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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

The other day I was talking to a psychologist about [difficult personal situation which I am unable to discuss publicly] and she said to me “This must be really damaging to your self-worth.” And, my honest internal reaction to her statement (although I didn’t say it out loud to her) was “Self-worth, what is that?” Because I’m not sure if I have any? I don’t mean that in the negative sense that I think I am worthless or anything. It is just that in my mind “self” and “worth” are concepts which do not intersect. Maybe that’s an autistic trait.

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The flip side of detaching self-esteem from technical competency is that you can make very strong assertions without being arrogant.

People of integrity with utilitarian leaning are often labeled amoral or unemotional.

People with a strong drive not attached to financial gain are often termed unambitious.

Your perceived worth really depends on values of society, so if you remove yourself from the equation, you only have no worth to others, not to yourself. Sequestered from others the sense of self has no meaning, so naturally you have no self-worth. Not because you are worthless, but because you have no self and place no importance on your perceived worth.

Or more strongly phrased, what's the point of self-worth if you can do everything you put your mind to?

I'd you can't but think you can, then that's a harmful psychological schism. Since no one person can achieve everything, self-worth is only meaningful in areas for which you lack competency

For example - and this deals not with self-worth but with stress - I'm pretty inflexible in my goals. When I can't meet my goals I tend to shut down. I'm often asked if I'm stressed, to which I can only respond, "Stress - what's that?". And yet clearly I've suffered a harmful schism between my perception of self and reality, as indicated by my lack of stress response.

My partner considers my deliberateness as lazy. They won’t discuss things with me because they already know all about me.

My willingness to share their perception of me being ineffective was quite damaging to my self esteem. I never felt successful due to lack of acknowledgment of my achievements.

They asked me to leave the house about a year ago. Once I met new people and they saw me as successful and fun my self worth improved.

Yes, that's why I qualified self-worth by field of competency. I really try to view the world objectively, ignoring the opinions of others, but after N fizzled relationships... is it me or is it you?

But just because you are detached from societal values doesn't imply you should be detached from people. I can't enumerate the intangibles I get by surrounding myself with others. I perform better, I have better ideas, I feel more alert. I've never been able to understand why as I never gain any objective aid. Does unexpected input promote flexible thinking? Am I inspired by differing worldviews to think outside the box. Or is it simple happiness? No idea.

The closest conclusion is that some people are flexible and looking forward and others are rigid and looking for reasons to be dissatisfied.

This was a very interesting discussion, and I just wanted to note that both of you are extremely articulate and I quite enjoyed reading your thoughts on this.

- random stranger

I was reflecting on this conversation and since a random stranger seems to be interested….

I wish I had been kinder with my description of the less flexible. A better description I think is rigid and relates to others through dissatisfaction.

> People of integrity with utilitarian leaning are often labeled amoral or unemotional.

Utilitarianism is a moral concept. I think you just mean analytical.

Maybe, but some people think it’s weird when you say “of course I’d divert the train over that grandpa”

I think it's interesting that the trolley problem is so useless you could interpret this as a statement for or against virtually any ideology or moral framework. Hence my rejection of any moral implication to bare analysis.

> People of integrity with utilitarian leaning are often labeled amoral or unemotional.

That's because utilitarianism [1] is just one of the three major recognized moral systems -- virtue ethics [2] and deontology [3] being the other two.

In real life, we tend to balance the three. Anyone who adhered strictly to one while ignoring the other two would rightly be labeled a kind of amoral monster.

And utilitarianism is generally applied more at the governmental/societal level than at the individual level. At the society level, you want the greatest good for the greatest number. While at the individual level, you want to give a vastly greater good to your young children, and your spouse, rather than treating your children and strangers' children as equals, or your spouse and other adults.

Someone who, in their personal life, uses utilitarianism as their primary guide is going to rightly be called amoral and unemotional. They'd be a monster, truly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology

A related observation I've gotten from interacting with normies including my wife:

Most people assume there is such thing as a "self" and that it is okay, natural, and desirable to preference yourself when interacting with other people. Indeed, for most normies, there is only various people and their selves interacting. My autistic perspective is that there is only a system of the world, various roles that people happen to occupy, and here are my options for where I can slot into it, might as well choose the best one, but it never occurred to me that the other people in the system could be individually influenced or that you could preference your self over others. At least, until I interacted with others enough to realize that that was all they were doing.

