Worth

I recently started thinking about worthiness. Sometimes I look on my life and wonder if I am a worthy person. I'm sure many other people do as well. Worth is always relative to someone or something, so the question is, am I worthy using whose standards? The problem that I think we have is that we feel unworthy using other people's definition of worth. We feel bad because we believe other people think we are worthless. We then take that to mean that we are worthless, which is not true. We think that this worth placed on us by other people is what worth is. The worth placed on us by other people is only their view of how worthy we are. The standard by which we measure worth should not be other people's standards. The next question is, what are we supposed to be worthy of? Are we supposed to be worthy of other people's acceptance? Do we have to have some worth so others will like us? Is that the worth we want to have? Many times we think worth is to be worthy of other people. Other times we may think we have to be worthy for society. We think if we aren't contributing somehow to the benefit of society, we are not worthy. Why not? Do we absolutely have to contribute to society to have some sense of worth? If that is the only way you define your worth maybe. The last thing I can think of at the moment is to be worthy for life. This is what I believe we should think of worth. Are we worthy of life? Is what we do, what we think, what we feel, who we are, worthy of life? Some people say they are not good enough for life. They don't feel as if they deserve to be alive. Again I have to ask by what standard worth is measured. There are many reasons people feel as if they are not worthy of life. I gave some of them earlier. Most of the ways we define our worth are not what worth is. It is only what others make it, and also what you make it. Everyone tries to look at the worth of things, or people. They see a piece of gold, and automatically think of high worth. That's looking at the gold's worth in terms of money, which would be of high worth in those terms. But when we think of gold apart from money, it is actually quite worthless. You may be shocked at this, because we have always defined the worth of gold in terms of money. Imagine if money did not exist, just for sake of argument. What could you do with gold? You could wear it, but there's no practical use for that gold. That gold is practically worthless. Worth changes depending on how it is defined. So how should we look at worth? I believe that if you are alive, you are worthy of life. The fact that you are alive makes you worthy of life, because you are already alive. Think of gold again; in terms of practical use it is worthless, but in terms of money it is highly valuable. We can be like that gold. Either we can be of no worth or we can be of great worth. We just have to look at it differently.    
-Smart