people aren't products: whatever happened to understanding one another?
Maybe we've become so focused on asking “What's wrong with this person?” that we've forgotten to ask “How does this person experience the world?”
We live in a time when there seems to be a label for everything. How we think, how we learn, how we remember, how we react to noise, how we socialize, how we grieve, how we move through the world.
Sometimes these labels are useful. They can help people understand themselves, find community, access support, and receive treatment when they need it.
But somewhere along the way, I wonder whether we've started confusing the label with the person.
when everything becomes a market
We live in an economy that finds ways to turn human needs into business opportunities.
There is money in assessments, diagnoses, prescriptions, therapies, programs, and lifelong management. Some of these services are necessary and life-changing. People deserve access to care, and nobody should be shamed for seeking help.
But we should also be willing to ask difficult questions about a society that can profit from identifying problems while investing far less in preventing suffering in the first place.
What about the loneliness that comes from being excluded? The exhaustion of living in poverty? The anxiety created by housing insecurity? The distress of watching the natural world disappear while being told to carry on as usual?
Not every struggle originates inside the individual.
Sometimes we need to look at the world we've built around them.
how did we forget to listen?
Imagine a person who notices patterns before others do. Someone who remembers conversations from decades ago. Someone who hears ordinary sounds more intensely, needs solitude to recover, or sees a situation from a perspective nobody else seems to understand.
Must we immediately decide what that person is?
Could we first ask questions?
What do they notice that others miss? What overwhelms them? What brings them peace? What have they learned through experience? What do they need from the people around them?
Human beings are complicated. Two people can experience the same moment and walk away with entirely different memories of it.
We don't all process the world in the same way. Why should we expect everyone to fit the same mould?
what can we learn from Indigenous knowledge?
Many Indigenous knowledge systems place importance on relationships, community, Elders, responsibilities, and learning through lived experience. Knowledge is not simply information to collect; it can be something carried, shared, practised, and passed between generations.
Indigenous peoples and cultures are diverse, with their own traditions and understandings of human differences. There is no single Indigenous worldview. But there is much to reflect on in approaches that emphasize relationship and responsibility rather than viewing a person in isolation.
What if we spent more time learning from one another?
What if an older person had opportunities to share what they had learned, rather than being dismissed as out of touch? What if a young person who questioned the status quo was heard rather than immediately judged? What if someone who needed a different way of living was met with curiosity instead of suspicion?
We don't have to romanticize the past to recognize that community, intergenerational knowledge, and belonging matter.
people aren't problems to be managed
I worry that we've become too comfortable treating human beings as categories to sort, statistics to measure, risks to manage, and consumers to target.
We see it in healthcare, education, housing, employment, and social media. We measure productivity. We count economic contributions. We assess whether someone fits the system.
But what happens to people who don't fit?
What happens when someone is poor, unconventional, sensitive, independent, or unwilling to follow the crowd? What happens when a person has something valuable to offer but doesn't have the credentials, money, connections, or personality that society rewards?
A person's worth should not depend on how easily they fit into an institution or how much money they generate.
And understanding someone does not mean ignoring their difficulties or refusing them help. It means seeing the whole person, not reducing them to a diagnosis, a problem, or a stereotype.
perhaps we need to recover our curiosity
I don't pretend to have all the answers. I simply wonder whether we've lost something important in our rush to explain everything.
Perhaps we need to become better listeners.
Perhaps we need to make more room for people who experience life differently.
Perhaps we need to remember that a diagnosis can describe certain characteristics or difficulties without defining an entire human being.
And perhaps we need to question an economic system that can place a price on almost anything while struggling to recognize the value of kindness, patience, wisdom, creativity, and genuine human connection.
Not everything valuable can be measured.
Not every difference needs to be corrected.
Not every struggle is an individual failure.
And not every person needs to be put into a box before we can treat them with respect.
People aren't products. They're not problems to be solved or markets to be captured. They're human beings to be understood.
Maybe a better starting point — for healthcare, for education, for our communities, and for how we treat one another — is a simple question:
How does this person experience the world?
And then, instead of rushing to answer for them, we could do something that seems increasingly rare.
We could listen.
Because understanding one another shouldn't have to be profitable to matter.
Reflective Questions
Have we become too quick to label people instead of understanding them?
Can a label help someone while still limiting how others see them?
What have we lost by placing so much value on productivity and profit?
How can we make more room for people who experience the world differently?
