The flip side of detaching self-esteem from technical competency is that you can make very strong assertions without being arrogant.

People of integrity with utilitarian leaning are often labeled amoral or unemotional.

People with a strong drive not attached to financial gain are often termed unambitious.

Your perceived worth really depends on values of society, so if you remove yourself from the equation, you only have no worth to others, not to yourself. Sequestered from others the sense of self has no meaning, so naturally you have no self-worth. Not because you are worthless, but because you have no self and place no importance on your perceived worth.

Or more strongly phrased, what's the point of self-worth if you can do everything you put your mind to?

I'd you can't but think you can, then that's a harmful psychological schism. Since no one person can achieve everything, self-worth is only meaningful in areas for which you lack competency

For example - and this deals not with self-worth but with stress - I'm pretty inflexible in my goals. When I can't meet my goals I tend to shut down. I'm often asked if I'm stressed, to which I can only respond, "Stress - what's that?". And yet clearly I've suffered a harmful schism between my perception of self and reality, as indicated by my lack of stress response.

A related observation I've gotten from interacting with normies including my wife:

Most people assume there is such thing as a "self" and that it is okay, natural, and desirable to preference yourself when interacting with other people. Indeed, for most normies, there is only various people and their selves interacting. My autistic perspective is that there is only a system of the world, various roles that people happen to occupy, and here are my options for where I can slot into it, might as well choose the best one, but it never occurred to me that the other people in the system could be individually influenced or that you could preference your self over others. At least, until I interacted with others enough to realize that that was all they were doing.

Relatedly, most normies project this self-interest onto aspies and assume that when they are saying how the world is, they are pushing their own agenda, because in their worldview everybody has an agenda. As a result, the aspie tendency to make observations about broad sweeping systems comes off as arrogance, as preferencing themselves and their worldview over everybody else. But to an aspie, there is no such thing as arrogance, because arrogance implies that one preferences their self-worth over others, and there is no such thing as "self" or "worth", and it is nonsensical to talk about self-importance.

I feel the same.

One thing that I have struggled with in relationships is that others need to feel validated, that their decisions are rational and that other people believe that they are rational. Stimulus from the outside to satisfy the inside.

What makes this difficult for me is that I don’t need to feel validated, I am comfortable with my own decisions in life and do not need someone else to approve. I think this ties into self worth which seems to be related to people’s perception of their actions and the approval they see from others. If you do not need external validation then you are not concerned about peoples perception of you and therefore self worth is a foreign concept.

I think there are two ways you can look at it.

One is what I think of as the neurotypical way. They spend a lot of energy on social modeling, on fitting people into hierarchies of privilege. (E.g., "respecting your elders", older sibling vs younger, teachers vs students, the popular kids, and so many other things.) Then in the same way they're judging the worth of others, they fit themselves into the same primate status model.

I think that's what the psychologist is talking about. Personally, I find that way not super useful.

But another way is sort of reverse engineering. From how person X treats themself, what can we learn about how much they value their own self? Like you, I didn't have much of a concept of self-worth in the sense of "where do I place myself in the many hierarchies most people around me are constantly aware of." But a therapist eventually got me to see that I did not treat myself as worth the same as the people around me. Paying attention to that has improved my life a lot.

The big question for me is to what extent the latter thing is influenced by the former. For neurotypical people I gather the link is pretty strong. For me it's definitely a weaker link, but it's hard to tell the difference between "there is no link" and "I don't notice the link".

I am a Christian. Something I have found within my faith tradition (and something I find is lacking in the culture around me) is a sense that I am in possession of an infinitely durable source of dignity and worthiness that is not tethered to who I am or what I have done. I have found this conceit enormously consoling.

I think the idea is that "people" tend to be attracted towards things that they think will increase their self worth and avoid things that decreases their self worth.

Though from a stoic perspective the only thing that can affect your self worth are your own actions, not external events which you have no control over.

>> "Self-worth, what is that?” Because I’m not sure if I have any?

This almost made me laugh. I know where you're at. You got a long road ahead so get started! Tell your psychologist when these things pop in your head. Have a laugh, but then reflect on it or whatever.

Let me offer some alternatives to "autistic": Anhedonia, schizoid personality disorder, avoidant (attachment OR personality disorder). There are many things, but it's not super important to define it, lest you let it define you.

One way of looking at it is how you assess yourself in things and take pride in or feel regret about that.

