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Comment by daymanstep | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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