Your life has no value.
There, I said it. Now, no need to get all sensitive or defensive, my life has no value either. In reality, no human life has value.
We humans are a bit egotistical aren’t we? We desperately search for any way to find a purpose for our existence. If a sign isn’t blazing and deeming us worthy, then we create our own tales to find that value ourselves.
For most, human life is given value through God. God gifts us with life. God carefully creates us and cares for all of us. This makes our lives valuable, and in order to properly cherish this gift, we must enjoy life to the fullest. However, the same people who maunder on about this turn around and criticize others for the way they live their lives. All lives being valuable and people not having value based on sexuality, gender identity, or just personal beliefs are two ideas that consistently co-exist in religion. This begs the question: how reliable is religion truly? These two ideas evidently counteract one another, and there’s lots of other faulty lines throughout religion, so can it really be used to reason an answer to such a daunting question? I don’t think so.
Then again what truly is value? In order to definitively say our lives lack it, we must first understand what gives something value. Something is typically deemed valuable through means of how rare, useful, and pristine it is.
One could argue that life is valuable because every single person is different, but this just seems like desperate thinking. Even if everyone isn’t exactly the same, there are billions of people, so some are bound to be extremely similar. Additionally, an object’s unique qualities only really make it valuable when there is a scarcity of it.
However, I must admit that there is a certain degree of value to human life. It is the fact that humanity exists which is special, but not that you exist specifically. Life is given value through the function of connection as opposed to the function of mere existence.You can value someone’s life because you know them and have grown to care for them, but if that person were to be seriously hurt not everyone around the world would be distraught. Meaning that their life has some value, but it’s not total. If people heard through the news that someone had died, generally they would be saddened, but it would be because someone had died, and not specifically because you had.
Establishing love and care as a way to measure someone’s value does set up a strange fact though. If care and love have to be established in order for someone to have a degree of value, then babies are incapable of having any real worth. Sure, parents love their children even at a young age, but this isn’t because of the person the child is, but merely because it is a child and theirs. Love exists for the child, but had they been given a different baby and told it was theirs, the same affection would be held. If this love could be given to anyone, then it isn’t really the love necessary to give life value.
Luckily for you, I guess your life does matter…a bit. It’s a value that isn’t automatically granted and varies from person to person. Our value can’t be absolute since in the grand scheme of things most people’s lives mean nothing, and there’s really nothing wrong with that. Why do our lives need to have meaning in order for us to be able to enjoy them? We don’t need to be carefully crafted and special in order to live the way we want to.