades show how well they are doing academically, while sporting results decide who wins. Awards recognise achievement, and adults naturally celebrate important milestones. None of this is inherently harmful. Success can build confidence and encourage children to keep developing something they love.

Problems can arise when achievement receives most of the attention. Children may start connecting what they accomplish with how much they matter. High marks bring congratulations, winning goals get cheers, and competitions naturally put the spotlight on strong performers.

Qualities that are harder to measure can easily fade into the background. Few trophies are awarded for noticing someone feels left out or helping a nervous classmate feel comfortable. Patiently helping a younger child rarely earns a certificate either. Young people notice what receives attention. Over time, those signals can shape what they believe society values and how they measure their own worth.

Being Needed Can Feel a Lot Like Being Loved

Many people enjoy being the person others can rely on. Solving problems, helping family and supporting friends can give us a sense of purpose. Being useful feels good, especially when our efforts make life easier for someone we care about. The difficulty comes when being needed starts to shape how we measure our own worth.

If people regularly turn to you because you’re capable or dependable, losing that role can feel unsettling. Illness, exhaustion, unemployment, ageing or simply reaching your limit can change how much you’re able to give. Suddenly, the person who usually helps may be the one who needs support.

Receiving that help can be much harder than offering it. Sometimes the discomfort comes from an identity built around being the capable one. After years of feeling useful, needing others can leave you wondering whether your place in their lives has somehow changed.

Healthy relationships allow those roles to shift. At different times, we will give support and receive it. Neither position makes us more valuable than the other, and our worth shouldn’t depend on always being the person everyone else needs.

Productivity Has Become Difficult to Escape

Technology has made many parts of life easier, but it has also made productivity harder to escape. Work follows us home and messages reach us almost anywhere. Even spare moments can feel like opportunities to get something done. That pressure has also crept into activities we once enjoyed simply for the pleasure of doing them.

Someone starts baking and gets told they should sell their cakes. A person who loves painting is encouraged to open an online shop. Teenagers making funny videos can quickly find the focus shifting towards followers, growth and making money.

There is nothing wrong with turning something you love into work if that’s what you want. The problem is the assumption that enjoyment should eventually become useful or produce something measurable. A hobby doesn’t need to become a business, and a skill doesn’t have to be mastered. Creativity can have value without an audience.

Children should be free to draw badly, kick a football without joining a team and invent stories nobody will ever read. Adults deserve that freedom too. We can garden badly, sing terribly or spend an afternoon learning something we’ll never use. Doing something purely because it makes us happy is reason enough.

What About People Who Can’t Be Productive?

Our ideas about being useful become more revealing when someone’s ability to contribute changes. Ageing may affect what a person can physically do. Disability can change how someone participates in work or community life, while illness may reduce independence for a short time or permanently. Babies need enormous amounts of care and offer little that we would normally call productive, yet nobody measures their worth by what they can contribute.

Our value shouldn’t suddenly depend on productivity as we grow older. The ability to work, earn, help or care for others can change many times throughout a lifetime. That makes usefulness a poor measure of what a person is worth.

Kindness asks us to see the person before what they can provide. Needing more support doesn’t make someone less deserving of dignity, care or belonging. Contributions also matter even when they look different from those society usually rewards. When communities place too much value on what people can provide, they become difficult places to belong whenever any of us needs help.

Children Shouldn’t Have to Earn Their Place

Children naturally seek approval from the people around them, which makes the messages they receive about worth particularly powerful. Praise often focuses on outcomes: being clever, helpful, talented, well behaved or successful. Those comments usually come from love, but young people are remarkably good at noticing patterns.

When approval appears most strongly after an achievement or when a child makes life easier for the adults around them, they may begin connecting acceptance with performance. The question can quietly shift from Did I do something good? to Am I good because of what I did?

Feeling secure shouldn’t depend on being talented, cheerful, helpful or easy to manage. Boundaries, responsibilities and expectations still matter, but they can exist alongside something more fundamental: the knowledge that a child’s value remains intact when they fail, struggle, need help or have absolutely nothing to offer that day.

Kindness looks different when it grows from that foundation. Rather than helping other people to prove our own value, we can contribute because we already recognise the value in ourselves and in the people around us.

Contribution Still Matters

Communities depend on people contributing their time, skills, ideas and care. Helping others can provide enormous purpose, while accomplishing something difficult can bring genuine satisfaction. Questioning the relationship between productivity and worth doesn’t require us to dismiss either of those things.

The important distinction is between what we contribute and what we are worth. Our capacity to contribute changes constantly, while our basic human value shouldn’t rise and fall alongside it.

There will be days when we have energy, ideas and time to give, alongside periods when we need patience, support or somebody else to carry more of the load. Healthy communities make space for both experiences and allow people to move between them without treating either as a measure of their importance.

Seen this way, kindness stops being something capable people give to those who need help and becomes part of a relationship between people whose value is already equal. Roles can change, circumstances can shift and dependence can move in either direction without anyone becoming more or less worthy of belonging.

Worth Doesn’t Need to Be Earned

Measurement will always have a place in our lives. Schools need ways to understand progress, workplaces need to know whether jobs are being done, competitions require ways to determine results, and communities depend on people being willing to contribute. None of those measurements needs to become a judgement about the worth of the person being measured.

At Zorzle, we’re interested in the messages children absorb from the environments around them, particularly the ones nobody deliberately teaches. When achievement receives constant attention while qualities that can’t easily be measured receive far less, young people can understandably conclude that value comes from what they accomplish.

We can offer a different message without asking children to stop striving, learning or contributing. There is room to enjoy the satisfaction of doing something well while knowing failure doesn’t diminish them, to help others without believing they must always be useful, and to accept support without feeling they’ve somehow become a burden.

Perhaps one of the kindest lessons we can pass on is that contribution has enormous value without being the source of our value. What we do will change throughout our lives, but our right to dignity, care and belonging should never depend on how useful we happen to be.

Join the Zorzle Conversation

We’d love you to be part of the Zorzle conversation. Together, we’re exploring how kindness, curiosity, courage and laughter can shape the world around us and the one our children will inherit.

Come and join us on Substack for more stories, ideas and conversations. Or settle in with the Love, Laughter & Kindness podcast as we meet people, share experiences and explore what a kinder future could look like.