Who Are You -if- You Are Not Useful?
Our identities are intrinsically tied to what we can produce for a system set up to fail us.
If you are anything like me, you avoid parties with people you don’t know, casual encounters at some random bar, and small talk -like the plague. The whole “So, what do you do?” coversation starter is too exhausting. The weird compliments from men with alterior motives are something all women understand, but even more universal is being held coversationally hostage by a stranger. I loathe it. Trying to find a way out of a monotone game of sniffing each other’s butts is a weird practice. It’s merely an echo of the adults at family gatherings when we were in high school- “so… what classes are you taking?”, “what are you gonna be when you grow up?”, “what colleges are you applying to?” All in an effort to do what exactly- get to know you better?
We've been trained by these family members to believe that knowing someone's job tells us who they are. As adults ourselves we play out what Carlos Castaneda referred to as ‘controlled folly’, the delusion that we have certainty because we have decided it to be so. Seconds after meeting someone, we want to place them in our mental filing system: accountant, teacher, entrepreneur, stay-at-home mom. This is the social conditioning at play.
But what if this fundamental question is actually fundamentally wrong? This isn't how humans have understood identity for most of our existence. What happened?
The Flattening of Human Identity
Shamanic wisdom as shared through Carlos Castaneda’s encounter with Don Juan speaks about how it is the job of the shaman to act as if he is important, but know that he is not. He is not more important than anything or anyone else and we are all in a play with our particular roles carrying out an act to see it through. In the big picture- nothing actually matters. If one were to take this to heart and truly explore it and apply it in a balanced effort to find peace within- it would shatter that individual’s worldview. The heirarchy of -being something- would implode.
However, industrial culture has performed a sleight of hand so complete that most of us don't even notice it happening. Somewhere along the way, we began conflating our identity with our utility. We started believing that our worth could be measured by our productivity, our value determined by our compliance, and our entire selfhood compressed into what we do for eight to twelve hours a day. We began to become our career focus. We decided one is better than another because of what we do during the time we are clocked in performing a role for someone else… in this case a faceless industry.
Anthropological research reveals that "personhood emerges" not in isolation but "with regard to place and how non-humans can also be recognised as persons."
This idea touches on fundamental questions about human identity that go far beyond Western social traditions. The evidence suggests that our sense of who we is not innate, individual property, instead it is something that emerges through our relationships with both our environment and energetic realms.
Consider how many Indigenous cultures understand personhood as extending beyond humans to include animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and spiritual beings. The Maori concept of whakapapa, for instance, describes kinships that encompass not just human ancestors but the natural world itself. A river isn't simply a resource or geographical feature. It is understood as an ancestor, possessing its own form of agency and deserving the same respect as a person. This radically different understanding of personhood challenges the Western notion that consciousness, rationality, or utility defines who counts as a "person."**
The idea that personhood "emerges with regard to place" also disrupts individualistic assumptions. Many cultures understand identity as inseparable from land, community, and ancestral connections. Your sense of self isn't contained within the boundaries of your skin but extends through relationships, obligations, and belonging that connect you to a larger web of life. The Aboriginal Australian concept of Country illustrates this. Identity is literally tied to specific places, with people seeing themselves as part of the land rather than separate from it.
When I was young my favorite thing was to climb trees. I would sit on a branch with my dog at the base and take note of how humans are the same colors as nature. Our eyes are like the oceans and the sky, our skin like the colors of the desert and the soil. It was something that seemed obvious to me as a 6 year old and was the inner motivation for everything I studied later. I found shamanic medicine early (thank the Goddess) and Chinese medicine as well reflects this concept.
It was natural for me to question this dynamic perhaps and specifically because of my time growing up with nature as my teacher. If personhood isn't primarily about what you can produce or achieve, then "who are we if we are not useful?" begins to dissolve. You are already somebody by virtue of your existence within your connections.
Indigenous cultures believe ecological belonging is among the highest quality for community-building and leadership. Identity isn't about what you produce - it's about how you relate, where you belong, and what stories connect you to an expanding idea of life.
