@theunitofcaring says:

People internalize that the only form of valuable contribution to society is to work a job that pays enough money to meet all their needs.

Maybe that’s true, at least in America.  We are kind of obsessed with money, and employment, and logistical self-sufficiency.

So let me add my voice to the chorus saying: that is a giant pile of horseshit, it has approximately zero correlation with any worthwhile concept of “value” or “contribution.”

And I say this for reasons that are pretty different from, say, @theunitofcaring‘s reasons.

Look – I’m not going to try to sell you on the line that all lives are equally worthwhile, or even that all lives are worthwhile at all.  Nor am I going to try to sell you on the Virtues of Small Pleasures and Simple Moments, or anything like that.  You’re allowed to set your own standards, and there are often good reasons to set them high.  But even if you have a very demanding, rigorous standard for “worthwhile life,” why in God’s name would it have anything to do with whether you can make a living in this hellpit society of ours? 

There are a lot of brilliant scholars out there who can’t get a job because, for whatever reason, they can’t quite fit into the tiny hypercompetitive perverse-incentives-out-the-wazoo world of academia.  There are a lot of genius artists who make no money from their art because its appeal is too narrow or too rarefied, and who make no money from anything else because they’re too busy making art.  There are a lot of excellent parents who are surviving on food stamps and hope because being a parent doesn’t pay anything no matter how good at it you are. 

There are a lot of people who are too fragile, too easily worn down, too screwed-up-in-the-head to be remotely employable by anyone – but who, in their one functional hour per day, create works that are enough to justify God’s ways to man. 

And, on the flipside, there are a lot of people who are paid quite a lot of money to do things that actively detract from the amount of good that exists in the universe.  Capitalism has a lot of virtues, but (at the very very least) there’s nothing inherently moral about its workings except in the most simplified models, and the distance between those models and reality is large. 

Being a financial burden on someone else sucks.  If you like, it’s a tick mark on the wrong side of the value ledger.  But let me say: if I were going to rank people by the abstract value of their lives, “are you making enough money to support yourself?” would be so useless a question on its own merits that I wouldn’t even ask it.