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Sondosia had some really interesting things to say about self-love, which has started to get me to think about the problems I have with the way a lot of people talk about self-love.
“Love your body!” “Everyone is beautiful!” “You’re an amazing person!” “You’re more awesome than you know!” “You’re perfect just the way you are!” Most things that get classified as a “positive affirmation.” Anything put on black-and-white pictures of overweight women doing yoga or birds flying into a sunset. You get the idea.
The problem is that they always sound false to me. I mean… I know I’m not perfect just the way I am. I forgot to turn in a form for long enough that I have to petition the provost to persuade them that, yes, I am attending this institution of higher learning. That is not the act of a perfect person! That’s actually the act of a somewhat ridiculous person!
As for the beauty thing… well, yeah, everyone’s beautiful in the sense that everyone is sexually attractive to someone, and that human bodies in general are pretty cool-looking. But conventional attractiveness is still a thing. While I’m fairly conventionally attractive (thin, white, clear skin, symmetrical features), I doubt hairy legs, bound chests, and haircuts that make one look like a teenage boy are going to be all the rage at Cosmo any time soon.
I would rather have a clear-headed assessment of my flaws and virtues than a smarmy “you’re perfect just the way you are.” For one thing, as a mentally ill person, I’m pretty inclined to declare that my flaws are everything, everything in the world, I suck at all the things. It is very difficult for me to get from “I suck at literally everything” to “I’m fabulous and amazing.” On the other hand, it is fairly easy for me to go from “I suck at literally everything” to “I am forgetful, antisocial, and excessively poor at sales, but on the other hand I’m a pretty good writer, a kind friend, and a Lawful Good Paladin.”
Once I know my flaws, I can say to myself that it’s okay. Everyone has some flaws; mine tend, at worst, to cause minor annoyance to myself and other people. I’m not a horrible person or secretly Hitler. Now that I know what my flaws are and the ways that I differ from Society’s Norm Of How People Should Be, I can work out how to deal with them if I want to– or I can just accept them as a part of myself. You know what? I’m antisocial. I’m staying in on Friday night to watch My Little Pony. I’m cool with that.
And I’d like to be able to point out that I’m forgetful without people being like “stop being so mean to yourself!” I’m not being mean; I’m being accurate. Yes, in high school, I was a creepy, ugly, socially awkward loser. Yes, I am peculiar to the point that it is astonishing anyone wants to date me. I don’t want to put my energy into denying that; I want to put my energy into being like “yep, and I accept that about myself, and I’m awesome anyway.”
I want to make it clear here that I’m absolutely not saying anything about what other people should like. If you happen to find that “everyone’s beautiful” and “you’re perfect just the way you are” make you feel better about yourself, go for it! There is room for more than one way of handling self-image in this world, and what works best for you is going to be rooted in your psychology and lived experience. Ultimately, you should do what makes you feel good.
But for me… you can stack up all your “everyone is beautiful” posters. I’d rather have “prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked female.” And “maybe I am ugly. I’m still fucking awesome.” I’d rather accept my flaws than pretend I don’t have them. And I’d rather have self-compassion than self-love.
Thing of Things 
I have a very weird relationship with this. As a hedonist, I find it weird that everyone talks about people as if they have some sort of terminal value. I mean, I understand that that’s how affect heuristic and the halo effect work, but people really do seem to see the value of people as something that exists in the territory. I actually think hedonism does a better job with dealing with things like fat-shaming etc. When you’re a hedonist, talking about the value of people’s bodies just doesn’t make sense. You just point out the disvalue of making people feel insulted, emphasize that fat shaming doesn’t help people get healthy, then you’re done.
What doesn’t work out so well is that I often end up believing all of this, but still alieving that I’m worthless and pathetic thanks to depression. Normally the CBT treatment for this is to think of good things about yourself, but if you don’t believe in virute or human value, finding ways to think positive thoughts is hard. My mind just goes back to “well the only thing with value is happiness and I am SO UNHAPPY therefore everything sucks and is awful and there are no upsides.”
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It seems like believing in hedonism has anti-hedonic results for you. Perhaps that’s a reason to try to cultivate a different value system, at least for the time being?
A longish digression on my own, somewhat related experience (which also touches on accepting flaws, as discussed in the OP):
I am not a hedonist*. While I’m not sure that my entire ethical worldview can be accounted for as a product of virtue ethics, that’s certainly the ethical framework that is most central in my moral reasoning, and so I generally describe myself as a virtue ethicist.
