I figured this out on a Tuesday. My wife had taken our daughter to visit family, a friend who usually needs me for business advice was travelling, and the team didn’t have any urgent problems for me to solve. My calendar was empty. Nobody needed anything from me.

And I panicked.

Not in an obvious way. I didn’t have a breakdown. I just felt this creeping, formless dread, like the ground under me had disappeared. I sat in our apartment and realized I had no idea what to do with myself when I wasn’t being useful to someone.

That was the moment I understood something I’d been avoiding for years: I had built my entire identity around being the person other people rely on. And without that role, I didn’t know who I was.

The psychology of staking your worth on usefulness

Psychologist Jennifer Crocker at the University of Michigan developed a framework called contingencies of self-worth that explains exactly what I was doing. Her research, published in Psychological Review, shows that people don’t just have high or low self-esteem as a fixed trait. They have specific domains where their self-esteem is staked. For some people it’s appearance. For others it’s academic performance or competition.

For people like me, it’s others’ approval. When your self-worth is contingent on being needed or validated by other people, every success in that domain gives you a temporary boost. Someone asks for your help, you feel valuable. Someone tells you they couldn’t have done it without you, and for a few minutes, you feel like you exist.

But Crocker’s research also shows the cost. When your worth is tied to a domain, failure in that domain doesn’t just feel disappointing. It feels like you’re nobody. The pursuit of self-esteem through these contingencies, Crocker and Knight argue, comes at a real price to learning, relationships, autonomy, and mental health.

That Tuesday, with nobody needing me, the domain went quiet. And the silence was unbearable.

How usefulness becomes an identity

This pattern doesn’t come from nowhere. Attachment researchers trace it back to childhood, to what Bowlby called compulsive caregiving: an attachment pattern where a person learns early that they receive love and connection not by expressing their own needs, but by meeting the needs of others. The child figures out that being helpful keeps the parent close. Being needy pushes them away. So the child becomes the one who fixes, who helps, who holds it together for everyone else.

That child grows into an adult who is excellent in a crisis, indispensable at work, the friend everyone calls first. And none of that feels like a problem, because the culture rewards it. Selflessness. Reliability. Always showing up.

But underneath it there’s a transaction happening that nobody agreed to out loud. I’ll take care of everything, and in return, you’ll need me. And as long as you need me, I’ll know I matter.

The problem, as the research on codependent caretaking makes clear, is that the motivation behind this kind of helping isn’t really generosity. It’s anxiety. The caretaker isn’t giving because they want to. They’re giving because they’re terrified of what happens if they stop.

What “others’ approval” contingency actually does to you

Here’s what the research showed me about myself. When your self-worth is contingent on others’ approval, you don’t just become helpful. You become a person who can’t rest. Because rest means you’re not being useful. And not being useful means you’re not earning your right to exist.

Crocker’s Contingencies of Self-Worth Scale, developed across studies with over 1,400 college students and validated for test-retest reliability, identifies “others’ approval” as one of seven domains where people stake their self-esteem. People high in this domain spend their time, energy, and emotional bandwidth in ways that maximize the chance of being seen as valuable by others, often at the expense of their own genuine interests and needs.

I saw myself so clearly in that research it was almost embarrassing. Every decision I made, from the work I took on to the favours I said yes to, ran through the same unconscious filter: will this make someone need me?

The emptiness underneath the helpfulness

The hardest part of realizing this wasn’t the realization itself. It was what came after.

Because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. And then you’re left with the question that’s been sitting underneath all the helpfulness this whole time: if nobody needed you, who would you be?

I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t have a complete one. But I’m slowly building one that isn’t dependent on other people’s problems.

I run. Not for anyone else. Just because it makes me feel alive. I’ve been reading more, slowly and deliberately, because I want to, not because anyone asked me to. I sit with my daughter not to be a good father in some performative sense, but because her company is genuinely my favourite thing.

These are small things. But they’re mine. They don’t depend on anyone needing me. And that’s the whole point.

Where Buddhism met me in this

There’s a concept in Buddhist philosophy that I kept circling back to as I worked through this: the idea that the ego doesn’t just show up as arrogance. Sometimes it shows up as selflessness. The compulsive helper, the person who can’t stop giving, is often just as ego-driven as the person who can’t stop taking. They’ve just found a more socially acceptable packaging for it.

I wrote about this in my book, Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego. One of the things that surprised people most was the idea that ego isn’t always loud. Sometimes ego whispers: “without you, they’d fall apart.” And that whisper feels like love, but it’s actually control. It’s the ego’s way of guaranteeing it stays relevant.

Letting go of that doesn’t mean becoming selfish. It means being honest about why you’re helping. Is it because you genuinely want to, or because you need someone to need you so you can feel okay about yourself?

The difference between those two things is the difference between generosity and dependency wearing a generous mask.

Learning to exist without a role

I’m 37 and I’m learning, for the first time, how to just be in a room without a function. To sit with someone without solving their problem. To have a conversation that isn’t about making myself useful. To go a full day where nobody asks me for anything and not interpret that as evidence that I don’t matter.

It’s uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be.

Because the discomfort isn’t a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign that I’m finally meeting the person I spent decades burying under other people’s needs.

He’s quieter than I expected. Less certain. A little lost.

But he’s real. And real, I’m learning, is worth more than useful.