Do You Feel Needed?
In Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel “Go, Went, Gone,” from 2015, Richard, a newly retired classics professor, finds himself at loose ends. Until recently, he was busy packing up his office and drafting lesson plans for his successor. (“The one departing must arrange his own departure,” he reflects.) But now that he’s relinquished his key and said his goodbyes, how is he supposed to fill his days? Travel, reading—that’s what people say. But can a life be built out of such optional amusements? From a window of his house, Richard can see a lake where, earlier in the summer, a swimmer drowned; apparently, some boaters saw the man waving, but thought he was joking and rowed away. There is bottomless need in the world. And yet there seems to be no need for Richard, in particular.
Psychologists say that “mattering” is a pillar of happiness, along with belonging and self-esteem. We know we matter when other people notice us, when they invest in us—and when they need us. Young people, accordingly, flourish more when they find ways to be relied upon in their families and communities. Older people tend to stay healthier when they don’t just receive care but give it. The sense of being unnecessary is deflating; the belief that you’re a burden can be even worse, can act as a stepping stone to depression and suicidal thought.
Being needed comes naturally in certain lives, and in certain stages of life. Your kids are small, your parents are old, or both; you’re important to your employer, your friends, your town, your church. At such times, you might be needed so much that it’s overwhelming. Yet it’s also possible to feel superfluous amid a busy life. You might have what the anthropologist David Graeber called a “bullshit job,” full of meaningless tasks. Your teen-agers might wish you’d disappear; your band might have broken up. Or maybe society itself, through its values, somehow makes you feel unneeded or redundant. In “The Diary of a Superfluous Man,” from 1850, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev depicted a well-off gentleman who’s prevented, by the rules of his social set, from doing anything concretely useful. Fourteen years later, in “Notes from Underground,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky imagined the “underground man,” who feels entirely unnecessary to his society and so strikes back at it out of spite.
Reflecting on the Second World War, Hannah Arendt suggested that totalitarianism takes root in societies where lots of people feel unnecessary or unwanted. After the 2016 election, it was common for the media to report on underemployed people in the Rust Belt who felt that they’d been cast aside. Today, manosphere ideology rages against a society that, allegedly, claims not to need men, and young people wonder whether there’s room for them in an A.I.-saturated workforce. Recently, even world-class mathematicians have felt the sting of redundancy. In a blog post titled “The Mathocalypse,” the mathematician Scott Aaronson recounts what his nine-year-old son told his wife, the computer scientist Dana Moshkovitz: “Mommy . . . I heard that a robot solved the math problem you worked on for your whole career!”
We have a real need to be needed. And yet many forces—thinking machines, aging, economic and social dislocation—appear to be making us feel redundant. Are we building a world in which no one is particularly necessary? Do we already live in such a world?
There are circumstances in which it’s obvious that everyone is needed. In “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging,” from 2012, the journalist Sebastian Junger explores the mini-societies formed by soldiers in combat. In a unit at war, everyone lives together, experiences events as one, and contributes toward shared goals; it’s a way of life in which “individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group.” It can be difficult, therefore, for soldiers to return to a civilian existence in which “most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.” Junger concludes that “humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
We live, by and large, in a fluid, transactional world of relative plenty and freedom. It’s good, in many ways, that there’s a possible substitute for almost every need, and for almost every needed person: redundancy can be a form of luxury, a route to peace of mind. And yet there’s a downside when needs become fungible, and easily recast as preferences. In “The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto,” the Catholic writer Leah Libresco Sargeant describes the care she wants to provide to her young children, and notes that it is “technically possible to delegate.” If someone else can watch the kids, feed them, and put them to bed, then in which ways, exactly, do they still “need” their mother? You’re valued at your job, but another employee might do; your basketball team needs you, but new players arrive every year. Something is lost in every switch, but it takes work to articulate it. The loss might even be impossible to articulate.