Relatedly, most normies project this self-interest onto aspies and assume that when they are saying how the world is, they are pushing their own agenda, because in their worldview everybody has an agenda. As a result, the aspie tendency to make observations about broad sweeping systems comes off as arrogance, as preferencing themselves and their worldview over everybody else. But to an aspie, there is no such thing as arrogance, because arrogance implies that one preferences their self-worth over others, and there is no such thing as "self" or "worth", and it is nonsensical to talk about self-importance.

Well that's an interesting theory. However, on reading it, my leading hypotheses are that people who express such disbelief in the possibility of their being selfish, either lack self-insight, or are lying. Your theory I would give a subjective probability rather lower than these.

Of course, this might be my lack of insight into the aspie mind. But self-interest is highly evolutionarily favourable, and is built into our brains from very early in our evolutionary history - from the first organisms that had brains.

Yeah it's your lack of insight and your projection of your own psychology onto others

The problem with that is: while it's true that one can't treat neurodivergent people fairly without taking heed of their testimony of how their mind works, selfishness is a behavior that has to be evaluated from an external perspective - for everyone, not just the neurodivergent. Because everyone who is ever selfish denies it, and has a story about why they're not being selfish. So it's always evaluated by POSIWID.

> Because everyone who is ever selfish denies it, and has a story about why they're not being selfish

Ayn Rand wrote a book The Virtue of Selfishness - of course, if she views selfishness as virtuous, she is going to claim that virtue for herself

Back to the realm of the more mainstream: a lot of people will admit they act selfishly sometimes - including me. I think you got to look after yourself, but you also should look out for other people - but if you go overboard on being selfless, you can start to be drained, and need to allow yourself a bit of selfishness to recharge.

I think what we really need is a healthy balance between selflessness and selfishness. And that’s the ideal I am for. But do I always get the balance right? I’m sure I don’t, sometimes I go a bit too far in one direction, other times a bit too far in the other.

I think what I’m saying here is pretty prosaic. Not everyone is going to agree, but heaps of people will.

Selfless people do not exist for biological and evolutionary reasons (self-preservation and such). But then... you are responding to someone who calls other people "normies".

This is a fascinating comment that really made me think.

And I'd like to present you with a different perspective.

You write that "My autistic perspective is that there is only a system of the world".

But it's important to realize that the "system of the world" you've developed is from your perspective exclusively. You are modeling everybody in your system, and you may be doing your best to be 100% objective and not push your own agenda.

However, your model is lacking because you can model your own "role" far better than anybody elses "role" -- you know your own preferences and desires with great accuracy, but not other people's. And you'll likely unconsciously assume that other people's preferences and desires as the same as yours, until proven otherwise.

You write "the aspie tendency to make observations about broad sweeping systems comes off as arrogance". But what if it has nothing to do with broad sweeping systems, but the fact that your observations are extrapolating too much from your own preferences/desires that you are projecting onto others without realizing it?

So the perceived "arrogance" may not be what you describe as an inappropriate reaction that you are bringing an agenda to things. But may actually be an appropriate reaction to the fact that you're making too many assumptions in your "observations about broad sweeping systems" that the systems in your head are reality, when they are not.

When I have conversations with really smart people who come across as arrogant, it's not usually because they are being overly objective. It's because while their logic and deductions may be 100% correct, it's their starting assumptions that are wrong, which usually assume that other people have the same preferences/desires as themselves. But sometimes it's really hard to understand just how different people can be.

This reminds me of a quote from somewhere: All models are useful, none are correct. I (not OP) make a strong effort to be objective in my modeling of the world (even when it hurts), as it’s the only tool I have to understand and predict behavior and behavioral expectations. I wish we had access to predefined objective mental models, or could share them with each other (copy program structure and state across minds).

