Before we begin: this article is written from the perspective of my own Christian (and, to a lesser extent, Buddhist) worldview. This is reflected in my language and terminology. But nothing I say means anything different if you don’t identify with Christianity or Buddhism. I might use Christian language, but everything in this article is demonstrably true from a fully secular perspective.

You are never enough

Recently, I’ve helped a fish welfare charity hire for a particular position in their organisation. The role is highly technical, and it requires expertise in both remote sensing and machine learning.

When I was reviewing the many CVs submitted for this role, I was astonished by the sheer volume—there were just dozens and dozens of people with deep expertise in both of those highly technical fields. I felt a bit overwhelmed by my own unimportance—if there are so many people around the world with such deep expertise, including in my own disciplines, then what good is my own experience and expertise? If there are so many researchers who publish numerous papers and book chapters every month (especially in the context of large language models like GPT making this even easier), what good is my own publication record?

I’ve been sitting with this Bible passage from Matthew 3:9 (NRSV):

Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.

This is a quote from John the Baptist, at the beginning of the Gospel story. John is having a go at the Pharisees and Sadducees—these are Jewish sects from Jesus’s historical period that are often criticised by Jesus for being too legalistic and missing the bigger picture.

In the above passage, John is essentially saying: your rank doesn’t matter. Your status as a member of a particular religious community doesn’t matter. God doesn’t love people because of their status or rank.

That is, no marker of status or specialness can ever make you truly special or unique. You can’t rely on a particular ability or skill or status symbol as a point of distinction.

Grace is not social status

Grace has nothing to do with social status. When I say “you are enough”, I don’t mean “you deserve to rank highly in society”. In fact, the truth that “you are enough” is really the polar opposite of caring about social status.

We live in the 21st century global civilisation. Much ink has been spilled, especially in the business and self-improvement literature, on how to improve your status in this society and how to “succeed” in the modern digital economy.

I think improving one’s social status is totally misguided. Modern society is founded on oppression and exclusivity, not acceptance and inclusivity (and, for those of us who consider animals worthy of moral consideration, mass industrialised torture). One’s social status is upheld by the same system and even the same individual people who are actively complicit in this oppression. You can buy as many business and self-improvement books as you want. You might succeed and get the comfortable job, the shiny car, the trim waistline. But those are things that are valued by the same people who think that it’s okay to be wealthy without caring for the homeless and the disadvantaged, or that it’s worthwhile to sacrifice sleep for the benefit of your company’s profit, or that it’s okay to demean people’s bodies if they’re different.

I’m reminded of The Amish Way: Patient Faith in a Perilous World, where Donald B. Kraybill and coauthors describe the faith of the Amish communities in the United States. The authors write that this world and its values are not the Amish people’s ultimate frame of reference—they are focused on something greater. There’s also a great Bible study on this topic here, which especially addresses the role of children from a queer perspective—the people who the world thinks are out of God’s grace are actually in.

Meaningful work

You will never be the best. This idea is taken further by Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. In that book, Burkeman explains that the book itself is essentially an extended argument for giving up hope. There is no hope, and this is deeply liberating.

There is no hope. In the professional world, there is always somebody smarter, more experienced, more dedicated. In the world of altruism, you are never going to solve all suffering in the world (see my related blog article here). In the world of sports, there is always somebody faster, stronger, more committed—and even if you find yourself winning the world championship in your sport, you’ll have to compete again next year and newer and fitter athletes to hold your title.

Certainly, do the things that are meaningful. Pursue a career that brings value to yourself and others. Enjoy participating in sports, if that’s what you find meaningful. A meaningful career and enjoyable pursuits are worth doing. But they do not make you special.

Absolutely help others. As far as I’m aware, there is no more meaningful pursuit than working to relieve the suffering of the oppressed and the marginalised people and animals on this planet. Please please please take this responsibility seriously. It is absolutely essential to help others as much as you can, to give this everything you’ve got.

But helping others doesn’t make you special. You can’t help everyone. There will always be someone who can work harder than you or who is better-equipped to change the world.

Do The Thing, and find meaning in doing it, but The Thing isn’t what makes you special—whatever your Thing might be.

You are always enough

So does anything make you special? Yes, certainly. There is something that makes you special.

In the Plum Village tradition, the Buddhist tradition in which I practice, you will often here the refrain: “You are enough.” When we meditate, we connect with this truth. Right here, right now, I am enough. What I’m feeling and thinking right now is enough. This is a deep truth.

You, the person reading this, have immense value. Your value cannot be measured in dollars. You are more important than all the wealth on the planet.

A drug trafficker, serving a life sentence in prison, has more value than Elon Musk’s bank balance. The transgender athlete, facing their fear and participating in a sports tournament as their true self, has more value than whoever wins the next World Cup, as does ensuring that people with cerebral palsy are not barred from participating in their chosen sport (see the IFCPF World Cup). The people currently living in tents in front of Parliament House in Canberra are more important than the Australian government. Ensuring that everyone—especially the elderly, the sick, the disadvantaged—has access to nourishing and safe food is immeasurably valuable, so much more valuable than reaching your desired BMI (on the topic of body weight, see this beautiful book chapter on body liberation from a Jewish perspective).

In London one evening, I was at a social gathering of my colleagues and people who do similar work to me. These are beautiful, generous people, and I love spending time with them. But their perception and views, my status in their eyes, mean nothing to me. So I took a ten pound note out of my backpack (only because that was the largest denomination I had), walked to the 7-Eleven to purchase a bottle of Dr Pepper, then wandered around handing out the change to beggars on the street corners.

The grace of God—your inalienable intrinsic value—is what makes you special. Are you living in truth? Are you serving others? Are you, as Jesus commands, loving God with all your heart and all your soul? Are you loving your neighbour as yourself? And everybody, all sentient beings, always has this value. It cannot be taken away.

I once visited the residential aged care facility in which my partner works. It was my partner’s day off, but we were there to swap the resident budgie into a larger cage—I was the strong pair of arms / bird whisperer. The residents were being served morning tea. While we were placing newspaper into the new cage ready for the bird’s migration, one of the residents spilled tea on her hands. My partner immediately noticed and went over, and she gently wiped the tea from her resident’s hands and mopped up the spill. She wasn’t working that day—there were other staff there. She didn’t have to help. I think this encapsulates exactly what I’m trying to say.

Update 2025-08-21
I encountered this deeply moving passage from G. K. Chesterton’s 1923 book St. Francis of Assisi:

I have said that St. Francis deliberately did not see the wood for the trees. It is even more true that he deliberately did not see the mob for the men. […] He honoured all men; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave him his extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robberscrawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was really interested in him; in his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken seriously […] We may say if we like that St. Francis, in the bare and barren simplicity of his life, had clung to one rag of luxury; the manners of a court. But whereas in a court there is one king and a hundred courtiers, in this story there was one courtier, moving among a hundred kings. For he treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings. […] No plans or proposals or efficient rearrangements will give back to a broken man his self-respect and sense of speaking with an equal. One gesture will do it.