Self-esteem sounds like a good thing, doesn't it?
Mine is low.
The reason is that self-esteem is generally built from successes, and if the bar is "too high" there aren't enough "wins" to get the sense of progression that leads to self-esteem. I expect a lot from myself, and fail and fail and fail. However, I think that a lot of western society has gone the opposite way, where we have put self-esteem as the goal, without recognising that it is the outcome of healthy skill development, and instead have kept lowering the bar to feel the sense of skill, without actually having it.
Most of the entertainment is this kind of esteem builder.
But a lot of the tools we have also encourage this kind of baseless esteem, where we are able to fake skill, looks and personality without actually possessing them at all. AI to create text, images and video. Filters to remove fat, spots and lines. Search engines to provide our sense of intelligence, humour and persona.
But are people actually confident?
I don't think so - unless they are also delusional.
When younger, my sister was a confident driver - no matter how many accidents she had. While I worried about her, I also wondered how a person can fail so often, but still have a high self-esteem when it came to driving ability. And I think it comes down to where she set her bar of comparison - which were her friends, who were almost all equally as poor drivers it seems. There was an expectation that crashes were normal, not that they were a sign of low driver ability.
No shame.
And I think that the "everyone gets a prize" approach to education has also been coupled with the degradation of role models, where rather than looking up to what people do well, it is about celebrating the biggest victims. We don't compare ourselves to the best of us, we compare to the worst of us, lowering the bar for us to feel good about ourselves, but not inspired enough to improve ourselves.
Self-acceptance is important, but self-resignation where we resign ourselves to whatever default position we are currently in is where we end up feeling the worst. In fact, while we feel best when we get to do what we want, we don't feel worst when do what we must. The worst we feel is when we live on the default decision, and that default position for most of us, is to be passive, to consume useless, and do very little that brings us growth potential.
And maybe when we are "too content" with our current situation, we are more likely to rest on our laurels and not look to grow further. Eventually though, our current situation is no longer a s good as it was, but if we haven't been growing consistently in the meantime, we are well off the pace of where we might want to be. And we might be so far off the pace, that it now seems out of reach and impossible.
Not enough wins.
Winning isn't about beating others. It is about meeting our intentions. If we set our goals too low the winning is worthless and bores us. Too high, and we are out of our depth, bound to fail. But if we set it just above in that "flow zone", we might fail sometimes, but we win sometimes too. And the stretch to get those wins pushes us to improve, so in order to get back into the flow state, we have to up the challenge again - and again.
I have low self-esteem, because my skill levels are too low for what I both expect and need from them. My assumption is that there are others out there, but there are also plenty of people who are confidently travelling through life, no matter how bad their results are. Being confident isn't the same as being happy, and having high self-esteem doesn't mean there is anything to back it up - but there are plenty who believe they have what it takes, no matter how little skill they possess.
How about you?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
