“self-love” has this frustrating marketing problem a lot of other things also have, that while in some sense it ought to refer to this broad universal thing, in practice it’s read as having an extremely narrow and specific “love and light” aesthetic many people don’t relate to
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there’s a kind of self-love you could describe as “courage” - the willingness to stand up to tyranny, even your own - and the aesthetics of that word are completely different. would attract a different crowd and nucleate a different scene
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"love" as a word is also honestly just so vague. it means a million different things to different people and all of them are vague
when people want to talk about romantic love they don't write abstractly about romantic love as such, they tell stories about falling in love
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completely forgot i was thinking about this because literally just wrote about it, oops
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Today I wrote about how embracing self-love doesn’t mean you have to become a huggy hippie type
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the men's group has been talking about masculine archetypes and that pov feels relevant here (although itself has a specific aesthetic). "self-love" is a Lover kind of aesthetic, "courage" a Warrior kind of aesthetic. one could ask what the Magician and King analogues might be
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the problem is that so many words have been destroyed. we could call the Magician version "self-knowing" but nobody knows what "knowing" means anymore ("self-understanding"? even worse). we could call the King version "self-mastery" but nobody knows what "mastery" means either
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when the words have been destroyed you have to go back to telling stories, i think. that's where i'm at anyway. stories have a chance of breathing life back into the words
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"love" as a word is also honestly just so vague. it means a million different things to different people and all of them are vague
when people want to talk about romantic love they don't write abstractly about romantic love as such, they tell stories about falling in love
Show this thread
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i like this question! associations that came to mind -
Warrior: agency; self-empowerment to act as a "live player"
Magician: self-cultivation, self-knowledge, mental/spiritual discipline
King: self-confidence