Re: Stop Loving Yourself
From Nikhil Stop loving yourself:
The pop psychology of today has conditioned us to believe that we should always love ourselves. But what if we are mediocre? If we keep celebrating ourselves without confronting that mediocrity β loving ourselves unconditionally regardless β we will never improve.
So you need a measure of self-loathing.
Echoes of my past self. Pop psychology, they argue β correctly β has assembled a self-esteem industrial complex that mistakes stillness for peace. Affirm yourself. Celebrate yourself. Accept yourself exactly as you are, in this chair, with this coffee, in this mediocrity you've been marinating in since the third time you told yourself you'd start on Monday.
They're not wrong about the rot. They're wrong about the antidote.
The voice that tells you you're mediocre doesn't arrive in thunder. It doesn't announce itself. It speaks in should β that small, damp, load-bearing word that props up every unfinished project and unstarted morning.
You should be further along
You should weigh less
You should earn more
You should want the correct things
You should with greater efficiency
Those are wants without period.
Let us name it: "should" is an endless hallway in a house filled with termites.
Self-loathing speaks exclusively in should. It is the should-generation engine, running constantly in the background, consuming whatever fuel is nearest β your ambitions, your afternoons, your capacity to sit still without flinching. Self-loathing would have kept me on the couch in the precise posture of a man explaining, at length, why starting tomorrow made more structural sense. What moved me was something quieter and stranger. Closer to curiosity. What, exactly, can this thing do?
That's the unnamed third option.
Loving something does not require unconditional surrender to its current form. This is the thing the pop psychologists and the self-flagellants are both missing, from opposite directions. I love this body and I have spent twenty years making it do increasingly unreasonable things. I love this mind and I quarrel with it constantly, the way you quarrel with someone whose judgment you respect and whose blind spots you can map from memory. I love the people closest to me and I want tremendous, specific, almost embarrassing things for them β not because they are lacking but because I can see the shape of what they're becoming and I want to be present for more of it.
That wanting β toward something, not away from something β is the gear that slips in both halves of this argument. Self-loathing is motion powered by lack.
It burns dirty, and it burns the operator, and eventually you look up and realize the destination was just a different room in the same building where you started hating yourself.