> or could share them with each other

Honestly, I'd say literature and fictional works generally come the closest to that. Sitting down with a novel written by someone from a vastly different background from yours is kind of the closest you can get to seeing the world through someone else's eyes.

Obviously not spy thrillers and the like, but novels that are more about real life.

Another really interesting resource is some of the podcasts that do ~hour-long interviews with famous people and really dig into their childhood, motivations, etc. Dax Shephard is particularly good at this. Discovering how vastly different people's backgrounds are, the big choices they made in life, and the unexpected factors that contributed to those choices.

> All models are useful, none are correct.

I have generally heard this as "All models are wrong, but some are useful" which is attributed to the statistician George E. P. Box.

> most normies project this self-interest onto aspies and assume that when they are saying how the world is, they are pushing their own agenda, because in their worldview everybody has an agenda.

I have a theory (not claiming to have invented it, just something I often think about) that most people have a strong tendency to assume that other people think the same way they do.

I feel the same.

One thing that I have struggled with in relationships is that others need to feel validated, that their decisions are rational and that other people believe that they are rational. Stimulus from the outside to satisfy the inside.

What makes this difficult for me is that I don’t need to feel validated, I am comfortable with my own decisions in life and do not need someone else to approve. I think this ties into self worth which seems to be related to people’s perception of their actions and the approval they see from others. If you do not need external validation then you are not concerned about peoples perception of you and therefore self worth is a foreign concept.

You may not need anyone else to approve, but doesn’t it still cause issues when they don’t?

Yes, but that's a different problem.

Although it's also tangential to the essay, which is about the mechanisation of self-image - not just sell-worth, but identity in general.

Which has always been socially imposed (even on those who are sure they're different). But now it can be directed algorithmically by a very small number of actors, who have the power to apply behaviour and value modification tools that can be individually tailored for everyone in a demographic - in ways which most people aren't even aware of.

"Low self-esteem" is just one the effects.

Sure, those issues come just as a storm comes for a sailor. You cannot control what comes your way but only how you react. I’m not a psychopath, I understand social norms and I do take into consideration how my actions will affect others, but I try my best to live a fair life and deal with whatever comes my way instead of focusing on what-if’s or how people perceive me.

Is the total lack of care about what others think of me a sign or symptom of autism?

I had it from childhood to a much larger extent than any of my peers, even though it diminished as I grew older.

I didn’t care in my teens and 20s and then suddenly in the last few years (in 35), i realized I cared tremendously.

Part of it I think is blows to my self-confidence, part is that when you have casual light social connections (school, the in-person workplace, I now wfh) you get this sense of people pseudo-caring about you.

But once that wanes (age and wfh) and you have you put effort into getting even the smallest amount of care from others. Which, in turn requires vulnerability.

> What makes this difficult for me is that I don’t need to feel validated, I am comfortable with my own decisions in life and do not need someone else to approve.

I think you are conflating a lack of need for validation and the ability to self-validate.

It’s not that you don’t need any validation, it’s that you have the ability to provide yourself with the validation you need.

Don’t take that for granted. It’s both something to be proud of and a reminder that you aren’t so different from others.

I think there are two ways you can look at it.

One is what I think of as the neurotypical way. They spend a lot of energy on social modeling, on fitting people into hierarchies of privilege. (E.g., "respecting your elders", older sibling vs younger, teachers vs students, the popular kids, and so many other things.) Then in the same way they're judging the worth of others, they fit themselves into the same primate status model.

I think that's what the psychologist is talking about. Personally, I find that way not super useful.

But another way is sort of reverse engineering. From how person X treats themself, what can we learn about how much they value their own self? Like you, I didn't have much of a concept of self-worth in the sense of "where do I place myself in the many hierarchies most people around me are constantly aware of." But a therapist eventually got me to see that I did not treat myself as worth the same as the people around me. Paying attention to that has improved my life a lot.

The big question for me is to what extent the latter thing is influenced by the former. For neurotypical people I gather the link is pretty strong. For me it's definitely a weaker link, but it's hard to tell the difference between "there is no link" and "I don't notice the link".