The Two-Dimensional Human
Our industrialized culture has created what we might call the two-dimensional human a person whose entire identity gets compressed into two primary functions: productivity and compliance. You are what you do for work, and you are how well you follow the rules of that work. And… your worthiness is defined by how much money you make from that work.
This reductive view asks us to ignore vast territories of the human experience:
Your capacity for wonder and creativity outside of monetizable skills
Your role as storyteller, dreamer, or wisdom keeper
Your connection to seasons, cycles, and natural rhythms
Your gifts as a friend, community member, or spiritual being
Your unique way of seeing and experiencing the world
Your relationship to place, ancestry, and belonging
When we reduce ourselves to our economic function, we're essentially agreeing to be seen - and to see ourselves - as human resources rather than whole human beings.
The -You’re A Good Person- Trap
Part of the cultural programming runs even deeper than productivity. We're taught that being "good" means being nice, accommodating, and compliant. Good people don't rock the boat. Good people put others' needs first and get vaccinated with experimental toxins. Good people work hard and don't complain.
This version of goodness has nothing to do with wisdom, authenticity, or genuine care. It's about being manageable and profitable for systems that need our compliance to function.
Question Your Identity Beyond the Job Description
What is your relationship to the land where you were born? Black people in the United States have a unique culture and worldview that belongs to them because they have not forgotten their ancestry. What is your role in the seasonal cycles of your community and what stories will you carry forward? The Lakota people of North America honor cycles and stories and have a deep wisdom about the record of humanity. Depending on your stage of life and the wisdom you have gathered, do you hold, honor or ignore your spiritual gifts and callings? Grandmothers and elders are locked away in sanitary environments instead of integrated within the cultural unfolding of our futures.
And those especially from traumatic backgrounds understand our families and kinships extend beyond biology. Indigenous peoples have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how they came to be in a particular place. Perhaps, finding your creation story will help reconnect you to your origin, your truest being.
When the Two-Dimensional Identity Cracks
What happens when people can no longer perform their assigned role as productive, compliant workers? Look at how difficult the retirement program is on a person’s soul. I imagine it is similar to what I experienced when my eldest daughter grew up and went off to college. I buckled from the loss of her in my daily life and had to contend with recreating an identity that wasn’t centered on how good of a mother I was. We see versions of this everywhere: the midlife crisis when someone realizes they don't recognize themselves anymore. The quarter-life crisis when recent graduates discover their degree didn't deliver the promised identity. The burnout that comes not just from overwork but from existential emptiness.
These are felt as personal failures. In reality they're the inevitable result of trying to force an infinitely complex being into a two-dimensional box. If you couldn't introduce yourself by your job title, how would you describe who you are? The path back to authentic identity isn't about rejecting work or responsibility rather it's about refusing to let those things define the totality of who you are.
Try my “Remembering Self” experiment for the next week: When people ask what you do, answer with something else entirely.
"I'm someone who notices energy in the people around me." "I'm a woman/man/person who helps others feel seen." "I'm learning to understand what my dreams are telling me." "I'm working on becoming a better ancestor."
Notice the discomfort - yours and theirs.
When I say to my clients “Productivity is an inside job”- this is what I mean:
In a culture that profits from your two-dimensional compliance, becoming authentically multidimensional is a revolution. It's refusing to reduce yourself to your resume. It's insisting on your full humanity even in spaces that only want to benefit from your labor.
I am not advising you become unemployable or abandon your social responsibilities. I am saying you can expand your sense of self beyond the narrow confines of what capitalism tells you matters.
Your identity is not your job. Your worth is not your productivity. Your value is not your compliance. You are a whole human being with depths and dimensions that no economic system could ever fully capture or contain.
These questions "What do you do?" “What are you going to be"?” can be an internal trigger for you to reclaim the answer to "Who are you?" And that answer is yours alone to discover and define.
In burnout or trauma recovery you're not just healing your relationship with identity, you're modeling a different way of being for everyone around you. You're proving that we can be valued for our beingness not only our utility.
And that might be the most productive thing you ever do.
** Black’s Law dictionary makes the distinction between a natural person - a living being and a person that includes corporations and dead entities.