For example, you wrote this comment. It is a well written comment. You likely have some belief roughly along the lines of "I write reasonably well". You have probably received feedback along those lines throughout life, and that reinforces that belief. This is perhaps mildly pleasing or at least seems correct.

Now suppose instead that whenever you wrote things people replied:

"Huh?"

"What? This makes no sense"

"Good god what led you to think that? That's so stupid!"

And so on. And you even reread some of your own writings that you thought were good and they seem to strike you as not good. The view that your writing is not good comes to strike you as correct. You aim to improve but continue to receive negative feedback. The view that you are genuinely not good at writing seems to be correct and you come to believe you cannot ever be good at writing.

That would be negative self worth. Does this example line up at all with any internal thought processed you have? Are you pleased by praise or hurt by criticism? Even to the level of thinking the judgements are correct or incorrect.

(To be clear you are good at writing)

How about integrity? Do you find that relevant? Usually people with integrity have high self-esteem because they adhere to a certain set of ethics. I'm not trying in any way to pass judgement, just to give you a different perspective.

I spent 56 years with that thought. Looking back for me it was family identity and trying to achieve standards of someone that died a decade before I was born.

I now understand self-worth in a new way. I had to realize that there was plenty of time to slow down and be deliberate. I had to get to point where I could take the time I needed to do a task.

I have no idea how others can find self worth but for me I describe it as being comfortable.

I feel this. As to why, my answer is simply that it’s a waste of time to worry about it, so why bother?

Interesting! If I said you were bad at your job and an ugly, inattentive partner, would your primary reaction be one of hurt or just one of calculating self-preservation? I would personally feel very emotional if I heard those things from someone in real life, so it’s an honest question.

What emotionally drives you, if not the assessments of your peers? Why excel at work, why find a partner, why do your best to be better everyday? I wish I could say I was driven by rational assessments of my needs as a Homo Sapiens and my moral responsibilities therein, but I think I’d be lying to myself. Or, at least, it’s an eternal struggle to minimize the importance of self-worth.

Completely agree with your point, and it feels like a personal preference/trait. Do you think this tendency is related to an autistic trait because of a focus on facts over social norms?

That sounds like a question for your psychologist, not randoms on the internet.

To interact a little more with the substance. I don't think I understand what you're saying. You're clearly using the concept when you write

>I don’t mean that in the negative sense that I think I am worthless or anything

That's what negative self-worth is. You seem to understand it fine. self-worth is your subjective assessment of how much you are worth. The self's assessment of the "worth" (whatever you choose to load into that term) of the self.

I'm the same way. I could dispassionately talk about either my strengths or my weaknesses. But I don't see the world as measuring myself in an overall way, nor other people. We all have so many dimensions that are always in so much flux, how could you ever reduce that to something meaningfully quantifiable?

I was confused by this part of the article: For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”

What's wrong with basing your worth on something like value provided professionally plus value provided personally, to myself and others?

Are we supposed to think that we are valuable (worth something) just because we exist?

Depends on what you mean by good. In Maslow's pyramid, the lowest levels are being optimised for while the highest are suffering greatly. By what are approximate proxies for high level metrics like self fulfilment and satisfaction, things are getting worse (especially in young people). Rates of suicide, depression, mental illness, self harm, addictions (drugs and alcohol), obesity, levels of social interaction, stress etc are all getting worse. Our children will live longer and be more well fed (they're very likely to be overweight), but by every upper metric they are predicted to suffer.

The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated. Those sci-fi stories of higher life with both vast technology and purpose - like the Forerunners (Halo) - is a pipe dream. We're not even heading in the direction The Culture - a post scarcity society that's like a rich old lady trying to find charities to work with. We're heading towards (at best) a Brave New World society - pacified, materially sound but vacuous and empty.

We simply do a terrible job at educating people about how much the past sucked and instead do the opposite with ridiculous Goethe like romanticism of the past.

Never mind that Goethe was the eldest of 7 children with only one sibling not dead as a child. Then going on to have have 5 children of his own. 4 that also happened to die as young children.

Modern people are so clueless we literally take the lack of dead children completely granted.

The type of person who writes this cultural word salad slop I suspect has an IQ of 100, thinks it is 140 and can't figure out what is wrong with the modern world that they are not above average in their output.

I agree generally, but I feel like we're slowly coming to realize that maximal leisure and safety might not necessarily be the recipe for a happy and fulfilling life.

> with just more rudimentary metrics

I think this is actually the answer: the word "just" is doing a lot more heavy lifting here than first meets the eye.

