You as a tool

Sartre though of humans as the only living being that was left unfinished by nature. The reason is simple and beautiful: our freedom. He understood the innate freedom that comes from being human as the ultimate inescapable curse of our species, because it meant we had no definite and absolute purpose. We can do as we please only because we were never assigned something to do. Bees produce honey, pollinate and protect their queen, bears gather food and hibernate to survive the winter, monarch butterflies travel thousands of kilometers to survive changing weather. We can’t speak in the same way of humans.
In contrast to animals, we live much more erratically, with each of us living different lives to our neighbors, and each community acting and holding vastly different beliefs. We can speak of the collective of most species and about what they do yet we cannot do such with ourselves, not even about the mere fact of surviving, since so many people consider suicide as an option without being biologically or environmentally forced into it — apart from most animals that engage in suicide.
Philosophers beyond Sartre have though long and hard about this and what this means, and most of them have converged in the idea that it is our duty to complete ourselves and assign our own meaning and define our own moral framework. Societies are good for this because they abstract away most of this hard choices through democratic processes, collective thinking and free thought, and they get 90% right for most of us, good enough for a sizable portion of the population to simply follow most of it without even being aware of it. I beg to differ with this.
Part of crafting your own morality is to carefully examine your past. Luckily most of the times you start to ask yourself these questions, you are old enough to have knowledge of yourself to build on. The 90% that we can all agree on are things that are rather intuitive in nature: killing people is bad, stealing something is not good, etc. The missing 10% regards to your identity and what you want to do with your life.
Society cannot answer questions about what’s good and not good for you to the extent that the matters of these questions climb Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.

Society can answer most questions about what it means to be safe and physiologically sound, but it is an infinitely personal matter what it means to transcend.
The framework that works for me, and which I believe to be generic enough to be aplicable to most human’s life, is the idea of serving humanity. (Concept that I dare confess isn’t even mine, but Tim Cook’s, as he mentioned it in his speech to MIT graduates. I am not aware of another mention of the term.)
I have written about this at greater length in another article, but TL:DR; serving humanity can be more specifically translated into creating or growing knowledge or wellbeing into people in your community. From this I have grown a thought framework — still in beta, I warn you. I don’t have any name for this framework, but for the purposes of this article I’ll name it the “you-as-a-tool framework” — how original.
The postulate is simple, thinking of oneself as a tool which sole purpose is to serve humanity — according to what I outlined above or any other moral code — is extremely useful for thinking about oneself and one’s role in the world. The usefulness of the framework is that it provides a number of metaphors in which to think about ourselves. To further this metaphor, tool is understood to reference a complex piece of machinery (e.g. a laser cutter) as opposed to a simple one (e.g. a wrench).
We are to be use(d)full
Working with something implies work; understanding what it’s supposed to do, learning how it works, how it is supposed to be used, putting the effort in actually using it, etc. It’s often hard work, but with many things, it’s a good trade-off, otherwise we’d never use nor build tools. We, as people, are likewise. Every time we work with someone we invest time and effort in them, and understanding how we can leverage the abilities and goals of others to further our own growth is very crucial, specially to the extent that we can make this reciprocal and even symbiotic.
We need manuals
A tool that nobody know who to use is useless, and to the extent that its objective and operation can be understood, its potential usefulness increases. We have to assume that we are a complex piece of machinery with lots of patches and this-works-everytime-except-on-rainy-sundays caveats. We shouldn’t expect everyone to appear and know how to work with us. Truth is, we are difficult to work with, and so is everybody else. Surfacing your intentions, beliefs, goals, and abilities optimizes the ability of others to make the most of us.
We need maintenance
Everything breaks, but a lot of the time those problems are fixable or even reversable. We should never expect to go about our life without conflict emerging from within or from the outside. Challenges and bad habits put stress on your ability to be the most useful and far from expecting to never face a challenge, uncertainty or act with bad nuance, we can only embrace those things are going to happen, but making sure that we have the strategies, mechanisms, and personal infrastructure to deal with these problems. Therapy, friends, journaling, healthy eating, reading, meditating, getting good sleep, creating stuff you like, and exercising, are all things known to make us feel better in the long term. We need to know our vulnerabilities and keep them at bay.
We need cooperation
A tool that can only be interfaced and which output is limited to itself, is useless. Tools are only useful in contexts greater than themselves, and so are we. Making ourselves easier to work with is not a selfless charity act, it benefits ourselves much more than it benefits others. Never expect yourself to be the best at everything, and take advantage of those around you that have something to win from helping you achieve your goals.
Maybe the tool metaphor was a bit of a stretch, but I still think it is a very helpful metaphor for understanding lots of dynamics and mechanisms regarding ourselves and how we work. I believe firmly that one’s life grows in value to the extent that what you do helps other and furthers the reach and understanding of humankind.
Use and be used.
