The Importance of Being Useful
“To hunger for use and go unused is the worst hunger of all.”
- Lyndon Baines Johnson
On January 7, 2021, eighteen-year-old Dylan Buckner killed himself. We may never fully understand why. He was a high school senior, quarterback on his football team, sports editor of his school newspaper, had college scholarship offers and mentored special needs students. His father speculated about a chemical imbalance but acknowledged that isolation forced on Dylan by closed schools during COVID was a contributing factor.
Social scientists talk about such tragic losses as “deaths of despair,” lives lost to suicide, alcoholism and drug overdose. Between 1959 and 2017, the rate of such deaths more than doubled. Multiple causes reflect the complexity of human personalities, but commonly cited reasons include isolation, loneliness, lack of work and poverty. Such deaths occur across generations. A 2021 Harvard report found 51 percent of young Americans reported feeling depressed or hopeless in the previous two weeks, with the danger highest among people of color, whites without a college degree and rural Americans. Moving along the age spectrum, the highest suicide rate increases from 2021-2022 were for those 45-64 and over 65.
Along with isolation and loneliness and possibly connected to them as possible causes is a less-mentioned factor. People may feel useless. Dylan lost many of the connections and contributions to others that made his life purposeful. An article by Andrea Darcy for the UK firm Harley Therapy notes that loneliness can contribute to feeling we don’t matter to anyone. New research,” she writes, “suggests it’s not enough to only feel others value us, we need to see that we are doing things of benefit to others.”
A feeling that one has little to offer – is useless – can arise in varied life situations. Workers in jobs that seem meaningless may become depressed, robbed of the dignity that comes from knowing their work is useful to others. A PEW Research study found that fewer than 50 percent of those aged 18-49 reported that their jobs were “fulfilling.” People who have lost a job, been deprived of the ability to function by disease or disability or recently retired from a profession that had enabled them to contribute to others and be recognized for it may wonder what use they still are. George Eastman, founder of Kodak and philanthropist suffered from debilitating pain late in his life. Unable to contribute in ways that mattered to him, he committed suicide, leaving this note: "To my friends, my work is done – Why wait? “ A person who has lost a loved companion has also lost the feeling of usefulness that comes with caring for and about another person. “Broken heart syndrome” has been coined to express that such a situation can result in a heart attack or even death.
We are social beings. Research on contributors to happiness reveals that money and material things do not alone bring lasting contentment in life. For that we depend on strong personal relationships, kindness to others, altruism and making a difference through being useful. Many today look to social media as a way to accomplish this, but it has limits. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy notes that feeling lonely is actually more common among heavy users of social media, perhaps because it separates them from physical connections and the emotional satisfaction they bring from being useful. “Likes” and “followers,” he says, may provide momentary good feelings but not the benefits of being truly connected with others.
There are ways to help vulnerable people feel they are useful and valued for being so. One of the simplest: just tell someone how much you value something they did for you. You can also encourage them to write down each day the things they’ve done to be kind and useful to others. A research study showed that people who did this felt happier than people who did not.
For young people, we can involve them in caring for siblings, older relatives and volunteer work as well as school or college activities that involve being useful to society. Proposals for national service or tying college loan forgiveness to community or public service offer similar potential.
Volunteering is important for older people too, and research suggests it can also improve mental function and memory. Horticultural therapy, such caring for a plant, has been shown to improve sleep and cognition and lessen agitation in elderly people. Caring for a pet can contribute to feeling useful at any age.
As information technologies advance, we will also need to focus on creating new jobs that give people who’ve lost theirs to automation the feeling of being useful.
In the middle of the nineteenth century Dorothea Dix campaigned for better treatment of the mentally ill and served as Superintendant of Army Nurses during the Civil War. “What greater bliss,” she said, “than to look back on days spent in usefulness, in doing good to those around us.” It’s not what we take from life but what we give that is the antidote to the hunger for use. A society that finds more ways to satisfy this hunger is a better society.
Photo Credit: riverchasechurch.org
