A Fiction Of Worth
How Comparison Infects The Self
A man’s value, in the modern sense, is rarely intrinsic. It is indexed—measured by influence, status, productivity, or approval.
The word influence itself betrays the sickness: once, it meant a flow of power between bodies, as in influenza—a contagious affliction passed invisibly from one to another.
So it remains. Most people contract their self-worth from others.
They do not feel valuable; they feel valued. And that is not the same thing.
To be valued means to be appraised, ranked, and measured. It implies a hierarchy in which your worth exists only by comparison. Someone must be less so that you can be more. It is a marketplace logic—one that the culture of self-esteem has simply repackaged as virtue.
But the self is not an economy. You cannot profit from yourself.
To “improve” or “enhance” your worth is merely to change your market position within an imaginary scale.
What the woman in The First Wives’ Club suffers is not loss of love but loss of valuation. Her worth has been denominated entirely in another person’s eyes, and when that currency collapses, so does she. Her tragedy is not psychological weakness but social contagion: she has caught the idea that to be unchosen is to be nothing.
This contagion is everywhere. Social hierarchies depend on it; whole industries are built on feeding it. Therapy, coaching, advertising, religion, and romantic fantasy each offer, in their own dialects, the same transaction: Give us your uncertainty, and we will return you to value.
The Practice of Peace proposes a different premise: that worth is not comparative but existential.
To be alive is to be of worth. The measure is breath, not status. It does not increase or decrease by achievement, beauty, approval, or love received. It simply is.
When men begin this practice, they often ask, “How do I know if I’m doing it right?” The question itself carries the infection—it assumes a benchmark outside the self. But peace does not depend on performance. It begins when the very idea of “right” or “better” is allowed to dissolve.
To see oneself without comparison is to recover from influence. It is to remember that no one else’s estimation can raise or lower you, because there is no scale, no higher or lower at all—only differing expressions of the same finite condition called being alive.
A mirror shows no rank. It reflects equally the famous and the forgotten, the attractive and the plain. The challenge, for most, is not to become better but to remain visible to themselves without reaching for a price tag.
That is the quiet practice of peace: to move from being valued to being real.