The digital era has brought a lot more quantifiable data, and with that has come a much easier (and in many cases automated) comparison, value-attribution, calculation of the probability of success, etc. The article speaks to this in the second half.

Previously this was largely impossible outside of government and other organisations with dedicated statistic collection. The author talks about how even sales numbers for authors were very imprecise and easy to exaggerate or fudge.

You could argue that the Digital Era has turned some of "life" (or at some of "art") into one big Goodhartian[1] parody.

That said, it does feel like the author has stopped believing that art has intrinsic value - and that its value might be different for different people, including the author. That is pretty much the mental step you need to take to end up in the parody to begin with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

> how would this be any different in a non-digital era? You’ll still have a market (albeit significantly smaller

you answered it yourself.

What's harder, to become the best tennis player of your neighborhood or the best tennis player on the planet? What if you base your self on something that's fringe at a global scale, but acceptable in your local culture? What if all your human interactions are on the internet (with millions of strangers that tend to treat you badly, because people are way more rude online than in real life) vs on your local community (where people treat you better simply to avoid getting punched in the nose, but you might think they like you)?

_Everything_ is different online (and that obviously impacts people's psychologies)

I think your notion of "the truth" is heavily influenced by exactly the context she's pointing at. Google and Meta's algorithmic rankings aren't "the truth", and "the truth" doesn't change on each regular parameter rebalancing. Those algorithms were built by a relatively small number of people from a narrow set of backgrounds who were focused on maximizing usage and revenue, and the bulk of "the truth" they contain is about that.

One thing importantly different about our age is context collapse. With communication costs and marginal costs near zero, a global service is easier and cheaper to build than local ones with equivalent coverage. It's as if we've taken every ecosystem in the world and dumped it onto the San Francisco peninsula to fight it out to discover "the truth" about what plants and animals are "best".

What's different about those small locales and villages is that each one of them naturally had its own values. Skills and tastes co-evolved. Schools of thought were born and elaborated. Communication and movement between locales gave useful exchange and inspiration, but generally weren't enough to swamp variation.

In the pre-web era, the question of, say, whether Irish music was better than Spanish music would be seen as kind of a dumb question to take any more seriously than for an entertaining argument. But having put everything in Meta's global blender and reduced it to counting updoots, the ever-present metrics purport to provide "the truth" to questions like that.

They don't, of course. But they do place a much larger burden on us to recognize that not everything that goes up and to the right is an unalloyed good.

> how would this be any different in a non-digital era

I would argue that the scale and the ease that comes with the digitalization and algorithmization is what makes the difference: eg. only literary critics can publish review of your book in a newspaper vs. everyone on the internet can post one.

While I agree with the main point you're making, I have to note that likening school playgrounds to markets is a questionable analogy. Schools are far closer to prisons than markets - in fact, I can't come up with a single way that school playgrounds are similar to markets other than the fact that they both involve humans.

It's not different, it's just worse. Online there are more people, interacting more shallowly (and therefore judging more superficially and less empathetically), and presenting a more fake version of their own self for you to compare yourself to, and we spend more time wading in it.

It's always been going on. But it has changed, not in kind, but in degree, and it does more damage.

Technology amplifies this, greatly. In a non-digital era our field of view was narrow, expanding either to our immediate physical surroundings or, when we went beyond them, limited by what we could read in a newspaper or see on TV. When I was little, I didn't know who was the most skilled person at my hobby or how popular it was or whether beautiful people online also happened to excel at it, while my teenage hormones wreaked havoc on both my personality and looks. Every single child in the civilized world nowadays is subjected to exactly that. You may be an aspiring dancer and there will be a million like you right there on your phone. It's hard for them to formulate self-worth when that is the case.

Does that mean the internet and digital advances are bad? No, it just means we were unprepared for them in a very meaningful way.

> She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.

Technology isn't always fractal, but you seem to be assuming it is. The internet is not just "a really efficient printing press", in the same way that New York is City is not "a little town or village made bigger".

If you can convince yourself that your problems are caused by modern novelties, then you don’t need to address the tricky problem of what’s actually causing them (it’s probably yourself). Any sort of scapegoating like this is going to have a lot of popular appeal.

I sometimes feel we are in a similar time to the "let a hundred flowers bloom" period in Mao's China, where dissent was tolerated for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

Funny, I have career issues and dating is easy but that’s only because I was willing to stake my whole life on it and use everything in my power to change it (except changing my looks - I look mediocre).