I have a strong natural inclination toward burning rage at, and loathing of, those who do evil things. I also tend to regard this as being, in itself, virtuous. So for a long time, I freely indulged this inclination. However, in practice, it created (and still creates, to a lesser extent) two problems for me.
One is that I regard a lot of things that I do or have done as evil**, and the self-loathing that that produces encourages avoidant behavior . . . which leads to more evil***. That’s a rather nasty positive feedback loop right there!
The other is that I can’t really manage cold hatred—when I get sufficiently angry, it puts serious stress on my cardiovascular system, I lose the ability to focus on other things, and I tend to make poor decisions on unrelated matters (i.e. do further low-level evil) due to being in a rage-filled state.
I had a massively unpleasant (panic attacky) experience the first time I tried metta (loving-kindness) meditation. The crux of it was that trying to feel compassion and forgiveness for a particular person that I hated was truly sickening and horrifying, because it implied turning on hating the wicked . . . which meant feeling turning my back on hating myself. That was actually a “worse” than doing the same for him (even though I hated him more), because it meant trading a sacred value for a practical one (although that’s not how I would have expressed it at the time).
After the meditation session, I spent a while walking, thinking, and praying. And the conclusion I came to was this: By holding a belief in the virtue of constantly hating the wicked, I was making myself less virtuous even if that belief was itself correct, because the combined virtue of holding it and acting (internally) on it was less than the vice that I succumbed to as a result of the rage and self-loathing that that belief produced. By righteously hating the wicked, I was on balance making myself more wicked!
So I did something really hard for me: I decided to be a bit pragmatic. I said: Okay, maybe it is virtuous to constantly hate the wicked, but even if it is, it’s not virtuous for me to do so, now, given the constraints of my personality. So I’m going to work on practicing compassion and forgiveness, even for myself, even for others who are more wicked than I am, outside of some very limited circumstances****. I’m going to try to change this part of my moral outlook, since by its own terms, holding it is a net bad thing to do.
It’s been hard, and my success has been far from perfect. But I’m doing a hell of a lot better than I was before I made that decision. I still have a lot of anger, I still do my fair bit for toxoplasma, and I still have a good deal of self-loathing. But all of those are a lot less true than they were . . . a year and a half ago? Maybe? I’m not really sure, now, exactly how long it’s been.
If passionately hating vice makes you more vicious, it’s probably a good idea to try to move away from passionately hating vice. And if being a hedonist makes you anti-hedonic, it’s probably a good idea to try to move away from being a hedonist.
*In the ethical sense. My behavior doesn’t always meet my standards.
**Maybe that’s just a product of unusually rigid moral standards; I’m not sure. In some sense, whether it is or not is beside the point.
***Mostly of a passive sort—irresponsible spending, unhealthy behaviors, failing to get work done, etc.
****I still hold that is virtuous, when confronted with a truly monstrous act as it is being committed, to flare with righteous anger and strike down the perpetrator. But so far, I have not had occasion to do so, nor do I expect to, and I don’t think that that sort of immediate reaction to something happening right here, right now is incompatible with a compassionate reaction to what people have done in the past, what they may do in the future, or even what they’re doing right now, somewhere that I can’t reach them.
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>It seems like believing in hedonism has anti-hedonic results for you. Perhaps that’s a reason to try to cultivate a different value system, at least for the time being?
I’m not entirely sure that’s either possible or desirable. I’m very convinced that hedonism is the correct metaethic (hence my username), and I think it dissolves away a lot of what I now consider to be stupid questions. See: the thing about fat-shaming and virtue. Overall I consider it a net positive. Really, the core problem I face is that my depression gets to be intellectually dishonest and I don’t.
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I think that many of those “stupid questions” are answered fairly effectively by an intelligent approach to virtue. On the fat shaming example:
1. Shaming people for private failings that largely or exclusively harm themselves is ignoble*; an individual of noble character recognizes that another freeborn individual’s life is their’s to dispose of as they please, and while they may offer a gentle rebuke in response to clearly poor choices on the part of a friend, they will not shame another for exercising their basic prerogatives.
2. As you noted, fat shaming does not actually result in its targets becoming healthier, but the reverse; if one views health (or the pursuit thereof) as a virtue, then fat shaming encourages vice in its target. It is not always the case that actions that encourage vice are vicious (we’re talking about virtue ethics here, not consequentialism), but it certainly tends to be.
