The Need to Justify Ourselves
We spend an inordinate part of our lives proving that we are worth something.
And most of the time, we don’t even see it.
We lay out our résumé as though pleading a case. We curate what we show of ourselves so that others will find us interesting, useful, adequate. In a conversation, we defend ourselves before anyone has attacked.
We explain why we made that choice, why we fell behind, why we deserve to be here. Even rest must be justified: “I’ve earned it.”
As though simply existing were never enough — as though we had to keep producing an entrance ticket, again and again.
Where does this exhaustion come from
I believe it comes from a world that has made our value a conditional thing.
We are not given a place: we are asked to earn it, and then to earn it again, endlessly.
Be productive, be useful, be visible, be relevant. Value is no longer something we are; it is something we must demonstrate — and the demonstration is never closed.
The moment we let up, the doubt returns: what if I am only worth what I just managed to prove?
When we become a case to defend
This is exhausting, and it is more serious than simple fatigue.
Because when we are forever made to justify ourselves, we eventually become, in our own eyes, a case to defend.
We inhabit ourselves the way one manages a reputation. We monitor the effect we produce. We confuse what we are worth with what we have managed to show.
And the child we once were — the one who played without wondering whether they measured up — we lost them somewhere along the way, buried under the accumulated proofs.
A question that shifts something
I spent a long time wondering how to get out of this.
And I found no method — I am, moreover, wary of any method for ceasing to justify oneself, which is itself just another way of justifying oneself better.
What I found was more like a question, and it was enough to shift something: what if my worth did not depend on what I show of it?
Not a worth to be inflated with positive affirmations.
A worth that would precede performance, quite simply. One that would be there before the result, before others’ eyes, before the proof.
Something like a dignity that is not earned because it was never up for earning.
We recognize it, or we forget it; we do not deserve it.
The daily reflex
I make no claim to live constantly at that height.
The reflex to justify myself returns every day, several times a day. But now I notice it.
I feel the moment when I am about to plead my cause without anyone having asked me to — when I am about to explain, to prove, to earn my place.
And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — I say nothing.
I let the moment be, without justifying it.
It is strangely difficult, and strangely restful.
What this says about us
I believe there is something larger here than a personal matter.
A society that demands each person prove their worth before offering them a place inevitably produces beings who are breathless, defensive, never quite at ease.
And a civilization that pushes this logic to its conclusion ends up exhausting itself — and perhaps, in time, running toward its own collapse.
What we take for lucidity or high standards is often nothing more than fear, generalized, of not being worth enough.
This intuition, I only graze it here. I devote a far larger portion of it to a manuscript I have been working on for years, La Sageocratie: in it, I seek to understand how a humanity might cease to ground its value in performance and proof, and what a world reorganized around a dignity that is not earned but recognized might look like.
It is too vast for these few lines.
The day this book is published, anyone who wishes may enter more fully and descend toward what is here only barely sketched.
For now, I hold to this small exercise — the most humble and the most demanding I know: to let things be, from time to time, without having to defend them.
And to remember that I have, at bottom, nothing to prove to anyone — least of all to myself.