Everyone Is Fighting Their Own Worthlessness — Who Gets to Decide Your Value?
In the age of AI, shouldn't we change the standard by which value is measured — for our own happiness?
Introduction — Everyone Is Fighting Their Own Worthlessness
There is a Korean drama recently released on Netflix whose English title is We Are All Trying Here. I’ve just started watching it, and it’s quite good. It’s especially fun to watch because Ryu Kyung-soo, who gave a memorable performance in Maybe I Do, appears in it. But honestly, it’s not the drama itself that has stayed with me these past few days — it’s the title.
A note on the title: Netflix translated the Korean title as We Are All Trying Here, but the original Korean — 모두가 자신의 무가치함과 싸우고 있다 — carries a sharper meaning: Everyone is fighting their own worthlessness. That sense of active struggle against feeling worthless is central to everything I want to say in this essay.
So today, inspired by that title, I want to share some thoughts about human value in the age of AI.
Not long ago, I read an essay by Kim Jin-young titled “In the Age of AI, the Truly Scarce Thing Is Human Touch.” It introduced what he called the Starbucks Paradox: Starbucks — a company with an enormous market cap — has been reducing automation and hiring more baristas. This is the “Back to Starbucks” plan announced in 2024 by newly appointed CEO Brian Niccol, who pledged to return Starbucks stores to their role as a “third place.” Consumer response has been positive. Kim’s explanation struck me: in an era when you can brew better coffee at home, people aren’t going to Starbucks to buy coffee — they’re going to buy connection with the barista.
AI is steadily expanding into territory we once called uniquely human. As this continues, won’t more and more people find themselves fighting their own worthlessness? But here’s what I keep thinking: rather than trying to compete head-on with AI, perhaps the real path to reclaiming our value lies in recovering what is most essentially human. Like Starbucks’s “Back to Starbucks.”
In a world where AI is changing nearly everything, the most important question we can ask right now is this: What is value — and who decides it, and how?
▶ This essay is also available as a video
What Is Value? — There Is No Value Inside Objects
I want to start here: value is not an objective fact built into things. It is subjectively determined. Value does not reside inside objects.
Adam Smith explained this in The Wealth of Nations (1776) as the “paradox of value”:
Nothing is more useful than water, and yet almost nothing can be had for it.
Diamonds, on the other hand, have almost no use value, yet can be exchanged for a great quantity of goods.
He separated value into use value and exchange value.
A century later, Carl Menger and the Marginalist school formalized this as the theory of subjective value:
Value is not inherent in the object itself.
What creates value is how much a person who needs the thing wants it in a given situation.
Georg Simmel extended this further in The Philosophy of Money (1900), framing it as a problem of human desire and relationships:
It is not that something has inherent value and is therefore hard to obtain.
Rather, because it cannot be easily had — because it requires time, effort, waiting, sacrifice — we experience it as valuable.
In other words, value is not inside things. It is created in the human mind that desires and evaluates them.
We already know this intuitively, without needing to cite philosophers.
Toss a gold nugget and a fish in front of a cat. The cat goes for the fish without hesitation. A human picks up the gold.
To the cat, the fish is more valuable than the gold. To the human, the gold is more valuable than the fish.
Who is right? Both of them.
Because value does not come from the object itself — it arises from the lack and need of the being that evaluates it.
Money, which we use every day, works the same way. A banknote by itself is nothing more than a piece of paper with ink on it. It has value because people agreed to accept it as money, to trust it, and to use it as a standard of exchange.
Value is not inside things. It is born from human desire, need, relationships, and agreement.
How Is the Degree of Value Determined? — In Whatever Fills Human Limits
So how is the degree of value determined? Does greater quality command greater value? I don’t think so.
Let me tell an old story.
From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, there was a format war in the videotape industry. VHS and Betamax went head to head. Betamax had better picture quality. Yet the market chose VHS, not Betamax.
The reason was not quality. VHS opened its technology to more manufacturers, so hardware and tape prices dropped quickly, and its longer recording time meant you could fit an entire movie on one tape. Betamax, carried almost solely by Sony, couldn’t keep pace.
