An Unnecessary Person

Trying to make sense of a really empty nest.

Doing my career, we had a method of revealing how necessary we were to the organization. It required a bucket of water and one’s hand. The process was to put the hand into the water and then pull the hand back out. Whatever impression the hand left in the water was a good measure of a person’s impact and value to the organization. Or to say it another way, cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people.

I get it. Organizations and causes are greater than any one individual, unless of course you are Hitler or Stalin. It’s a fact. We are all little people and little people are replaceable. After we are replaced, we are more or less unnecessary, at least in Western culture. If we are lucky, we may get another chance to stick our hands back into the bucket of water, but eventually, we will for whatever reason be forced to remove our hand from the bucket and we will be replaced. Some of us will be remembered, but many of us will simply be forgotten.

I see it when I’m with my old guy. People ignore the elderly or begrudgingly acknowledge them. What do they have to offer? We don’t have time to slow down and listen to them. Being old is only one of the ways someone can become an unnecessary person. After too many years of field work in awful places, I had to quit. I felt overwhelmed with emptiness because I was unnecessary. When I decided to try to merge back into the rat race, the two year hole in my resume and the questions it raised were deal breakers. I was unnecessary.

Those feelings of worthlessness are hard to overcome. I didn’t know where to start, so I did the only thing I knew how to do. I figured out ways to help people, all kinds of ways. It didn’t delete the sense of worthlessness immediately, but gradually, I came to think I might have some value to the world after all. I also learned that no workaround works forever. Some of us must work on it constantly. I must work on it constantly. As soon as I think getting good at being valuable, something comes along and bursts my bubble.

This brings me to my final point: we kind of owe it to each other to see the value and worth in those around us. We are the safety net when one of us falls from valuable to unnecessary. I remember complaining-asking my boss once about why I got all the least pleasant, most demanding with no way to really win assignments. “Because,” he said with a smirk,“you feel no pain.” I thought about how my value was dependent on my stoicism, and if I ever weakened, I would immediately become unnecessary.

When the kids leave the nest, the way we are necessary to them changes dramatically. They get caught in their own rat races and we end up on the back burner, not because they don’t love us, but because they are not so dependent on us anymore.

For married couples, the stresses of life become wedges that drive to people apart, and too often, one of the spouses decides the other is not only unnecessary, but an actual hindrance to their happiness.

It’s a sad and difficult thing when we realize we are unnecessary people. It makes perfect sense in our throw away culture that we are willing to throw away people, too. In a book called What Are People For, Wendell Berry asks these questions. Are people resources, human resources, that are meant to be exploited, used up, and no longer necessary? What happens to them when they are used up?

This brave new, hyper competitive, AI driven culture we find ourselves in makes the question more pertinent than ever. What are people for? Are some people unnecessary?

When I was a kid, a friend had a hippie poster on his dorm room wall called The Desiderata. As I think about what the poster said from my present perspective of years and experience, it seems to answer the question of unnecessary people, that an external determination need not dictate one’s own view of our value. What we contribute over the years may change, but we also possess an intrinsic value that can grow with the years. To discover those values in ourselves and in others needs much more attention than we are programmed to give, but programming can change.

No one is inherently unnecessary.

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.