To measure is to reassure ourselves that worth can be quantified. That impact can be proved. That aliveness can be tallied.

What if instead of measuring, we would:

• Witness what is unfolding.

• Listen for who is nourished and who is harmed.

• Remember the unseen labor that can’t be graphed.

• Stay accountable to those entangled with my work.

I have already written on un-performing and un-earning our existence. I ask myself, now that the “utility” of the technologies we have built and invented surpasses our “own utility,” what’s then the utility of life? What’s the human utility?

As I ask myself I feel something moving within my torso. And, at the same time my “view” shifts. That’s the double-movement:

• From within: loosening the clutch of optimisation in my own nervous system.

• From without: shifting the gaze so the world is no longer a puzzle to be solved, but a living web to be met.

Maturity is not just “feeling differently,” but cultivating different lenses for reality .

For centuries and millennia we have been focusing on “optimising” ourselves, hence the obsession with measurement.

Now we are at the point where technology can obsolete our “utility.”

What becomes then of us?
What do we reclaim?
What do we remember?

Modernity taught us that our value = our utility.

Useful to empire.

Useful to industry.

Useful to family roles, to systems, to “the economy.”

And now, as AI, robotics, and automation start outpacing human “efficiency,” that logic collapses.

If our worth is tied to our output, then obsolescence becomes existential.

But here’s the wild paradox: this is also an invitation.

When “utility” slips from our grip, we are forced back into the older truths:

• We are not made to be efficient: we are made to be relational.

• We are not “resources”: we are living extensions of Earth’s metabolism.

• We are not valuable because of what we do: we are valuable because we are.

So, in this crisis of utility, “What do we reclaim? What do we remember?”

We reclaim the right to exist without performance. The value that circulates through presence, not products. The worth of laughter, rest, kinship, tending soil, things automation can’t meaningfully do.

We remember that our ancestors did not survive by optimizsing; they survived by weaving. That belonging was once defined not by productivity, but by reciprocity. That the “point” of a human life was never utility, but fidelity to the web of life.

This is my whisper to you:

I am not a tool.

I am not a metric.

I am not a utility.

I am an echo of ancestors,

a steward of the present,

a seed for futures unseen.

My worth cannot be automated.

Because it was never in what I did

It has always been in how I belonged.

You can download more poems in defiance of what rules us, to lit up our souls here. A renewal of old myths, old narratives and obsolete systems.

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