Between the two, it is clear that fat shaming is not a virtuous course of action.
As for your conviction—perhaps that is unchangeable. But perhaps not. If you strive when moral questions come up, to think of them in other terms, and to act on the resulting conclusions, then you may find that your changing habits result in a changing character, and that in turn in changing convictions.
*It’s probably relevant to note here that I have a notion of “virtue” that is heavily tied up with “nobility,” which is is heavily tied up with the underlying meaning of “those characteristics which are commendable in a warrior aristocrat.” Neither of these ties is absolute, but they’re both definitely there.
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“As you noted, fat shaming does not actually result in its targets becoming healthier, but the reverse”
So why does cigarette-smoking-shaming result in its targets becoming healthier?
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Because shaming specific, highly-public behaviors is far more effective than shaming outcomes, particularly when those outcomes are (a) heterogeneously caused by (b) mostly private behaviors.
In addition, fat-shaming is often intensified by activities (such as jogging in public) that tend to reduce obesity. It’s as if instead of cigarette-smoking-shaming, we had nicotine-addiction-shaming, and it was (often) more intense for people attempting to purchase nicotine gum or patches than for people purchasing or smoking cigarettes.
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I’m not sure I understand what you mean by people not having terminal value. I’ve always thought of hedonism as a system that assigns some terminal value to people in some respects (or to be more exact, it assigns terminal value to certain aspects of people, and then excludes other aspects of them for reasons I’ve never understand).
Maybe you mean something different by assigning “terminal value to people.” When I hear that term, what I understand that it means is that you respect the goals a person has in their life and try to help them achieve them. Most people have being happy as a goal in their life, so under most circumstances a hedonist will end up behaving in a way that values people.
I understand that there are freak circumstances where hedonism fails to assign value to people, like wireheading an unwilling person, or killing someone and replacing them with someone else who is happier. But we’re discussing self-esteem, not those rare circumstances.
Maybe what you mean is that people “value people” in the sense that they consider having people around to be a good thing regardless of what those people want. For instance those people who oppose the assisted suicide because it violates the “sanctity of human life,” even if the person in question is suffering and can’t achieve any of their life goals. From my point of view that is failing to value people, since you’re putting a person’s not being dead ahead of the goals they want to achieve in life (not suffer, in this case). But that’s really a matter of semantics.
Also, I doubt that the halo effect or the affect heuristic is why people think people are valuable and hedonism is false. The fact that people want things other than happiness has been proven scientifically. People’s moral intuitions are backed up by cold hard data. The thing that we consider “wellbeing” in our moral intuitions has pretty definitively been proven to be something more than just happiness, though obviously happiness is an important part of it. I know there are some hedonist utilitarians who say they don’t care and they’ve decided not to value any of the other things people say they want. I think of them the same way I think of creationists who started out claiming the science supported Creation, and then became Presuppositionalists when they realized it didn’t. Some people are just too stubborn to quit.
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“For instance those people who oppose the assisted suicide because it violates the ‘sanctity of human life,’ even if the person in question is suffering and can’t achieve any of their life goals.”
This is one example. What I’m getting at is that the statement that e.g. fat people are less (terminally) valuable.doesn’t make any sense from the perspective of a hedonist.
Re: your last paragraph. I’m one of those people. I don’t understand how people claim to have determined that our preferences matter. In the case of pleasure and/or pain, we can assume that I have some sort of direct access to my subjective experience. I presumably can tell from this that pleasure is good and pain is bad*. Not so with preferences. I can say “When my preferences are satisfied I feel good, therefore satisfying my preferences is instrumentally good,” but I don’t see how we can establish the terminal value of preference satisfaction**. It strikes me as a perpetual motion belief.
*I suppose I could somehow be wrong about whether or not pleasure is good or pain is bad, but if I’m wrong about that then I’m not sure it’s possible to have ethics at all.
**Actually, it’s not even preference satisfaction, just the mental state of feeling satisfied, which could presumably be replicated with wireheading or an experience machine. Also, as near as I can tell it’s just a particular type of pleasure anyway.
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@wireheadwannabe: What I’m getting at is that the statement that e.g. fat people are less (terminally) valuable.doesn’t make any sense from the perspective of a hedonist.