Not a psychologist but I am friends with more than a few. I don't know why you assume the psychologist meant the first because they did not. Self-worth has nothing to do with social hierarchy. It is how you treat yourself and a core thing therapist work on is helping you treat yourself the way you would treat others, with compassion and respect.

I thought maybe I was using the phrase wrong, but the first two definitions I find are "the internal sense of being good enough and worthy of love and belonging from others" and "a feeling that you are a good person who deserves to be treated with respect". You'll note that those are both inherently social. And both "good enough" and "with respect" are about one's position in the caste/hierarchy structure.

The reason I assume what the psychologist meant is that most of them are neurotypical, and neurotypical people are deeply invested in social primate dynamics. I understand that this is hard for neurotypical people to see, but you might read things like DeWaal's "Chimpanzee Politics" or Johnson's "Impro" [1]. Plus there's my personal experience, where psychologists are very inclined to talk about self-worth in the social sense. And I think that's fine; I'm sure it works well for their neurotypical patients.

[1] particularly the section on status transactions, which are vital for authentic theater performances, but are rarely articulated because it's so natural to neurotypical people

I think what they simply meant is that neurotypical people are a lot busy with making models of hierarchies between people and finding out their own position within that hierarchy, and mostly automatically or unconsciously derive self worth from that.

While some types of non neurotypical people don't automatically spend their mental energy on such thoughts and analysis. That is maybe why 'self worth' feels a strange term to them. They simply are who they are and will not try to come across as this or that type of person (helping, smart, empathetic, strong character etc) . Neurotypical people hence find the way they come across weird.

Are you suggesting that self-worth can only be defined as the sum of your perceived worth to others? That makes the 'self' in worth an oxymoron, no?

To you, it seems the best way to achieve self-improvement is to maximize your value to others, i.e. by moving up the social hierarchy. But that doesn't imply that those who don't play the game have no worth, does it?

I think you are conflating a sense of happiness with a sense of worth. They are not necessarily the same.

For example I occasionally find myself in conflict with an acquaintance over a miscommunication. If after explaining the underlying conditions the other individual refuses to adjust their perception of me, I couldn't care less. That's their problem, not mine, even if they continue to spread their (possibly vile) misperceptions.

Now if I had sucked up to them perhaps, yes, I would have improved my life. But what I did not do was reduce my self-worth.

I just described two different ways of thinking about self-worth, so I am not suggesting it "can only be defined" as anything.

I take comfort in seeing my experience described by others. I’m waiting on a neurological evaluation to see where on a spectrum I exist. I have been evaluated for a personality disorder of which none was found.

Hey, I'm glad to hear that. Some years back I came across a great online test, one created by autistic people. I can't find it now, but I strongly remember the graph, which showed a bimodal distribution and marked my place on it. [1] In the years following it was such a help, in that I could without judgement see how I and others related. It let me stop worrying so much about trying to be "right" and focus on being right for me.

As long as I'm mentioning things that helped, I'll recommend this online alexithymia test: https://www.alexithymia.us/test-alexithymia

It looks at ability to perceive one's own feelings. Once I realized that I was relatively bad at it, it was such a relief. And in the years since I've gotten a lot better, because I knew I needed to work harder at it than the average person.

[1] If that rings a bell for anybody, I'd love to know!

I am a Christian. Something I have found within my faith tradition (and something I find is lacking in the culture around me) is a sense that I am in possession of an infinitely durable source of dignity and worthiness that is not tethered to who I am or what I have done. I have found this conceit enormously consoling.

I'm envious of that intrinsic sense of self worth, but I don't follow how that's a consequence of being Christian. I carry guilt and shame from sins that can't be rectified, knowing that Jesus loves me doesn't help me love myself.

It's pretty funny when you consider that a huge part of Christian evangelism is the attempt to convince normal people that they aren't worth dirt and are condemned to eternal torture unless they believe in somebody that the religious can't prove exists for a feat that they can't prove ever happened.

