Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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