Echoes From the Past: "Make Yourself Useful!"

I seem to have spent an unusually large part of my life surrounded by people who measured the worth of a person by their utility.

It started with my father, who from a quite early age on would find me sitting and "not doing anything in particular" and he would immediately say to me "get up and do something useful!"

It didn't take me very long to learn that when he came along and would ask "what are you doing?" that the absolute worst answer I could ever give was the typical thing that a lot of children give which is "nothing..." Instead I learned to fabricate fairly elaborate tales of what I was busily in the middle of — often invoking my mother — in the hope that he would pass me by and not make me go do something like sweep the driveway or run the lawn mower or rake leaves.

Usefulness was very important to my family. In fact usefulness was more important than whether you were a nice person, or you had integrity, or you were honest... the true measure of who you were was how useful you were.

I'm sure lots of children feel this way about their upbringing, but it seemed to me that my parents' primary reason for having a child was so that they could get relatively free labor!

One of the things about these childhood lessons is that they often follow us into adulthood. It's not that we necessarily like the effect of them, or even agree with them, but there's a familiarity there, so we tend to repeat the pattern... even if we're not entirely aware that we're doing so!

Although I grew up to be an adult with no particular desire to focus my life on "being useful," I frequently found myself in friendships and relationships where my primary value to the people around me was the degree to which I was useful.

Truly? I Just thought that helpfulness was a right thing...

Of course that could mean a lot of different things. But usually it meant that I was the one who got called when something heavy needed to be moved, or somebody was moving their apartment, or somebody even needed to be picked up from jail because they had been arrested for being drunk in public! No, I don't have a lot of those kinds of friends, this was while I was in college.

Of course there is nothing particularly strange about human beings trying to be useful.

After all the majority of US culture is based around the "Protestant work ethic," and this culture tends measure itself in terms of how successful we are at our jobs. Which, in turn, is nothing more than an expression of how useful we are.

Of course, I might be a bit of an odd fish because I've always felt somewhat out of step with usefulness as a measure of who I am. In truth, I'm actually not all that useful. Or, perhaps, I'm not very useful in contexts that have marketable and commercial value... but I might be useful in other ways.

I'm often "quite useful" in ways that allow others to not have to hire professionals to do some job.

As I have aged, I have grown less and less concerned about this particular aspect of life. And I have learned what many "useful" eventually have to learn: We always have the option of saying "no!"

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about you? Do you consider yourself a "useful" person? Do you think usefulness is a good measure of a person? Or are there other aspects that are more important? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 2023.11.06 23:59 PST
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