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7:34 PM · Jul 23, 2020Twitter Web App

this is one of those things where someone is trying to make you feel good with comforting noises, which is honestly sweet,

but if you’re a thinking person and you investigate this a little closer, there are a lot of followup questions. What IS self-worth even? twitter.com/WholesomeMeme/…

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Caring about self-worth, beyond a certain point, is just reifying your own feedback & evaluation mechanisms. You will feel worthy when your behavior accords with your ideals. This is a practical problem, far more than it is a psychological one. The practical bit is also harder.

Unfortunately, it's not so simple as to just drop the psychological striving and download straight into performative actuality. You need to first see the striving for what it is, a shell game on top of the real game. This takes certain insights that are difficult to attain.

Your sense of self-worth(lessness) is the logical extension of opinions you hold about yourself, and opinions that have been planted in you. Most people have both, both a sense of who they wish to be and who they are expected to be.

You will never find anything but misery by meeting internalized expectations. For better or worse, you have natural preferences. They may develop or devolve, but they are there.

If you do enough work to start hearing the "shoulds" in amongst the "woulds" of your preferences, you can cut that shit really fast. Sometimes it just sloughs off like so much wet paper. Sometimes you have to tear it off yourself.

But the work, the real work, is to behave in this world as you would like to behave, to feel from your own side that you are where you need to be. This can't be achieved in a day, and it's constant work. It's not a fixed property you will always find to be perfectly adjusted.

People, especially depressive people, like to take the upbeat, "sweetie, you're doing fine" approach to try to perform at being self-satisfied. This doesn't really work. You need to believe it yourself. The best way to do that is to muster your resources and do the work.

Being "who you want to be" is ultimately just another task, like doing your dishes or cooking your food. It's a bit higher order, but it's always subject to change and thus can never be completed, except in the same transitory, relative way you can be mostly full after a meal.

When we treat it like psychological BS, we ignore the problem space not only of what we want to be, but of what we COULD want to be. This is far more interesting than how we're feeling about our time-isolated performance, and gives us far more room to play in. Go have some fun!