Yes, that is one manifestation of Christian evangelism. Modern Christianity is plagued by literalism and ignorance. Most self identifying Christians (and I would posit most skeptical rationalists) have not deeply engaged with the texts and often when they do get hung up on an overly literal interpretation. If one looks beyond the surface, there is tremendous wisdom that helps everyone live better today -- not just in some hypothetical afterlife. Indeed, I believe that if you try to follow the teachings of Jesus, your interactions with others and your life writ large will be better. That has been my personal experience and I had to be called back kicking and screaming as a committed non-believer.

Of course, having said all that, I am personally dismayed by the state of Christianity in our world. Institutional Christianity has done and continues to do tremendous harm in the world so I am sympathetic to your perspective. Indeed, I am most upset because I find the way that many nominally Christian institutions behave to be directly contrary to the their own sacred texts. The hypocrisy is almost unbearable. But I would encourage everyone reading this to withhold judgment of other's faith practices and/or self-identification until you understand where they are coming from rather than lumping them in with the worst exemplars of their nominal affiliates.

That's a rather reductive take. Telling people "they aren't worth dirt" is a hard sell, for one thing.

Not when you're also trying to sell them your solution.

"You are a worthless sinner, a transient cloud of mortal dust, with a soul that is in danger of an eternity of torment. Unless you - you know - do what we tell you."

As marketing pitches go, it seems pretty straightforward.

It's not reductive at all. Telling someone that they are only worthy of torture or destruction for not believing in an unprovable entity is actually worse than that.

Allistic people tend to feel a need to believe in something, even (especially) if they cannot produce evidence for it. This is called "faith" and widely regarded as a virtue because it gives structure and purpose to an existence that largely came about by accident. Jesus is fairly middle of the road in terms of horribleness of things to have faith in.

Religion has to sell itself or else it will eventually cease to exist. Christianity still exists.

That said, my personal feeling is that Christians (at least where I live) these days mostly focus on what to do right themselves (to be a self worthy God loved person) rather than saying what others are not doing right.

Well, for some people I imagine it helps to know that there is someone that loves them.

Christian mythology is powerful because of the idea that God loves you so much he will give you infinite chances to repent and turn away from sin for as long as you live. Carrying guilt and shame for your sins won't fix them, but being sorry for them and working to sin no more will fix your future.

It was even more powerful in an era when the gods were vengeful in their retribution and/or capricious in their favor. I'm not saying I like it or agree with it, but it does really bring some form of comfort to people, which is why it spread so far and lasted for so long.

Fascinating. Would you elaborate on the mechanics behind the dignity/worthiness?

I think the idea is that "people" tend to be attracted towards things that they think will increase their self worth and avoid things that decreases their self worth.

Though from a stoic perspective the only thing that can affect your self worth are your own actions, not external events which you have no control over.

I think most people use other people as a kind of mirror, to try to see who they are and how they fit. (Autists may do it less than others, or even none at all.)

If everybody thinks well of me, then I should probably think well of myself. If everyone thinks badly of me, then I'm probably not worth very much. So goes the logic.

So social media is tearing up peoples' self image, not just because of put-downs and deliberate trolling, but mostly because everyone is putting forward the best version of themself that they can, and we compare that, not to the version of ourselves that we put forward, but to the reality of ourselves, and we lose in comparison.

And that's the problem with self-worth-by-comparison. There's always someone against whom you lose, in some aspects. Richest man in the world? Yeah, but that other guy has a bigger yacht, and we use yachts as measuring sticks.

That's true of all of life, but social media amplifies it. We can see more people faster to compare ourselves to, and they can present a fake image more convincingly.

And marketers play on this status anxiety. Just look at pretty much any car ad. The best way to innoculate yourself against this (to an extent anyway) is to learn a bit about marketing and do some marketing. Once you have seen how the sausage is made, it has less power.

I think social media broke my partner’s self-worth. I’m not on social media beyond HN and found no way to communicate with someone so engaged in remote relationships.

I think stoic ideas are from an era where their circumstances made them have those principles. We don't live in that era. It is possible to affect others and the associated cascading effect that can bring about a change in others action which were affecting you negatively. If Naval's idea of "individuals having leverage holds water" directly implies that you can change others, albiet slowly. If your reach becomes big enough that it becomes a threat that "other actors" need to curtail that reach through "algorithms" is another evidence that you were indeed having effects that they didn't like.

