Know Your Value

There’s a subtle narrative running through our culture: that being human means being flawed. Our bodies get tired and age, our minds get clouded with emotion, and our decisions bend toward bias and inconsistency. Next to machines, which are built for precision, free of feeling, and running the same clean process every time, we can start to feel like the inefficient version of something better.

But that story gets the whole equation backward. What looks like a design flaw is actually where our greatest strengths live.

What guides us? It turns out that deep down, logical, efficient answers aren’t the main criteria for how we make meaning of the world. And that’s a good thing. We see through the lens of our experience, which is subjective, and interact with others on the same journey. The result is a redundant and far from perfect jumbled mess of human expression, interaction, development, and yes, destruction. It is full of false starts and contradictions. It is, by any efficiency standard, a terrible system.

And yet it’s the system that got us here. Every act of unexpected kindness, every creative leap that didn’t follow a straight line from the problem to the solution, every time someone chose connection over the “rational” choice — that’s the mess doing what it does. A grieving person comforted not by the right words but by someone simply staying in the room with them. An idea that only made sense once a person let go of the “correct” way of doing things. This is the system working exactly as it should.

So, emerging from the mess of humanity are the important things—the qualities and desires that uplift us, even if they’re not logical or even reasonable. These are attributes that brought us from the caves to develop thriving civilizations, and from the dark ages to one guided by a quest for progress.

No matter how it’s programmed, AI will never be able to replicate these central human truths. They are core to our being and are what make us uniquely capable of holding the power we do.

So when the world tells you that your emotion, your inconsistency, your very human mess is something to smooth out or optimize away — know that it’s not a flaw to fix. It’s your value. Remember it.