Partly as a result, Sargeant argues, we tend to downplay our needs in an almost anticipatory fashion. We too easily adopt “a narrow definition of ‘normal’ life as autonomous,” and comply when we’re “asked to prune the connections that tie us to others.” We might say that capitalism makes us needy people who don’t need people: we’re full of wants for products and services, but not necessarily for the individuals who provide them. (We, in turn, aren’t strictly necessary, even if our services are.) But there are also political and psychological reasons to make autonomy the default. We prize liberty, independence, and self-definition; we’re wary of the emotional costs of depending on others and being depended upon. As a society, we practice what therapists call an “avoidant” attachment style. “I am a rock / I am an island,” Simon & Garfunkel sang. “I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain / . . . I touch no one and no one touches me.”
In an essay from 2000, published in Wired and titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” the computer scientist Bill Joy worried about society’s direction: by 2030, he predicted, we’d be able to build computers “a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today,” making “the prospect of human-level computing power” realistic for the first time. (By some measures, today’s most advanced A.I. chips can be about that fast.) Joy feared that such technology, coupled with genetic engineering and other advancements, might “replace our species”—an anxiety that becomes even more credible when you realize that it’s existed for nearly two centuries. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man argued that individuals had become “piano keys” that could be played on command, in a composition coördinated by supposedly rational rules. In “Signs of the Times,” from 1829, Thomas Carlyle warned that we were entering a “mechanical age,” in which not just “the external and physical” would be “managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.” Leo Tolstoy, in his 1886 novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” imagined a man who was basically successful but who realized, on his deathbed, that he’d lived on autopilot. These thinkers suggested that we might internalize modernity’s logic of redundancy, finding ways to be unnecessary not just to one another but to ourselves. From this perspective, the development of technologies such as A.I. is just a furtherance of a long-standing trend.
Will A.I. really take our jobs? Will scientific and economic developments actually render the traditional human way of life obsolete? Maybe (hopefully!) not. But even the possibility of such outcomes wounds us. How can we insist upon—and really feel the existence of—our necessity, when so many forces seek to minimize it?
It helps to recognize that, just as there’s a rich discourse of redundancy, so there are many perspectives that clarify how and why we’re needed. In his book “Deep Utopia,” from 2024, the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who studies A.I. and coined the term “superintelligence,” asks how we might find meaning in a “solved world” in which A.I. does everything for us. He imagines people devoting themselves to hobbies, spirituality, the arts, sports, food, conversation, and “other domains which can serve as playgrounds for our souls,” and which will allow us to learn about each other and develop “our virtues and potentialities.” Hobbies, conversation—these seem slight against the steamroller of modernity. Yet my wife sings in a choir on Sundays, and, because there aren’t many altos, she can’t miss a rehearsal without letting the group down. Our participation in communal life really does make us necessary; it conjures, out of nothing, a place we need to be.
In “The Dignity of Dependence,” Sargeant suggests that, by believing in our own autonomy, we create the very conditions that obscure how much we’re needed. In his book “Dependent Rational Animals,” from 1999, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that we should do the opposite, by acknowledging that both needing and being needed are fundamental to our existences, from our vulnerable childhoods to our dependency in old age. Across our lives, MacIntyre wrote, “in order to flourish, we need both those virtues that enable us to function as independent and accountable . . . and those virtues that enable us to acknowledge the nature and extent of our dependence on others.” One of the complexities of being a dependent, rational animal, he pointed out, is that we’re not always needed and needful at the same time; in life, there are some periods when we give help, and others when we receive it. If you feel needed today, know that you’ll have needs later; if you feel unnecessary now, the odds are that you’ll be relied on down the road. Apocalyptic thinking tells us that we’re on a one-way journey to obsolescence. Actually, we’re on a wheel.
Our societies can make us atomistic, giving us the impression that we’re increasingly cut loose and wandering free, for better and worse. But, Sargeant proposes, we are also like atoms in that we are “stochastically vulnerable to each other,” always colliding and connecting unpredictably. Often, she writes, “we don’t know for sure when or where the next need is going to emerge.” The question, therefore, becomes one of readiness—of “whether, when that need comes, we will be able to offer a stable bond in response.” We need not just to be needed but to be ready to be needed. We’re waiting, for an uncertain duration, for a call that’s certain to arrive. ♦