An analogy: the company with the best engine doesn’t win the car market. The one that also has service shops, spare parts, gas stations, and a distribution network takes the market.
VHS had lower picture quality than Betamax, but it was closer to people’s daily lives. That’s why it won the value competition.
The philosopher René Girard spent his life writing about what he called mimetic desire:
We often want things not because we find them intrinsically good, but because others want them.
Recent research by economists Alex Imas and Madararász puts numbers to this. People are willing to pay nearly twice as much for something when they know only they can have it.
A revealing experiment demonstrated this:
Human-made artwork rose in price by 44% when buyers were told only they could own it.
AI-made artwork rose by only 21% — less than half.
This held even when quality was identical. Those two words — “made by AI” — made people think, “This could be replicated endlessly,” and they discounted it accordingly.
I’ve now shown several mechanisms through which value is determined. But I believe there is one more fundamental reason, underneath all of them.
Human finitude — our limited lives, limited bodies and minds, our very incompleteness — is the root condition from which all value is made.
We valued the bicycle, the car, and the airplane because they filled the limits of our bodies. The crane fills our inability to lift heavy things. The computer fills our inability to calculate quickly.
Humans have always assigned value to whatever fills their limitations.
And paradoxically, because of that, the value of what is essentially human has been chronically underestimated.
These two sentences are the spine of this essay. They are the reason we fight our own worthlessness — and the reason that fight will intensify in the age of AI.
Why Do We Feel Worthless? — Human Value Follows the Same Rules as Object Value
Now let us return to that drama title.
If value in objects works this way, then human value follows exactly the same principles.
When I was in university, I went on a rural volunteer program — a tradition in Korean universities where students spend time working on farms in small villages. In that village, there was a man who was universally praised. He was hardworking: up before dawn, out in the fields all day. He was respected and, I imagine, is doing well today.
In the same village lived another man who didn’t farm, spent his time drinking, and was a constant source of trouble. The village spoke poorly of him.
But I couldn’t stop thinking: what if we were in the era of hunters? A man who lazes around ordinarily but leaps into action when food runs out — who goes out and comes back with game — might have been celebrated. In a time of war, his value might have been far higher.
There is no fixed value assigned to a person as such. Value attaches to whoever can supply what that particular era most needs — and only for as long as that era lasts. When the situation changes, a person’s value changes too.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explained this through his theory of field and capital. Here, “capital” means not only money, but everything valued in a given arena — money, educational credentials, connections, reputation, skill. In farming communities, the capital is diligence. In academia, it’s degrees. In business, it’s money. What counts as capital is determined by the rules that govern that field.
I once gave a talk with the provocative title “What GenAI Revealed About the Triviality of Human Creativity,” and I used a Korean example that I need to explain for international readers.
Seo Jang-hoon is one of Korea’s greatest basketball stars — a 7-foot-1 center who dominated Korean basketball for decades and is a household name. Kang Ho-dong is Korea’s most celebrated champion of ssireum — Korea’s traditional form of wrestling, similar to sumo, which has deep roots in Korean history and culture. He was so dominant in ssireum that he became a national icon, before later becoming one of Korea’s most beloved TV entertainers.
Here is the thought experiment I posed:
Imagine we live in a society where a person’s worth is measured by basketball skill. In that society, Seo Jang-hoon becomes a billionaire and Kang Ho-dong ends up destitute. But that doesn’t mean Kang Ho-dong is worth less as a person than Seo Jang-hoon.
Now flip it: imagine a society where worth is measured by ssireum wrestling. Suddenly Kang Ho-dong is the billionaire and Seo Jang-hoon is penniless.
Here we arrive again at a fundamental truth:
Even people are evaluated by standards external to their humanity.
The philosopher Erich Fromm described modern people in To Have or To Be? as “marketing characters”:
They experience themselves as commodities on the market, and identify their own value with the market price they receive for themselves.
The moment you mistake your social price tag for who you are, you lose yourself. This is what Marx called alienation.
The fight against worthlessness begins right here — in the trap of external evaluation.
