Introduction

It is that time of year again, when the eternal blue skies of summer yield to the thick blanket of monsoon clouds. Soon cool, misty rain will mark each day sending us all indoors. For eight weeks I had been on a hectic schedule with my cottage building, trying to beat those rains. The roofer has now covered the top with underlayment, protecting it from the ruinous water and I can slow my pace to a more humane level.

Being inside means to me, it is time to write. Writing is my friend, the pen, my crutch, holding me up during my darkest hours. I’m still pondering if I should write a new novel, tentatively titled, A Whisper in the Holler; An Appalachian Gothic. I will keep you posted.

Today I have decided to write a series of articles. But this comes after much internal debate. I am a candid person, pursuing personal honesty the best I can. However, this topic will require me to be more vulnerable, more honest, and offer readers more opportunities to misunderstand my point. But what do I have left to lose?

One of my favorite podcasts that I listen to while I’m working on the cottage is Hidden Brain, hosted by Shankar Vedantam. It is a wonderful series addressing provocative topics in psychology and sociology. He, being like-minded, likes to take the topics to a deeply personal level, his expert guests often sharing intimate struggles from their own lives, as well as evidence from research. One conclusion he makes over and over, is how honesty could make our societies much healthier. One example is that personal failures outnumber our successes, however, most people are prone to only share their successes. This is truer in the age of soundbites and social media. It is a long tradition for us to only show our good side. As our social exposure is becoming narrower (consider the difference between a Facebook post and an evening at dinner with friends of years gone by) our “good side” is all others will ever see. This gives each of us the false impression that everyone else is experiencing oustanding sucess in their person lives, but we are not.

Having a healthy valuation of my own self-worth has been a challenge my entire life, much more so since cancer has taken so much from me. But I do not believe that I’m an outlier and this article is not an exercise in self-examination. It is not meant to be about me, but about us. It is my opinion that most people struggle with this valuation but would never speak of it outside their own heads. I think those who are most confident are often the most insecure. The person who steals all the attention at a social event is compensating for their private feelings of inferiority. Yes, I do think there are those who have a healthy self-valuation, but they aren’t the people you would expect. It is the grandma who is raising their own grandchildren, working two jobs to make ends meet. They are so busy and goal oriented, living from meal to meal, that they don’t have the time or energy to consider their own value or what other people think of them.

I am not a psychologist and don’t claim to know the field that well. But through my own years of meditation about these things, I now believe that the underlying driving force to our thinking and behavior is this eternal pursuit to matter. To have worth, enough so, that gives our lives meaning. This is why people have careers. This is the pursuit of money. Having X number of dollars in the bank is a direct reflection of what we think we are worth as humans. Olympians endure unfathomable hardships to come out near the top, and thus sealing (so they think) their own self-worth. Dictators like Putin declares war on his neighbors out of a place of insecurity. As he turned 70 this year, I suppose he was feeling insecure about his legacy. A marble statue of himself in Gorky Park might suffice, in his warped thinking, to give him that value. Suicide comes only when the person assesses their value as worthless; not having the value to even breathe oxygen anymore. Those idiots who shoot up schools or shopping centers, do so as a desperate act of trying to create personal worth. It sounds warped, but if they can’t achieve a positive worth then a atrocious act would suffice. P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

Generation Z’s new ticket to feeling selfworth, or so they think, is to “go viral.” Fame as an “influencer” or famous on TikTok might give them that sense of worth . . . for a few days.

I know for me personally, my pursuit of value has fueled my greatest accomplishments, and my biggest mistakes have come from acts of desperation to have value when I feel I have none. Come with me on this journey as I explore this personal saga and with a pursuit of how do we best approach this in a healthy way.

Mike