That’s a really odd example. It seems like pretty extreme weakmanning to me—can you name any serious moral philosopher of any school who actually has argued that? If not, it seems really odd to reject virtue ethics (and deontology, and all forms of consequentialism other than strict hedonism) in order to escape from holding a position that isn’t implied by any serious form of virtue ethics.
You also seem to be either equivocating between a “pleasure/pain” distinction and a “satisfaction/suffering” distinction, or simply using the former as labels for the latter. That seems to me to be unhelpful, given that it’s easy to come up with cases where pleasure causes suffering and/or pain causes satisfaction.
It seems to me that you’re trying to derive an ethics which is provably correct, but that’s not actually possible. All of ethics ultimately rests of moral intuitions, including your hedonism, and moral intuitions are not provable, any more than any other axioms. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to have ethics—right or not, my moral intuitions are my moral intuitions, and I’m going to act on them. It’s useful to put some thought into the matter, and to come up with a sensible way or resolving conflicts between different intuitions, but to try to reduce everything to a single succinct axiom or two is a road that leads only to frustration or madness.
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@wireheadwannabe
You are making the completely unwarranted assumption that pleasure and pain are directly accessible to subjective experience, but that preferences are not. You seem to think that the only way our brains assign value to things is by assigning them pleasure or pain. This is patently false. It is possible to directly experience wanting things in the same way that you directly experience pleasure and pain. And I don’t just know this from introspection, neuroscience backs me up.
Neuroscience has demonstrated that people do indeed prefer things independently of pleasure and pain. The idea that pleasure and pain are the only things we value, and the only form of subjective experience it is possible to assign value to, is an illusion created by the fact that our “pleasure” and “preference” signals are carried on the same neurons. A good summary of this neuroscience can be found in lukeprog’s article “Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone” on Less Wrong.
Now, you might ask how I know that I value my preferences directly, and not whatever neural signal that accompanies the belief that they are fulfilled. But this is confusing me with the substrate I run on. All programs have to run on some kind of substrate. Something has to carry the signals and store the data of a program. You are confusing the carrier that sends the signal with what the signal represents in the program. That’s like saying that when I do math, I’m not really adding numbers, I’m just sending neural signals.
And if you want more evidence note that I, and other people, often seek out uncomfortable truths, and wish to learn the truth about things even if it would make us unhappy, and cause us to (correctly) believe that our preferences are less satisfied. If we valued signal over substance, we wouldn’t do that.
Are you seriously denying the Orthogonality Thesis? Are you saying that if someone makes a perfectly rational Paperclip Maximizing AI, that you could go up to that AI and successfully convince it that it doesn’t really want paperclips, that it wants the electric signals in its circuits that are correlated with a belief it has made paperclips? You wouldn’t be able to do that. It would either ignore you, or melt you down to make paperclips. That is because the paperclip maximizer knows it wants paperclips, not electronic signals, and wireheading itself would be irrational. You would have made the mistake of confusing the carrier signal for the thing it stands for.
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And they point out how much pleasure they get from the mockery, how happy they are to have found a community of like-minded people, and how reducing a fat person to tears is their most cherished memory. Also, even if fat shaming doesn’t make anyone healthier, it might make fat people avoid public places, which would surely be a major hedonic improvement (remember, these folks believe that almost everyone else secretly hates fat people too).
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SELF-COMPASSION. There’s that phrase I was looking for!
I can be fucking BRUTAL on myself when I want to be, to the point that sometimes I literally go back and list cool experiences a la Cliff Pervocracy or read specially-saved nice things my friends have texted me before i can be like, “Vivs/Truffles/Ingrid/Lady of Many Pseudonyms, you are depressive. You procrastinate, and you have some Issues around emotional intimacy. But for fuck’s sake, you’re a college graduate, published writer, you’ve got friends who love you (some of whom consider you their go-to during panic attacks, so clearly you’re not THAT bad a friend), and I knowwww you want to lose 15 pounds, but has anyone who’s actually seen you naked ever had any complaints? You’re okay. Calm down.”
Also, one issue I have that can be solved by self-compassion but self-love kind of leaves hanging is that I don’t really trust my own motivations (I was abused by a family member who specialized in believing their own bullshit, and I’m terrified of falling into that trap). I.e. when I try reminding myself that maybe I was less productive that one semester because an immediate family member was in a psych ward at the time, I then worry that that is a BULLSHIT EXCUSE for MY OWN LAZINESS because I am actually TERRIBLE. But if I remember that I wouldn’t think that about literally anyone but myself, it makes it easier. It really does.