Why Do We Fight Worthlessness? — The Struggle for Recognition, and the Vicious Cycle
Why doesn’t the feeling of worthlessness end at feeling — why does it become a fight? Why does the sense of worthlessness turn into pain, and that pain into a lifelong struggle?
I believe it touches something deep in human nature. We cannot determine our own worth alone. We only feel “I must be okay” when we are recognized by someone else.
The philosopher Axel Honneth spent his life studying this and summarized it in The Struggle for Recognition. When the recognition we receive — through love, through rights, through social usefulness — collapses, we do not merely feel uncomfortable. We are wounded in our very self. That is why we fight. The fight against worthlessness is, at its core, a fight to be recognized.
Alain de Botton named this pain “status anxiety.” When we fall short of society’s standards of success, we fear not just poverty — we fear losing love and respect itself. That fear is the engine that keeps us fighting without end.
And the fight doesn’t end with one person’s pain. It spreads to society.
When people lose their jobs and cannot find new ones, they are crushed even further by their sense of worthlessness. Some become withdrawn; others nurture anger and hostility that disrupts those around them. This makes society more inhumane and barren. And within that more inhumane society, still more people develop feelings of worthlessness, alienation, depression, and hostility — which make society more chaotic in turn.
This is the vicious cycle we must stop.
Here, I believe there are three things that every society must understand:
First: In a society governed by basketball rules, Kang Ho-dong may seem insignificant. But viewed from the perspective of what a society needs to function, he is absolutely necessary.
Second: Kang Ho-dong is not inherently worthless. His value only appears lower because the rules this era has chosen happen to value different things. It is temporary.
Third: Therefore, we must not push Kang Ho-dong out of society, or look down on people themselves.
If Kang Ho-dong leaves, that society can no longer sustain itself. If we begin looking down on people as such, the society becomes unstable and chaotic.
The moment we forget these three things, society shakes — and if someone seizes power and rewrites the rules by force, that society’s life ends there.
How to Stop Fighting Worthlessness in an AI-Changed World — Redirect Where We Place Value
There is a reason I am raising all of this now. The arrival of AI has placed us on the most consequential test of value in history.
Here is how I see AI:
The pinnacle of “external value attribution” — humanity’s long project of filling its own limits.
AI surpasses humans in memorizing knowledge, comprehending enormous volumes of text, and finding better answers within it. Professions that once commanded great respect — doctors, lawyers, skilled craftspeople — may no longer be recognized as they once were. And the scope of change AI will bring is incomparably wider than what electricity, the internet, or the smartphone brought.
The historian Yuval Harari has warned that this era could produce a vast “useless class” — people who once proved their worth through work, suddenly stripped of that ground all at once. What we do with them, he argues, is the greatest question of our time.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt anticipated this even earlier:
A society of laborers that is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor — a society that does not yet know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.
That line from The Human Condition is the landscape unfolding before us right now. The drama title — Everyone Is Fighting Their Own Worthlessness — reads like a line written in advance for the AI age.
In this upheaval, if we cling to old rules to evaluate people, society will not hold. It could become a world of chaos and violence. So what do we do?
I find a path in a short parable.
Someone asked a business tycoon: is there any way for our neighborhood soccer team to beat the Brazilian national team?
The tycoon said yes.
Asked for the secret, he said it was neither recruiting better players nor more training. The answer was to climb to the position where you set soccer’s rules — and change them.
Right now, the competition between humans and AI is in full swing. Under the current rules, humans will keep losing to AI. But humans have one tremendous advantage: the rules of human society are made by humans. AI can win within the rules; it cannot write them.
But changing the rules is only the instrument. What matters is which direction those rules point.
I believe the direction is clear:
Shift where we place value — from the external to the internal, from what lies outside human beings to what lies within.
That is the real work to be done.
The great abundance AI will produce — who should it belong to? Our creativity and ability were not made by us alone. They are the result of countless relationships passing through each of us. AI is the same: AI itself is the product of all the relationships, history, and accumulated records that humanity has built over time. Shouldn’t those fruits return to those relationships?
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who say “Tax me more,” and Sam Altman, who proposes distributing AI’s earnings as universal basic income, are all pointing in the same direction.
