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Comment by superuser2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious as to what you are saying here. Poor self esteem is healthier? People shouldn't have self esteem, positive or negative? Or they should, but we should ignore it?

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I think he's saying that falsely implanted self-esteen, a la "everyones a unique special winner!", is a problem. When everyone is told over and over again while growing up that they are great and their self-esteem is artificially inflated, they inevitably experience some amount of cognitive dissonance and maybe even depression at the realization somewhere down the road that they're probably not as unique, special, talented, or great as they were told they were as a kid.

This could set someone up for any number of positive or negative effects, emotions, or actions, from long term depression or suicidal feelings to a burning desire to really improve themselves to actually become that unique and talented person they were told they are.

> I think he's saying that falsely implanted self-esteen, a la "everyones a unique special winner!", is a problem.

I certainly hated that growing up. It was years before I could believe I had done anything right, because people would say the same things either way.

But I think tokenadult was actually proposing something else: not focusing on oneself so much. Much like CS Lewis's concept of humility: "could create the greatest cathedral in the world, know it is the best, and rejoice in the fact that it is the most wondrous of all cathedrals; without being any more or less glad that he created it than he would be if someone else had created the cathedral."

Or to take another CS Lewis quote: "And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself." Focusing on self-esteem instead of the goal or substance at hand is shutting a creature within the dungeon of its own mind. That really is a great phrase for it.

I don't really have a response to this other than to say that I like what you wrote and what CS Lewis wrote. Thanks for telling us about it. It is truly or relevant to the obsession over self-esteem today.

There are a bunch of 'positive thinking'-style things that claim to 'increase self esteem', but actually intentionally cause unrealistic expectations - and when those expectations aren't met, then the larger the gap/mismatch between expectations and reality, the greater damage to self esteem.

I think that sometimes increasing your self-esteem depends on factors totally outside of your control. However, a lot of self-esteem programs seem to think that change depends entirely on the individual. Depression comes from the difference between reality and what you think it should be.

Goals aren't results. A movement with the stated goal of "increasing self esteem" is not guaranteed to actually increase self-esteem, nor is there any guarantee that the only effect of the movement will be on self-esteem. Further, the stated reasons the movement had for increasing self-esteem are themselves goals of the movement, which are also not results; nothing guarantees that increased self-esteem will actually have the results those who were in the movement believe, nor that those would be the only results.

(This is one of those things that when I say it, it sounds trivial, but I observe that there is a very pervasive cognitive bias to assume that stated goals === results, in a wide variety of contexts.)

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