Years ago, when I was a teenager, my dad thought that, in the interests of character building, it would be good for me to work in the tobacco fields, just as he had done as a young man. Although I didn’t know what was involved, I felt I didn’t have much choice in the matter, so I prepared to undertake the work. It ended up consisting of 54 hours a week of hard labor, under a tent with very hot temperatures, and in what probably anyone would consider dirty working conditions.
As a young man I was incapable of judging whether the compensation was fair. However, I did feel a conviction that my view of myself was different from that of my employer. This got me thinking about my true value as a person. It was apparent to me that others, such as my employer, placed a different, lesser value on me than I did.
Over the years I took away a variety of lessons from that experience. I have looked back on it since through a metaphysical lens, and I have gained helpful insight regarding the meaning of our true value. Merriam Webster’s dictionary provides one meaning of value as “relative worth, utility or importance.” To me, that definition seems to make one’s value to be at the mercy of a very subjective evaluation, involving one’s own or another’s perceptions and assessments of individual character—perceptions that may be wrong or inconsistent.