You think Marcus Aurelius was unable to affect other peoples' actions? That's not the idea. The point is that you can't directly make someone else think or feel a certain way, only act on them externally.

If causality holds, acting externally will have changes to internal assessments assuming good faith dialogue. Plus Marcus Aurelius was helpless in that it would take him lot of time and energy to give personal attention to each individual and clarify their doubts. He didn't have the technology to record his thoughts on a topic and refer people to it.

> He didn't have the technology to record his thoughts on a topic and refer people to it.

He did and we’re still reading them to this day.

I could be wrong in this. But wasn't his writings only for himself and was published only later. How many people really referred to his writings? When was printing press invented? How popular was it compared to Bible? Was it possible for people to consume his writings in multimedia formats like video, audio? Were there meme-pages on tiktoks which contextualized his writings in different day-to-day scenarios so that the importance of his general ideas were imprinted on their minds? Did he have debate with others to defend his ideas watched by many, how would he respond to those counter-arguments? Would your mind change considering if his responses weren't that strong or on filmsy grounds?

> Were there meme-pages on tiktoks which contextualized his writings in different day-to-day scenarios so that the importance of his general ideas were imprinted on their minds?

I honestly cannot tell whether this is satire or if I just don’t want to be on this planet anymore.

I hope it's satire. It would be quite limiting to believe that people can only learn things from short format video

Marcus Aurelis wrote in short snippets format. They were notes to himself which were latter organized into flowing organized essays by historians and writers.

Meme-pages are today's "brevity is the soul of wit". They really distill experience and wisdom in nice consumable package.

And of course from a Buddhist perspective the self is an illusion, making all this 'self-worth' chasing akin to tilting at windmills.

True, but it’s harder to run around with a begging bowl in Western cultures. Even though self worth is an illusion, right livelihood is part of the Noble Eightfold Path.

I was very unBuddha while pursuing what currently enables my lack of expectations. I’m just discovering acting on the world with no expectations of what is next.

I don’t think the notion of self-worth is rejected by Buddha. I think the expectation of achieving it through actions is rejected. The expected results are the problem not self-worth or actions.

>> "Self-worth, what is that?” Because I’m not sure if I have any?

This almost made me laugh. I know where you're at. You got a long road ahead so get started! Tell your psychologist when these things pop in your head. Have a laugh, but then reflect on it or whatever.

Let me offer some alternatives to "autistic": Anhedonia, schizoid personality disorder, avoidant (attachment OR personality disorder). There are many things, but it's not super important to define it, lest you let it define you.

> Let me offer some alternatives to "autistic": Anhedonia, schizoid personality disorder, avoidant (attachment OR personality disorder).

You are right, except in my case I’m pretty sure it is more autistic than any of those - our children do X/Y/Z and professionals tell us “those are signs of autism” (one child diagnosed, the other not yet formally but the paediatrician is convinced she has it and on the waiting list for an assessment) and (for many but not all of them) I’m thinking “what do you mean that’s a sign of autism? I was like that when I was a kid too, some of them I am even still like that”

One way of looking at it is how you assess yourself in things and take pride in or feel regret about that.

For example, you wrote this comment. It is a well written comment. You likely have some belief roughly along the lines of "I write reasonably well". You have probably received feedback along those lines throughout life, and that reinforces that belief. This is perhaps mildly pleasing or at least seems correct.

Now suppose instead that whenever you wrote things people replied:

"Huh?"

"What? This makes no sense"

"Good god what led you to think that? That's so stupid!"

And so on. And you even reread some of your own writings that you thought were good and they seem to strike you as not good. The view that your writing is not good comes to strike you as correct. You aim to improve but continue to receive negative feedback. The view that you are genuinely not good at writing seems to be correct and you come to believe you cannot ever be good at writing.

That would be negative self worth. Does this example line up at all with any internal thought processed you have? Are you pleased by praise or hurt by criticism? Even to the level of thinking the judgements are correct or incorrect.

