A nearly inevitable wound: on low self esteem

I have an unusual relationship with low self-esteem. Because I have severe OCD, I am usually too busy wondering whether I have accidentally done something monstrous to think about self-esteem. However, when I’m in a rare state with little by way of OCD symptoms but low mood these concerns come rushing in. I worry particularly about my looks, charm and willpower. I also worry that I should be worrying more about virtue. I’ve seen enough to know why self-esteem is a rigged game. A big part of it is combinatorics.

There are about six different areas of life were knowing you’re below average, or even just below the average of your peer group, hurts like hell. It leaves a usually lifelong wound that can never fully be compensated for:

1. Good looks

2. Intelligence

3. “Charm”/social skills

4. Virtue (people are particularly good at lying to themselves about this one though)

5. Willpower/not being lazy

6. Emotional stability

Being below average on one of these, and knowing it, or believing you’re below average when you’re not, really hurts. Even knowing you are above average on all the others would not fully make up for it. When you go further down, things get worse. Think about the words that might be applied to the bottom quintile of each. Ugly. Dumb. Weirdo. Bad-natured. Lazy. Crazy. This, I think, is what is truly interesting here. There are some truths about yourself- not even very drastic truths in the scheme of things- that only a handful of people will ever fully recover from knowing. These truths have an asymmetric impact to positive discoveries, at least for many people and especially when we are at in our lowest moods.

It might be useful to think about it in the context of dating. Imagine learning that a prospective partner who otherwise seemed like a good option was one of ugly, dumb, charmless and irritating, bad natured, lazy or crazy. You’d be pretty offput! Even being told they have “below average” looks, intelligence, charm, virtue, willpower or emotional stability would be a hit even though 96% of people tick one of these (more details on that estimate below).

Even though most of us are in the bottom quintile for at least one of these traits, learning someone is in the bottom quintile of any of will probably make you think quite a bit less of them. The only possible exception is looks outside a dating context. Even here though A) there are subtle effects and B) this is redoubled by looks mattering more than any of the others inside a dating context. Of course we shouldn’t think this way. We shouldn’t judge people based on intelligence or emotional stability, outside the specific contexts where it is justifiable. However, we do and pretending we don’t just compound the harm.

I setup a simulation of the likely distribution of weaknesses from the above list in the population. I used known statistics from the literature of the degree to which these traits correlate. Most correlations are small, and none were above 0.3. Some are very hard to measure- for virtue I just imputed a correlation of 0.3 with willpower and left everything else at zero. Obviously, traits like attractiveness are being measured based on rating studies using popular opinion and not some magical true hotness level in the sky. 96% of people were below average on at least one trait and 68% were in the bottom quintile on at least one trait.

There’s a bunch of smaller nodes that carry their own weight. For some people and in some contexts, these can be quite large. Taste, creativity, athleticism and organisation, for example. I even included athleticism on the original list in an earlier note version of this piece. Wealth probably belongs on the list but is a bit different because in theory it’s more changeable- in practice this can just make it hurt even more. Much the same can be said of education. I have not talked about health problems or disability because they need their own handling but suffice to say they are most certainly sources of wounds considering the stigma attached. Other sources of wounds left out because they’re not compatible with a percentile treatment include: belonging to a stigmatized group, a perceived history of bad behaviour or a tight connection with others (a spouse or family) with a history of bad behaviour.

When you factor in that: 1) most people are judging by their peer group, and 2) within each peer group half the people must be below average on each point, and about one in five significantly below average, most of us are carrying around at least one of these complexes. Peer group anchoring can be punishing for the unusually gifted hoping to escape the effect. One philosopher once memorably put it to me like this. Every philosopher, in their worst moments, tends to see themselves as having the bare minimum intellect for the discipline. Thus, they see philosophers less intellectually gifted than themselves as irritating interlopers, philosophers more gifted as deeply intimidating, and themselves as just scratching by. Obviously, things aren’t normally that extreme even in philosophy, and philosophy is, despite academia’s quiet reputation, a brutally competitive discipline. Still, I think something like this is all too common. On the plus side, peer group comparison is doubtless a source of relief for the less gifted, but even here, there is the looming knowledge that one is in a small pond.

And even if, by some chance, you’re not significantly below average within your peer group on any of these, you’ll probably still build up a narrative about how one or more of them has cost you the achievement of everything you’ve dreamed of. Most of the time it might not be salient, but when things are tough, you might find yourself returning to the narrative and using it to worry away at your self-esteem.

Worse many of these traits are multifaceted- perhaps you’re smart but not fast, charming but not funny, handsome, but short and so you’ll always find enough negative traits to drink at the poisoned well.

I’m not blind to the obvious, and strongest, objection that people have such a hazy conception of how good they are in each domain that their position scarcely matters. Further, their conception is biased upwards protectively (1). There are several things to say here. Firstly, I think these defences tend to drop away in one’s darkest moments. Secondly, although people exaggerate their skills, they also keep raising the bar for what they expect from themselves. Someone said on Substack recently that people used to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, but they now see themselves as temporarily embarrassed celebrities. Very true! If that’s your self-conception, “a bit above average” won’t cut it in many of these domains. Thirdly, peer group sorting means that thinking you’re better than some average can mean very little. The bodybuilder might think that he and his friends are gorgeous compared to the average man, but he weighs [ha!] himself against his body builder friends.

