Excellent piece from Brendan McCord: You Are Not a Function: Why the Race to Stay Useful is a Trap.

John Stewart Mill: "a human being is more like a tree than a steam engine."^[i][j]

"A tree does not exist in order to produce lumber.

You can make lumber from it, and good lumber is nothing to sneer at.

But if you look at a tree and see only lumber, you have missed what is standing in front of you.

Something is growing there under its own power, toward its own form, and the growing is not a means to some further end.

Humboldt's claim about human beings is the same shape.

A person is a self-developing being whose worth is not exhausted by function."