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Oh my gods, so much this.
At my university’s on-campus counseling center, there’s a wall with hanging wood plaques with “encouraging messages” written on them, which you can take and/or create and leave (there’s a pile of blank plaques and a marker just below the wall). It’s kinda tacitly framed as a suicide prevention thing, without being explicit about it.
And one time, when I went there to explore some therapeutic options, I saw one that simply said “You are flawless!” And it made me angry.
Like, not only do I personally, as the person who happened to be reading that particular plaque at that particular moment, know that that’s not true of me, but if it were . . . anyone who was flawless would have a flawless assessment of their own flawlessness, right? Anyone for whom a plaque like that is useful is by definition someone for whom it isn’t true. And if that can’t understand that, then they must be really far gone*.
So . . . are there actually people out there who really are that disconnected from reality and logic, and are still functional enough to be making plaques for others like them? Or are there people who are comforted by lies that they know are lies (both rationally and as a gut instinct)? Or is it just people who don’t have mental health problems having zero sense of how self-loathing actually works?
So yeah, I’d much rather have a plaque or poster that says “You’re flawed. So am I, and so is everyone else, and that’s okay. It’s part of being human. Regrettable, yes. But okay. Work on it to the extent that you can, but make peace with it regardless.”
*In the sense of “massively delusional,” not of “worthless” or “permanently broken.”
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Of course people are comforted by lies that they know are lies. Think of a lover assuring their beloved “I’d move mountains for you.” No you wouldn’t, mountains are hard to move and that would be a really arbitray request. That is, of course, hyperbole, as is(I’d guess) the poster you saw.What the latter probably means to convey is something like”Your flaws aren’t as significant as you think they are.” or “You have permission to stop worrying about your flaws.” For some people, that’s not a good thing to hear, either in a “no, some of my flaws are actually quite serious” way or a “Yes, I’d like to have a more positive self image I just can’t” way. But some people’s self image is helped by hyperbolic positive statements. In fact, hyperbole might help by bypassing the “does this statement apply to me ?” filter. A statement like “you are beautiful ” might secretly be directed only at beautiful people but “you are perfect” is equally wrong, an therefore equally right, applied to anyone.
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Apparently we both have some typical-minding in play—I can’t imagine “I’d move mountains for you” as a sincere statement of reassurance. In fact, I have a hard time imagining anyone past their mid-teens or so saying it without a hint of irony—which could still be playfully affectionate. “Darling, I’d move mountains for you. I assure you, dealing with the manure pile in the yard is a mere trifle! Go see what the kids are doing, will ya, I’ll handle it.”
That’s not to say that I can’t see value in dramatic statements, just . . . not in ones that are obviously false. “I’d walk through fire for you” is different, since that’s something that people on occasion (in extreme circumstances) actually do.
It’s also possible that I just don’t get a sizable fraction of what most people (or just most women?) view as “romantic” or “reassuring.”
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the worst is “you are loved *~uwu~*”. Well, thank you for reminding me of my crushing loneliness and lack of skills for making friends or partners (and/or the limited nature of my friending + dating pool, which I can not change). Also thank you for reminding me that my problem is so rare, and I am so far in the low-end, that even imagining someone is like me is beyond your capabilities, oh kind slogan-maker who had set out to create something for the suffering. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
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I get the same thing feeling about shit like “people who are suffering need empathy, not sympathy.” Gee, thanks for saying people with my emotional needs don’t exist. Double thanks for often combining that with telling me (and others) that how I try to help people (how I realistically can try to help people) is actually just a selfish attempt to get them to go away and stop bothering me with their pain.
(Yes, I’m still bitter about the RSA shorts video. No, I’m not sure I ever won’t be.)
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That empathy/sympathy thing seems odd to me. Surely it would be the other way around? I feel like people would prefer “Man, that sucks” to “I know how you feel”. Maybe I’m typical-minding here.
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Probably a bit (I instinctively do the same), but I think you’re mostly just missing the extent to which the pro-empathy people (a) typical-mind and (b) oversimplify. So even though empathy is actually a bunch of distinct capacities, experiences, and behaviors (I’ll try to find and link the comment in which I took a stab at enumerating them), pro-empathy people take the fact that they tend to positively correlated (particularly in neurotypicals) as indicating that they’re all really just aspects of the same thing. So they view the failure to engage in actually-kinda-shitty behavior that serves to signal concern as indicating a lack of actual concern, with explicit statements of concern being lies meant to get the sufferer to go away and stop bothering them with inconvenient pain. At least, that’s the most charitable interpretation I can come up with. The others are a lot uglier.