(To be clear you are good at writing)

This begs the question because it starts with "how you assess yourself". Why assess yourself, the self, the whole person, at all? So, you're not good at writing. Perhaps you're not good at anything. In that case, you probably shouldn't attempt things except as practice. But why give yourself an overall score as a person, what are you even supposed to do with that information? You can't be anybody else, so it's useless. Work with what you've got, fuck 'em.

My theory based on nothing but internal reflections

A lot of people's minds are raised from a young age to make judgements and comparisons with others. Their minds are told that one must be useful to be valuable, and that simply _being_ isn't enough.

Over time those bad habits of the mind are so ingrained and automatic that we assume them to be part of "me". "My" thoughts, "my" ideas and so we don't question their assumptions or where they came from.

It takes conscious effort to be able to change those habits into something more positive, or to be able to center your mind to a point where those habits seen as just other thoughts and don't have the same "weight" behind them.

We're an ever changing process and being able to judge and adjust is a useful skill. It's just that doing that doesn't require all of the crap we put ourselves through due to unchecked assumptions.

I write imprecisely but I wad actually referring to assessing how you are at specific things. How you feel you are at specifics bleeds somehow into a general sense of self esteem. I definitely agree on not tying your sense of self worth to the opinion of others, though we are none os us totally immune.

Even diogenes the cynic who scorned society reproached himself when shown he was not meeting his own standard as well as he could. He lived simply and had but a cup to drink from. Then he saw a child drinking from a stream and smashed his cup in frustration at not having thought of the child's simpler approach.

Anyway my comment was aiming at illustration what high self worth or lack thereof may feel like, rather than what one should do.

How about integrity? Do you find that relevant? Usually people with integrity have high self-esteem because they adhere to a certain set of ethics. I'm not trying in any way to pass judgement, just to give you a different perspective.

my understanding of integrity means that you do things that are guided by a shared moral compass - keep your word, avoid cheating, etc. Those signals seem to be all external (you do them because you don't want to violate your contract with another person, etc). I don't think that's in any way related to self-worth (which is a measurement of value to yourself, independent of others)?

It is definitely related to self-worth, because the contract you make is not with another person, it's with yourself. And when you respect it, it increases your self respect and worth.

I don't see how that's the case at all. A sense of obligation (how much you value someone else) has nothing to do with self worth (how much you value yourself). If this was the case at all, a great treatment for low self esteem would be to commit to stuff for others, since that'd automatically make you valuate your own self more

>If this was the case at all, a great treatment for low self esteem would be to commit to stuff for others, since that'd automatically make you valuate your own self more

How do you know this is not true?

If your sense of obligation is seen as a value function for people, it follows that your self-worth is the value when you plug-in "self". Helping others and volunteering is indeed something that brings satisfaction and could help heal your sense of self-worth. If you value another person higher than yourself, by helping them you would establish a connection between their worth and your own. You potentially went from lacking any evidence of positive self-worth to having concrete first-hand evidence that you are worth something to someone.

> How do you know this is not true?

years of therapy :-)

the opposite is also demonstrably false - there's people with huge self-esteem who are known for their complete disdain for others or their opinions.

I can see that. And your counterexample is also pretty apt.

I guess universally it may not be true, but I suspect for some it very well could be. Just depends on the value function you ascribe to (knowingly or unknowingly).

It should also be said that this topic is more complex than these simple models. I've heard it described that Narcissists essentially refute the evidence rather than allow it to poke a hole in their bubble of self-worth; All of that to say, there are many moving pieces beyond just how you value things that add up to your self-worth.

It doesnt have to be a shared moral compass, but simply your own. That is to say, you can practice integrity in isolation from other people.

A simple mundane example would being going to the gym if you tell yourself you will.

A more complex example would be acting in accordance with the values you believe in or not. If you think people that kick dogs are terrible, but you yourself go around kicking dogs, this creates a lot of cognitive dissonance and low self worth. If you promise yourself to stop, but keep breaking that promise, you realize you cant be trusted, which also impacts self worth.

This definitely touches on one important aspect of difficulty in enduring an addiction one is trying to cease. A promise broken thousands of times, and yet still made again.

