meritocracy to humanity

My quarter-life crisis happened from 2025 Q4 (I’ve just named quarter life crisis cus turning 25 in 2 months anyway). Up to this point, I couldn’t be able to write anything meaningful about this, as nothing could be organized. So much confusion. Finally up to this point, I’m slowly getting some conclusions on clueless questions(starting from my recent post about industry observation). And this post is about my most important learning frame regarding people, which seems to be the root reason for self-insecurity as well.

For a long time, honestly, I did not have the best frame of evaluating people and their lives based on how much they had achieved/are likely to achieve. The latter part could count as belief, tho it required some evidence for me to believe in it. Also, not saying this is bad all the time, ofc when evaluating a work partner/team, this is the right way to do. I think adjusting the same thing for “friends” and even “family” and “myself”, derived other orders of emotions.

The most critical impact was on myself. As in, I noticed I want to prove myself, I’m worth it by forcing myself to achieve success, and learn hard things. Otherwise, I found myself pretty useless. Even regards all the experiences, efforts, and results from historical times.

This is very much of root insecurity, also covered by layers of second, third orders of emotions. So it was very tricky to find out, was fundamentally impacted me in all places.

Concretly when I’m work-wise lost, what happened:

1. Led me to value myself as uncertain. As in, if I am not high performing at the current moment, my existence is worthless (in an extreme sense).
2. Also insecurity over relationships(including friends, work, family, relationships, random people I encounter in daily life), rooted in my view self-low valued, such as overthinking, anxious, reactive, etc.
3. So, eventually stuck in this bit of negative thinking loop, where not helpful at all for eventual genuine exploration even.

Yes this sucks, I’ve already known this, but only up to the point of any surface level of negativity should be changed, so only able to adjust bandaid solutions at the end. This was much fundamental learn about myself, and the conclusion is much about how I should “value” things.

To briefly assume where this mindset was adopted from, multiple factors combined, such as 1) capitalism psyop about successful/productive life being chased. 2) korean education psyop about good grades student is a better human in a hierarchical way(which leads to work culture as well) 3) A sort of self-trait on being competitive, value work achievement more than other values. Probably more, but I weigh more on the solution than the precise reasoning.

Just one note on here, I’m not saying I should have valued hardworking less. Still, after all the analysis, I think I value hard and sincere work, and I want to succeed and achieve great things. It’s more about realizing that “believing oneself truly and pushing for hard work and valuing the skill and high achievement” is independent from “So if I’m not able to achieve a result, my value as a human is decreasing and so does other people”. Former one, I’m happy to keep it as part of me, which I’m proud of, and also I’m happy with it. Later on, I decided to remove it. I’m not proud, and it makes me unhappy.

So I’ve decided to love myself, without condition. Not like I’m satisfied with myself “because I did XYZ”, I’m just happy with myself. And live a life while stacking evidence, such as I tried to be kind, genuine to people, and some proud moments in life in terms of growth, including work, but also personally. I decided to love myself by believing in my intention and my effort. So even in the near term, let’s say I’m not sure what value I’m creating to the world, I still believe that I will one day, with the action. I’m not saying I’ll be delusional. If I hit a low point, I’ll view it as a low point. But starting from an objective evaluation of the point, and moving on to a subjective, optimistic belief, brings so much power to the movement.

If I extend the logic above, I can love people without condition. Again, I’m not saying I don’t value someone who is smart, skillful, experienced, and insightful (I usually refer to these people as “interesting” people and like to be friends with). It’s the same as above, if they are interesting, that itself is an objective evaluation of the point. Subjectively, instead of valuing more than others just because of the objective point, if I like the person, I can just love without condition. And this is what makes genuine personal relations, which makes both happy.

From a different perspective, even though I still value work-wise component much heavier than others, it’s not the absolute truth. What makes “human” is not just about social achievement, at all. This leads to philosophical questions about what is really valuable in life, given the few constraints(unequal environmental start, finite amount, and unknown on start and end etc). So again, this objective low/high point is also objective in a very narrow sense, in the assumption that this belief of value in life is true. But this is a separate post.

Not easy to fully transition one’s fundamental mental model. Knowing and “really knowing” are different. But still, this is what I’ve recently been diagnosed with myself, and I believe this is a big step toward building a genuine security fundamental.

Using metaphors from the book give and take, eventually this is one of the building blocks to becoming a “giver” from one who has lived life as a “matcher”.