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When Your Sense of Worth Is Wired to What You Produce

Mira Calloway4 min read
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When Your Sense of Worth Is Wired to What You Produce — Mind & soul
In this article

There is a particular kind of unease that arrives on a Sunday evening when you have achieved nothing measurable. Not guilt about an unfinished task — something stranger and more personal, a low hum suggesting that you have been, for two days, slightly less of a person. Plenty of capable women describe it. They can tell you exactly what they produced last quarter and not much at all about what they enjoyed.

How the wiring gets installed

Almost nobody decides to tie their worth to output. It accumulates. It begins with being the child who was praised for being clever rather than for being kind or funny or present. It continues with school systems that rank, workplaces that measure, and a culture that asks what you do roughly nine seconds into any introduction. If the clearest, warmest attention you ever received came in response to achievement, you learn something practical: produce, and you are safe.

That logic works beautifully for a while. It makes you reliable, employable, impressive. The trouble only surfaces when the output pauses — through illness, redundancy, maternity leave, a sabbatical, a project that collapses — and you discover that there was no floor underneath. Nothing was holding you up except the next achievement.

Mind & soulMoney & career

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