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? (original thread)

If self-worth is worth that you give yourself, why not simply decide that you’re worth a lot? “I hereby decide that I have an abundance of self-worth.” Done!

This maybe works for a narrow subset of truly delusional people, but for most people it’s not quite enough. Why not?

well- before we can dig deeper on this we first have to lay out the spectrum of people who are dealing with some version of this issue. Some of them are “doing okay” (or even good!) and remain feeling “unworthy”. Others are doing terribly, and their inaction etc is costing others

Generally speaking you gotta be careful with who you’re reassuring, because sometimes you’re reassuring someone who shouldn’t be reassured. But y’know, that’s the wider problem of social media in general and that‘s not going to be solved in a hurry…

Having been through quite a journey on this myself & having talked to probably 100s of people about this over the years, I think I’ve come to think that the concept of “self-worth” is itself a little clunky and contaminated. It’s almost like thinking about your health via weight

If you have a critically low (or high!) “self-worth” then that’s probably an indicator that something is messed up, but in practice I think there are actually a whole bunch of variables that go into generating this strange, vague scorecard that people carry around in their heads

It’s worth trying to list them out, and troubleshoot them. Different people care about different things to different degrees, for different reasons

• health
• relationships
• appearance
• sense of purpose
• economic viability
• etc etc

There are two ways you can interpret “productive”. One is in narrow terms: literal measurable economic productivity, ie making money in the short term. A broader frame is: some form of progress on some of the above fronts, eg “I should be catching up with old friends”, etc

Doubling back a bit: the variables, incidentally, explain why it’s seldom easy to magically increase your self-worth overnight- because they’re “tied” to things in material reality. If I’m a shitty friend, and I want to be a better friend, I don’t get to simply “decide” that I am

But one can certainly make the decision to start doing better! And one can also examine one’s beliefs about those variables, and change them

For eg: if your “self-worth” is low because you’re not making a lot of money, one way to improve it is to make more money. Or! You can also investigate your relationship with money, and ask yourself why that matters to you, and how so, exactly

I’m not saying “lol just decide you don’t care about money, problem solved”- although for some people that general approach can be the start of a lot of relief. It depends. It’s messy. It’s complicated. But nevertheless it can be explored and clarified

I think I’ve personally gotten a lot of mileage from framing my own challenges in terms of self-respect. Maybe it’s the same thing to some, but I find it less messy and confusing. It becomes more of a dialogue: what do I have to do to earn my own respect?

I’ve found that I can respect somebody who doesn’t work all the time, who isn’t perfect, who makes mistakes, and so on. I respect people who make “a decent effort”. That too is a vague term that’s full of many variables…

And this isn’t some academic curiosity for me, this is something I really, really struggled with in the depths of my depression and despair. How do I know if I’m making a good effort, or if I’m bullshitting myself?

On retrospect I was in a dysfunctional state because I lacked the cognitive tools and frameworks to make sense of myself, which took a painfully long time to build. I realize now I struggled extra hard because I was isolated. I wish I had people to talk to

It’s not really something you can help someone with by writing them a twitter thread, though hopefully maybe you can nudge them in a way that sets them off on a healthy and nourishing path, however they choose to define that. It’s a whole journey, a process of becoming