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It seems to me that part of the problem is conflating “objective awesomeness” with self-esteem. Even if you’re unintelligent, ugly, and have an unpleasant personality, you shouldn’t hate yourself – simply because you are yourself. On the other hand, you should also want to improve, but not so you can like yourself more. While you may evaluate others based on their “objective awesomeness”, it is a mistake to evaluate yourself based on them alone.
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I’ve thought about this a lot. As someone with shitty self-image, trying to help people like me by yelling EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL! seems a lot like trying to help people with depression by telling them to cheer up. Are there people who see these blanket, “you’re beautiful and everyone is perfect” slogans and actually have an improved body image because of them?
(Or maybe their ineffectiveness to me has to do with the fact that I’m a guy and they’re pretty much never targeted at men. I can look at some pro-body image thing targeted at women and remind myself that it can also apply to men, but I don’t think it’s really the same?)
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Well, speaking personally, there’s definitely a non-zero portion of women who want to set those motivational “No, really, you’re ~beautiful~” posters on fire.
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They help me, mostly by reminding me that (a) I want humans to be alive and interesting (b) all living humans I’ve interacted with in any capacity so far have been interesting (c) therefore, we generalize and say that all humans are interesting, and that given a random human, I want them to survive (d) I am a human (e) I should survive.
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Thank you for this.
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I actually occasionally like stuff like that, but generally not for the intended reasons. I mainly just like them when they’re in the form of Tumblr posts, and it’s not really the message so much as it is the intention behind them. It’s nice to see that people care about helping other people, even if the messages themselves aren’t all that helpful.
On the other hand, I do feel sort of uncomfortable when it comes from individual people and is directed at me specifically, because a lot of times it just makes me feel like they don’t know me very well. If it’s obviously hyperbole and from close friends it can be alright though. My reaction is still less “Yes, I am definitely perfect” and more “This friend seems to think I am pretty alright and cares about me.”
Overall, though, I do agree that reminders that it’s okay to have flaws tend to be more helpful.
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I have a desire to improve myself. Telling me that I am perfect the way I am, especially when it feels like a suggestion that I shouldn’t change, that’s denying my desire.
I am unhappy with some traits I have. Telling me that those traits are okay is denying my pain.
I will not deny my desire or my pain, just to make some therapist feel more comfortable.
Also, it’s kinda offensive. It’s like: “Other people can grow up… but I wouldn’t expect that from you, and you shouldn’t expect that either.”
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I have always had a hard time with self-love at a rather fundamental level. To describe this better, I find that it is easiest to preface with the following story:
As a child, I was raised agnostic/atheist. When I was growing up, I would hear serious stories of and people talking un-ironically about the effects of a deity/deities in their lives. Listening to these stories, I would get this sense of those experiences for those people thing being so alien/different from my own experiences that they were essentially impossible for me to properly understand.
This exact same feeling surfaced with every lecture that I ever received on self-esteem from grade school through adulthood.
I keep being told to simply “take it on faith” that one should have positive esteem, “It is not a matter of evidence” friends argue, “It is just something you do.” They usually continue with something like, “If you do not believe in yourself, what DO you believe in?” Normally in a situation like this I can forgive the lack of rigor in verbal argumentation and work to focus on the sentiment behind the phrasing. However, in every case, it comes down to blind faith in one own’s self-worth.
It seems to boil down to: I should hold myself self in esteem because I am worthy, I am worthy because I should hold myself in esteem. At worst this is toxically circular. At best it is axiomatic with no reasonable support for why I should use it as an axiom in my system.
… Gah, am I making any sense?
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I really only started to improve my self-image after I started improving my image of other people. That guy across form the on the subway last evening was a pudgy greek office worker, but he was also beautiful. His skin was imperfect, his nose big, his hands round and soft, but his skin fit him, his nose was interesting, his hands held the cell phone that he smiled into. His hair was a conventionally attractive salt and pepper, but it was beautiful too. I could have watched him the whole ride.
This is not to say I wanted to have sex with this guy – what I was doing was extending him a certain kind of love. If I extend this compassion to myself as well, this doesn’t mean I think I’m super desirable, though it might help with some unrealistic anxieties. It’s just… self-love.
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