I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
Today, halfway through my 1000-day project, I want to highlight the primary conflict I’ve been navigating for more than two years (since this 500 days follows on to a year-long previous reinvention blogging project): seeking external validation and extrinsic rewards vs achieving internal alignment, intrinsic rewards, and a way of contributing positively to the world.
I have not been simply searching for a way to find exernal validation and rewards. I’ve been looking for an internal feeling of self-worth, grounded in what my world and my culture says is worthy and valuable.
A few years back, when my sisters and I were following Brooke Castillo’s work religiously, and having what we called “sisters’ coaching calls” in which we used her approach to question and guide each other, my younger sister repeatedly said, “I don’t feel worthy!” And she said it in a way that told me she thought she should feel worthy, that not feeling worthy was a problem.
At the time, I said, “maybe the problem is not that you don’t feel worthy but that you feel like you should feel worthy.”
Many of the activities I’ve explored during these past 500 days and the one-year reinvention project I undertook before that were aimed at feeling worthy, or, to use different terminology, having high self-esteem.
In their 2004 paper The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem, psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Lora Park question the benefits associated with having high self-esteem, arguing that when people invest their self-worth in particular domains, and adopt the goal of validating their abilities and qualities in those domains, they “react to threats in [those] domains in ways that undermine learning; relatedness; autonomy and self-regulation; and over time, mental and physical health.”
It is pervasive in American culture to seek self-esteem and a validation of one’s worth, both in particular domains and in general. Crocker and Park write “The pursuit of self-esteem is so pervasive that many psychologists have assumed it is a universal and fundamental human need…; some have even argued that humans evolved as a species to pursue self-esteem.”
They describe how the pursuit of self-esteem can include reacting to threats or potential threats in destructive ways:
[People pursuing self-esteem] interpret events and feedback in terms of what they mean about the self; they view learning as a means to performance outcomes, instead of viewing success and failure as a means to learning; they challenge negative information about the self; they are preoccupied with themselves at the expense of others; and when success is uncertain, they feel anxious and do things that decrease the probability of success but create excuses for failure, such as self-handicapping or procrastination.
Crocker and Park suggest that when the pursuit of self-esteem is successful, it has emotional and motivational benefits, but that it also has “short- and long-term costs, diverting people from fulfilling their fundamental human needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy, and leading to poor self-regulation and poor mental and physical health.”
Pursuing self-esteem / worthiness vs pursuing joy and alignment
People pursue self-esteem in different domains. Over the course of these 500 + 365 days, I’ve pursued it in the following ways:
- Joining local art groups, showing my art in juried and open shows, participating on organizing committees in various ways, putting my art online for sale, with the hopes of winning recognition for my art and selling it too
- Taking two professional photography courses at a community college, with the thought of possibly building a professional practice photographing fine art
- Writing newsletters, about AI, about midlife reinvention, about investing, about my life history, with the idea that I might build a substantial readership and turn writing into a money-making business
- Drafting books, such as one about midlife dating and romance, wanting to feel a sense of achievement and again, building an audience, and a potential income stream
In each case, my intention was not simply to enjoy the practice and process, but to validate and prove my abilities and my qualities — to build my domain-specific self-esteem.
But as I’ve progressed, I’ve begun questioning such goals and commitments much earlier in the process. I no longer spend weeks or months pursuing such goals. For example, in August I briefly flirted with the idea of creating a philosophy discussion meetup in my town. But very quickly after only taking a couple steps towards making it happen I realized I was living according to the rules of Byung-Chul Han’s burnout society.
I set the idea of the philosophy meetup down. I refocused myself on this daily blogging practice. I asked the question: what is enough right now? And I decided on just these things:
- Blogging here daily, as a writing and thinking practice, and as a way to record my ever-changing life
- Fostering homeless dogs, on the theory “saving one animal won’t change the world, but it will change the world for that one animal”
- Improving upon my health habits including lap swimming three or four times weekly, reducing drinking, and eating better including regular intermittent fasting
- Staying in regular connection with loved ones — breakfast every other week with my dad, lunch on opposite weeks with my mom, once a month lunch with a good friend, scheduled phone calls with my two older kids, and daily dog walks with my daughter who lives with me
- Continuing the rewarding activity of learning to options trade, improving upon my longer-term investment portfolio practices, and building a system (using AI) to manage both
- Keeping up with home, garden, car, and other life maintenance activities
I do these things because they are intrinsically rewarding to me, and practically useful. It is crazy to think: maybe this is enough?
Why do I find that so crazy? Because I have spent my whole life looking for prestige, money, social approval, and, maybe most determinedly, recognition that I am very, very smart.
A couple weeks ago I said to my daughter, “I’m not doing enough with my life!” I think what I meant was “I’m not doing enough important with my life,” where I define important as something that will win me money, recognition, an audience, social status. For much of my life, I was good at that, and I was rewarded. It worked for me, until it stopped working when I entered midlife. It didn’t feel like me entering midlife so much as midlife colonizing me somehow with errant desires and ideas of what I could actually spend my time doing, how I could live, who I really was.
That’s going in a direction I’m feeling wary of following right now — like some horror movie with aliens infecting only those who are forty years of age or older.
Some alternatives to pursuing a feeling of worthiness
In their paper, Crocker and Park offer the following alternatives to pursuing self-esteem:
- Self-affirmation – “affirming valued and important aspects of the self” so as to “temporarily satisfy the need for a moral, competent, adequate self.” But this keeps the focus on the adequacy of the self and “provides only short-term relief through temporary satisfaction of self-esteem goals.”
- Noncontingent self-esteem – but “it is not clear whether people with truly noncontingent self-worth actually exist.”
- Shifting goals – “shifting from a superordinate goal of being a person of worth, or from the more immediate goal of validating one’s abilities or qualities, to another goal that includes others.” This doesn’t mean you must engage only in altruistic goals but rather to include others or contribute to something larger than the self.
I want to add one option to that: unselfing — letting go of the self — dropping the need to organize everything about me, myself, and mine. That was the place I was coming from when I suggested to my younger sister she need not keep looking to feel a sense of worthiness. Instead, drop the idea that the self is so important that it must have a sense of its own value.
The researchers write, “Only by letting go of the goal of having self-esteem and saying ‘So what?’ to fears and anxieties that are assuaged by self-esteem can the costs of pursuing self-esteem be avoided. If one’s self-esteem becomes higher, more stable, less defensive, and less contingent as a result, that is a bonus, but it cannot be the goal.”
There I think they can’t quite get rid of the idea that one needs self-esteem. That one needs to boost up the self, that it’s a “bonus” if you get some self-esteem.
But I’m thinking that shouldn’t be the goal. Instead the goal should be for the self to diffuse away as a matter of importance. It’s not a bonus if by letting go of self-esteem your self somehow reinflates itself.
There’s plenty more to say about this, and lots of interesting details from the paper about how exactly the pursuit of self-esteem leads to decreases in relatedness, autonomy, and overall mental health. I may get back to it later, or I may investigate Jennifer Crocker’s idea of the ego system vs the ecosystem, which resonates with me, but seems to lack something important in providing a guide for how to live one’s life.