Happily married right now. Feel free to email me to exchange some career advice for dating advice.

Of course. I feel more comfortable speaking my mind under a more anonymous account. Even then I'm pretty measured, I just don't want to deal with potential headaches in my professional career.

I don't owe the world my true self

How one views karma is funny. I take comfort in my aggregate score due to implied comradely. I noticed down votes happen no matter what is stated.

Not really the ideal way to approach HN, although understandable.

If you're considering HN from a forum perspective, the best advice I've read is to think of 'points' as currency to spend on unpopular opinions. After a certain point, you can 'afford' to say whatever's on your mind (within reason). Reddit is the same. You rack up 'karma' so that you can afford to take some downvotes for speaking your mind.

Now, the other dynamic is that some people here expect to see and work with other HN folks in the real world. THAT is more chilling, and I don't think one could be one's 'authentic self' in that instance unless you're already a 'name' who doesn't need to give a rip about others' opinions.

I tend to wonder what the heck I said that caused an unexpected downvote.

I tend to get grumpy when an expected one happens, there are many unwritten rules on HN.

I tend to defend against imagined arguments with my statements, and against corner cases far, FAR too much. Getting those imagined arguments wrong doesn't help either.

I do notice that things that are inconvenient but true tend to take a hit, then rise back over time, so that's a good thing.

I genuinely don't care. I've questioned downvotes I've received before, but usually it's just because I want to know why I might have had a bad take or how I might be looking at things wrong.

Respectfully, I know nobody here and you all mean nothing to my life, which is much broader than what I post here, so what do your judgements matter to me? What do these points actually mean that I should choose not to be myself because of them? The answer, to both, is nothing.

[flagged]

Not exactly the same, but some friends and I have a tradition of going to a local equivalent to Hooters on Mother's Day since it's the only place that you don't need a reservation. The last time we went the server gave us all an official card with her name on it where we could go to leave feedback for her.

It happens everywhere in marketing, at all levels. Strippers, movie stars, ballet dancers. Anyone whose job it is to reach eyeballs and build a 'brand'.

It is nigh on impossible to get a literary manager these days unless you have a sizable social media following, for example.

It's absolute brain rot.

Businesses live and die by Google Maps reviews and social now. I am familiar with a Kentucky pizza chain that gave instructions that if each server did not meet their Google review quota, they would be let go or moved to hosting.

https://ibb.co/MBcJhZW https://ibb.co/kG1bddG

I've never heard of anything remotely like that occurring in the restaurant industry and servers - but there are industries where the reach of someone would be important for hiring or booking them for a gig. In today's world, social media followers is one of those proxies we tend to default to for reach.

But a similar thing has been part of the service industry for a long time - attractive and charismatic people will often get the best shifts, even if they're not necessarily the hardest working or best at the other aspects of the job. I suspect if such a thing around the followers is happening now, it's just the a new manifestation of the same underlying cause.

Possibly more followers relates to more customers coming by especially for her/him

I sometimes get hand written note to review and mention the name of the person who made my food on food delivery app.

>And we know from Goodhart's law and reward hacking that optimizing a proxy is, at some point, either useless or actively counterproductive.

I don't think that's accurate. It might be useless from the perspective of the system, but hugely advantageous from the perspective of the individual. When a co-worker hacks the metrics and gets the promotion, that might be bad for the company but it is great for them, and perhaps bad for you.

The same is true for sales, search engines, and social interactions.

I agree with your first point that the proxies are not true reflections, but don't see where this is peace of mind when someone loses out because of them. If anything, I think it would Foster anger that the system is rigged, basically the opposite of Peace of mind

> my skills interest few, but those few are willing to pay a lot.

We share this privilege. My wife doesn't, though, and she and I have fundamentally different interactions with social media.

For her, it's a necessary evil to some extent - the nature of her profession demands that she's tuned into hot trends. That's a visible connection between her profession and her social media relationships. The invisible connections are much harder to identify, and you bring up an interesting point. I can't conceive of a company looking up your instagram account just to see how many followers you have, but maybe that's a thing. I wouldn't know.

This is an odd thing to say on a site that depends so heavily on the upvote.

I sometimes think "algorithms" understand me more than other people. Through my actions, they can diagnose me better than any doctor. e.g. meme therapy pages on facebook and tiktoks. I believe a constant stream of "best matched tiktoks/reels" to my situation" would be equivalent in value to going to a 3-star michelin restaurant and having their best dishes. It is available to everyone.

> The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...

>There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...