Liking ourselves,
having high self-esteem as we tend to put it.
Is crucial to any feeling of well-being.
What's odd then is just how unpredictable
the allocation of esteem often turns out to be.
There are people with modest jobs
unspectacular bodies
and unglamorous friends
confidently nevertheless, they claim to buoyant levels of self-esteem.
They seem to like themselves.
Despite the absence of any vigorous signs of
approval
from the world at large.
And then there are others.
For who no amount of achievement
prestige and financial security
ever seems to do the trick.
They anxiously challenge despise and critique themselves.
Always feeling that they have under performed
Never quite trusting that they really deserve to exist.
Having sound levels of self-esteem
Ultimately appears to have precious little to do
with hitting any verifiable benchmarks .
It seems connected up with a stranger.
More internal, more subjective kind of logic.
With factors immune to stand at notions of achievement.
Three factors stand out in particular.
Firstly
The single greatest determinative of how much you will esteem yourself
is how you compare with your same-sex parent.
Whether you've achieved more or less than mom or dad.
Rather brutally it seems that comfortable levels of self esteem
are only available to those who've managed to outpace their same-sex parent.
Those from a poor backround have a big unwitting advantage here.
You might only be driving a beaten-up old taxi around Manhattan and living in one room in Harlem,
but if your same-sex parent was a subsitence farmer from Easten Burkina Faso
you will at times feel princely nevertheless.
Similarly yet more darkly you might have grown up in ostensibly privilege circumstances,
but if you same-sex parent made a few hundred milion and you're only managing to pull in a midlle-class salary
you're liable never quite to shake of haunting feeling that you're a disgrace
Secondly
We don't feel inadequate in relation to everyone who has more than US
only those who we'we come to see as belonging to another crucial determinative self-esteem.
Our peere group.
By this we mean the people who we're educated with us, who are around our age
and who live in our part of the world.
These people matter infinitely more to our sense of well-being than the population at large.
It's a piece of extreme bad luck and matter for particular commiseration and assistance
if ever on peer group produces someone who starts a bilion dollar company
or god forbid ends up runnin the country.
Everytime someone we went to school with does better than us a small part of us will die
we should therefore take immense care to attend very ordinary schools
and after graduation to throw all invitations to reunions straight in the trash
Thirdly
A lot depends on what kind of affection we were the recipients of in childhood
in particular how many conditions our love came attached with.
Some of us had parets who only knew how to give out the conditional kind of love.
It was all about the grades and the school reports.
We therefore grow up of course to be high achievers but it's not so easy, running around
your whole life long desperate to put out the raging fires of self-hatred
striving to impress everyone you meet in search of an unsatisfied desire for a parental approval you never knew.
But others the blessed ones who've know unconditional love, from the start
will be ok just to be, they won't have to do quite so much pushing they have an inner basic
buoyancy quaranteed by the knowledge that they once mattered immeasurably
A big reversal like being fired will be unpleasant it won't necessarily have to be a tragedy.
Knowing about the odd internal origins of self-esteem is crucial
because of how often we pursue goals in the belief that success will at last
give us the keys to feeling good about ourselves. It seem the truth is slightly darker
you might ostensibly be doing very well at work but if your dad was a big shot
or your school buddy became president or your parents didn't tank you up
with the right unconditional sort of love no amount of striving, goalscoring
and medal-winning is ever really gonna do it.
This changes where we should imagine our challenges lie
feeling good about ourselves isn't ultimately something we can bring about trough
professional or economic achievements alone.
In huge part it's going to be about coming to terms with ourselves.
The result of understanding our past and the dynamics of shame, conditionality and humiliation that might lie there
it turns out that high self-esteem seems largely to be apprised of psychology rather
than the fruit of anything we might achieve out in the world in relation to the economy.