However if it is the very cycle itself that increases the effort necessary for breaking out of it, how tied to self-worth is it for different people? When one is the subject and the researcher or the judge, defendant, and prosecutor simultaneously - it can be much more challenging to locate the anchor to which self-worth is tied.

Huge topic, but I totally agree. There's a massive feedback between self control and self-worth

> How about integrity? Do you find that relevant?

I feel a very strong ethical obligation to our children. I often worry about whether I've met that ethical obligation to them.

But when I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking about our kids, and what I have done and failed to do – I'm not thinking about "self worth". I feel guilty about some things – whether I should or I shouldn't – but my mind doesn't associate those feelings with the phrase "self worth".

I spent 56 years with that thought. Looking back for me it was family identity and trying to achieve standards of someone that died a decade before I was born.

I now understand self-worth in a new way. I had to realize that there was plenty of time to slow down and be deliberate. I had to get to point where I could take the time I needed to do a task.

I have no idea how others can find self worth but for me I describe it as being comfortable.

I feel this. As to why, my answer is simply that it’s a waste of time to worry about it, so why bother?

Interesting! If I said you were bad at your job and an ugly, inattentive partner, would your primary reaction be one of hurt or just one of calculating self-preservation? I would personally feel very emotional if I heard those things from someone in real life, so it’s an honest question.

What emotionally drives you, if not the assessments of your peers? Why excel at work, why find a partner, why do your best to be better everyday? I wish I could say I was driven by rational assessments of my needs as a Homo Sapiens and my moral responsibilities therein, but I think I’d be lying to myself. Or, at least, it’s an eternal struggle to minimize the importance of self-worth.

Not the person you're replying to but

"What emotionally drives you, if not the assessments of your peers? Why excel at work, why find a partner, why do your best to be better everyday?"

It's fun and it makes me happy. People in my life are smart people but they're just as flawed as I am, what they think of me also changes over time. Why would I build the foundation of my life and career on such shaky ground?

Absolutely I can have negative emotional reactions to criticism-although it all depends on what the criticism is, who is making it, whether I agree with it. But I don’t mentally link those feelings to a concept called “self-worth”. To the extent I have a “self”, it is a bucket whose contents varies over time, and varying thoughts and feelings go in that bucket-sometimes those feelings can get quite dark, but even then I still don’t think of myself as having a “worth”

What motivates me? Certainly part of me likes it when people say I’ve done a good job. Again I don’t mentally link that feeling with a concept called “self-worth”. But often also I get motivated by the pleasure of the work in itself - when I really get hooked on a program, I find improving it is something I enjoy as an end-in-itself

Completely agree with your point, and it feels like a personal preference/trait. Do you think this tendency is related to an autistic trait because of a focus on facts over social norms?

That sounds like a question for your psychologist, not randoms on the internet.

To interact a little more with the substance. I don't think I understand what you're saying. You're clearly using the concept when you write

>I don’t mean that in the negative sense that I think I am worthless or anything

That's what negative self-worth is. You seem to understand it fine. self-worth is your subjective assessment of how much you are worth. The self's assessment of the "worth" (whatever you choose to load into that term) of the self.

You missed the distinction between "I don't feel I have any worth" and "I don't see the world in terms of quantifying worth."

I'm the same way. I could dispassionately talk about either my strengths or my weaknesses. But I don't see the world as measuring myself in an overall way, nor other people. We all have so many dimensions that are always in so much flux, how could you ever reduce that to something meaningfully quantifiable?

I was confused by this part of the article: For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”

What's wrong with basing your worth on something like value provided professionally plus value provided personally, to myself and others?

Are we supposed to think that we are valuable (worth something) just because we exist?

It might be fine if you’re a successful professional or entrepreneur and have a good salary or business.

Of course if you’re an Amazon warehouse worker or a burger flipper, and your labor is completely fungible and provides low monetary remuneration, then you would judge yourself as low(er) value in comparison. So determining your self-worth via other properties makes a lot more sense huh?

We can create value through more things than what we do for a job. It’s true!

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