And the concrete shape of this “redirection” is already visible in Brian Niccol’s “Back to Starbucks.” The economist Alex Imas calls that space the relational sector. The more AI drives down the price of goods through automation, the more people’s spending shifts toward what is hardest to automate. He says it plainly:
The durable jobs of the future are not in monitoring AI or writing prompts. Those are transitional roles. Durable jobs are in the relational sector — where the person themselves is the product.
This is what it looks like to shift value from external to internal. Not fighting AI to win, but moving to a more human place.
Our posture in preparing for the AI age is to recover something more essentially human, isn’t it?
Turning an AI-Changed World into a Human-Flourishing World — Finitude as the Scarcest Resource
I believe the principle for building the new rules of a new era is clear: point not outward from the human, but toward the human itself. Let me reproduce thoughts I once wrote while reflecting on Galaxy Express 999:
Might it be that human finitude — our limited lives, our bounded bodies and minds, our very incompleteness — is in fact the foundational condition from which all value is made? Humans have always placed value on what fills these limits, and so paradoxically, the value of what is essentially human has been underestimated. But if AI achieves some version of the infinite, perhaps from now on we should instead embrace human finitude and limitation — and work to elevate the value of that very thing.
This is not mere sentiment. It is where everything I’ve argued arrives.
Value always attaches to what is most scarce. In a world where AI can infinitely replicate, remember, and calculate, what becomes most precious is ultimately finitude itself. Our time has meaning because it ends; because it cannot be undone; because this moment comes only once. Whatever can be infinitely copied will eventually become common.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of “Being-toward-death” says the same thing: it is precisely because there is an ending that our lives have meaning.
Galaxy Express 999 — the classic Japanese manga and anime series — tells the story of Tetsuro, a boy who travels to the ends of the universe to obtain a mechanical body that lives forever. But at the end of that long journey, he realizes that the finite human life — lived humanly and ended humanly — holds deeper value. And he gives up immortality.
In an age when AI is manufacturing some version of the infinite, perhaps all of us are standing exactly where Tetsuro stood.
The philosopher Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics points to the same place. The good life, he argued, comes not from accumulating external things — money, honor — but from living out the unique nature and capacities within oneself. In other words: the good human life is found not outside the human being, but inside.
Here, then, is the summary:
For too long, we have spent our energy placing value on what is external to us.
Now, let us put a little more effort into attributing value to what is internal.
Let me stand once more before that drama title: Everyone Is Fighting Their Own Worthlessness.
I do not believe the way to end this fight is to learn to fight better. I believe it lies in recovering what is more essentially human — rather than striving to compete head-on with AI.
And if, on that recovered ground, we can write new rules with human hands — rules that place greater value on what is essentially human — then the world AI is changing can become a world where people are happier.
And in that world, everyone fighting their own worthlessness — that painful, exhausting battle — need not happen anymore.
That kind of world — isn’t it possible?
References
→ The inspiration: Netflix drama We Are All Trying Here (Korean title: 모두가 자신의 무가치함과 싸우고 있다), starring Ryu Kyung-soo
→ Brian Niccol’s “Back to Starbucks” plan: Strategy by Starbucks CEO (appointed 2024) — Starbucks Official Newsroom
→ Value scarcity · Relational sector: Original video
→ Rules of the game · Relational returns: Original video
→ Theoretical foundation: Kim Jin-young, “In the Age of AI, the Truly Scarce Thing Is Human Touch” — Original essay
→ Thinkers woven into this essay: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (paradox of value) · Carl Menger (marginal utility, subjective value theory) · Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money · René Girard (mimetic desire) · Alex Imas & Madararász (relational sector, scarcity) · Pierre Bourdieu (field, capital) · Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? · Karl Marx (alienation) · Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition · Alain de Botton (status anxiety) · Yuval Harari (useless class) · Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition · Bill Gates & Warren Buffett (”Tax Me More”) · Sam Altman (universal basic income in the AI age) · Martin Heidegger (Being-toward-death) · Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (eudaimonia) · Galaxy Express 999