Peer groups are typically strongly sorted on intelligence and probably charm, moderately sorted on looks and weakly sorted on the rest, but that’s enough to make things substantially harder for the gifted. As I said above, I suspect the cushioning effect of the below average is reduced, precisely because you know you’re in a small pond. Look at the psychodrama in America that seems to break out among those without college degrees resenting the status of those who have them even when relatively few people they interact with have college degrees. Perhaps there’s also a sense in which we all treat celebrities, streamers etc. now as a quasi-peer group. They’re more charming, hotter, smarter, often better at appearing unflappable etc. etc.

Now how to escape? What about domain deflection- the under rating of domains you’re not good at? This is very partial. I suspect the nerd who disavows beauty and charm as fripperies feels the sting when they’re low, or when they’ve just suffered because of being weaker in these domains. I know I do.

But aren’t these traits more changeable than you think? Some of them probably are. Working out alone will change your looks substantially, and plastic surgery can be very good these days (albeit a source of shame in itself). The reality is though that most people never will change all that significantly on any of these traits, with the exception that several curve downwards throughout the life span. Interestingly, for several of these traits, trying to change them is itself considered a minor taboo. Plastic surgery has a loserish vibe, even reading How to Win Friends and Influence People comes across as slightly loserish. Brain games for intelligence probably don’t work, but even if they did, the sight of someone playing them earnestly on the train would seem a bit much. I’d probably do it if I thought it would help, but a lot of people are very sensitive about what we might call metastatus concerns- approaching status management in the right way. Across all six areas we’re focusing on, a botched rescue attempt often reads worse than resignation.

My approach- and this might sound a little sentimental- is to reflect that I have enough available to me to do good in the world now. If you’re in prison, suffering from the early stages of dementia, have committed numerous wrongs, are ugly, lazy, emotionally unstable, charmless and generally spiteful and no one whatsoever likes you- if literally everything is going against you- you can still choose to do something right now, relative to your capacities, that is extremely kind. It won’t change the past and it may not change your future. Poor virtue is on our list after all- so maybe you’ll just go back to being cruel afterwards. But right now, you can do a good thing and focus on that rather than your own relative position. Ethics, unlike the machinations of social capital is graded relative to a handicap- “to whom much is given” and all that.

A word on virtue here. It is, in many ways, the odd one out throughout our essay. The one people are most likely to deceive themselves about- probably in both directions. It might seem odd that I’m suggesting doing something kind to break the cycle of self-hating rumination. After all the desire and even capacity to do kindness is dependent on virtue. Here’s the thing though. Some people doubtless are too far gone to desire kindness, but this is far less common than being deficient in virtue. Consider all the usual boogeymen of our society. Imagine one finds them in a state of contemplating with shame their past actions: the murderer, the sex offender and the disgraced official. Almost all of them have the capacity to do something kind and it’s probably among their best bets for breaking the loop.

In our culture generally, the solution is not higher self-esteem- the self-esteem fad of the eighties and nineties was never going to work. If you tell everyone they’re great, they’ll know you’re lying because great is, in human affairs, usually inherently positional. Telling people to have unconditional self-regard on the basis that they’re simply human is a good move, but it’s a very partial solution and on its own rings hollow. I’m not a Christian anymore, but the best answer I ever saw to this puzzle came from reading C.S. Lewis in grade 8: discourage positionality and relative status assessment at all. On fripperies, and on the things that matter. We should stop judging and evaluating our positions at all, beyond a minimum required for realism and navigating the world, and focus on living well and morally. Think less about yourself, not less of yourself. Domain deflection isn’t enough, because you’re still acceding to the logic of the game. You must refuse to play. Don’t try to surpress the thoughts, that’s a losing game, gently let them pass and turn your attention to something else.

As Mill has it: “Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way... Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.”

Believe in something beyond yourself. Martin Luther King said “"If you have not discovered something you are willing to die for, then you are not fit to live.” But it goes beyond how we should live. You can’t fully live if there is nothing you would die for. If your life the center of your moral universe you will be subject to constant anxiety, a singular life is too fragile a thing, and could be destroyed at any moment. People have been quoting Weil a lot recently: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” And I would add, attention on something other than ourselves is not just kind, it’s the only way to be free.

(1) I’m supposed to cite Dunning-Krueger here, which has become a stand in for “people think they’re better than they are, even though this is A) not what Dunning and Krueger were saying and B) was obviously recognised by many psychologists before them. As I’ve stated in previous writing, I am somewhat sick of this phenomenon where a bastardised, generic point becomes the real estate of a particular thinker. “Oh, you’ve said sometimes you must act before you understand? Better cite Kirkegaard” and so on.