I Was Treating Myself as Replaceable — Heidegger on Building Teams

Using the reading log feature in Michinari, my side-project app, I finished Yamucha’s The Happy Prince Who Dies Tomorrow — a book that unpacks Heidegger’s Being and Time in narrative form. What stayed with me afterward wasn’t philosophical knowledge. It was an unsettling question about how I had been seeing the people on my team.

”Everything but yourself is equipment”

The book turns on Heidegger’s notion of the equipmental whole. A hammer only means anything because nails exist; nails only mean anything within the practice of building, which chains up to the purpose of having somewhere to live. Equipment can’t exist on its own — it exists only in relation to a purpose and to other equipment.

Pushed far enough, that lens reaches people too. The colleagues I work with are of course human beings, but as long as I’m relating to them in order to get work done, I’m seeing them as part of an equipmental whole. Keep asking “for the sake of what?” and the chain always terminates in yourself. I couldn’t nod along to that while reading. But I couldn’t argue with it either.

The dangerous part is turning that gaze on yourself

What really landed was what came next. When we become cogs in society, we start seeing ourselves as one more piece of equipment in the chain. And equipment that can no longer serve its purpose gets replaced — the same way you swap a broken spoon for a new one.

Ask most people who they are and they’ll answer with a job title or a role. I did. That means defining yourself, in line with how others look at you, as a tool for fulfilling a purpose. The book calls this the inauthentic mode of living: living like replaceable equipment, which is also living without ever asking what your own life amounted to.

Death’s “unsubstitutability” as the way out

So how do you escape the gaze of others? The book’s one trump card is death. It lays out five characteristics: certainty (it comes for everyone), indefiniteness (you don’t know when or how), non-outstrippability (no possibility lies beyond it), non-relationality (every relationship ends with it), and unsubstitutability — it happens only to a you that no one can stand in for.

That last one was decisive. Work can be covered by someone else and titles can be handed over, but no one can die in your place. Rather than being morbid, contemplating death turned out to be the act of confirming that you are not replaceable equipment.

Finite, and therefore irreplaceable

We can recognize ourselves as irreplaceable precisely because we’re finite. If time and possibility were infinite, nothing would be irreplaceable. The same goes for time itself: reframing it from a flat line running on forever to the finite budget that is mine changes its weight entirely. It lined up neatly with what I wrote earlier on raising the resolution of your time.

But the book won’t let you stop there. Finding finitude only in yourself while treating others and things as infinitely replaceable is, it argues, still inauthentic. You have to find the same finitude in others and grant them the same irreplaceability. Only that far around does the authentic mode begin.

What comes after “I belong here”

I currently lead a team I was assigned to partway through. The members have few points of contact with one another and tend to work in isolation. That’s exactly why I’ve been working through the implementation I described in the four stages of psychological safety, aiming for a team where everyone can feel “I belong here.”

What this book made me feel is that “I belong here” isn’t enough. That’s a secured place to stand — and once people can voice their honest feelings, it can tip into a relationship where everyone only says what they want to say. What’s actually needed is people who respect each other as finite, irreplaceable beings and help each other reach the goals each of them wants to reach. Psychological safety was the starting line, not the finish.

Closing

If all I got out of a philosophy book were the slogan “be mindful of death,” I’d have forgotten it by next week. What actually stayed with me was concrete: how I look at the person across from me in tomorrow’s 1-on-1. They are just as finite as I am, and just as impossible to replace. Whether I can hold that as a premise changes what the same thirty minutes become.

Knowing psychological safety isn’t enough — the four stages: understand, design, implement, reproduce — the team-building notes this post starts from
Ending the Kind of Reading You Forget Instantly — How Michinari Turns Logs Into an Asset Without Quotas — the system I used to log this book and generate its completion report
Time Is Equal for Everyone, but Never Fair — on reframing time as a finite personal budget