‘The day you were born is the day God decided that the world could not exist without you’.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov
To be able to regard ourselves as having value is one of the most important cornerstones of positive mental health and self esteem. And yet it remains frustratingly difficult for so many of us to sustain. A whole industry of self-help and wellness culture has blossomed to try and respond to this need and heal this deficiency in basic self-worth that seems so common. In turn, the idea of self-care has become pervasive in the cultural discourse around mental health and well-being.
Whilst the promotion of self-care is clearly important and necessary, there’s also a certain strangeness to it as a phenomenon. It seems to indicate a kind of cultural sickness which renders our innate animal instinct for self-preservation so diluted as to require continuous and deliberate re-instating. That we need to take care of ourselves seems like an obvious given for any animal, yet we seem to require constant reminding that this is fine and good, actually.
Myths and Archetypes
One could point to a number of potential causes for this widespread collective deficiency in self-worth. Western culture has it roots in a particular reading of the Judeo-Christian creation myth and its promotion of the idea of original sin; you are born with a stain of unworthiness which you have to work to overcome. Your value is not innate but has to be earned (and there is a transcendent being always observing and judging whether you’re deserving, even when you’re alone).
Whilst our society in the West is much less religious than it used to be, this belief in our basic unworthiness has remained stubbornly persistent as it has been carried over into more secular forms.
The archetype of the hero and the myth of the hero’s journey are also pervasive in Western culture. This leads to an emphasis on exceptional individuals as the proper centre of value. Famously outlined in Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’, the myth of the hero’s journey is endlessly replayed and reproduced in stories, books, TV and film. It was a significant influence on the original Star Wars trilogy, and is of course a central feature of the ever popular superhero story.
Status and Self-esteem
These stories place the heroic individual front and centre, overcoming great obstacles, demonstrating outstanding bravery and skill, facing threat and danger to secure a promised treasure. Esteem is earned through great individual struggle, and is given to the exceptional individual who saves the community from ruin.
In capitalist societies, this myth is updated into modern versions which sell you the opportunity to overcome your innate unworthiness through work, wealth creation, and consumption. It sells you the promise of climbing up the status hierarchy as a way to overcome this innate lack and earn your value and chance of esteem.
This contributes to a culture which tends to venerate exceptional (and wealthy) individuals and spotlight them as the most worthy objects of praise. In so doing, it relegates to the shadows the complex web of conditions, communities, and relationships which facilitated those individual achievements.
Conditions of Worth
Being exceptional becomes the entry-price to esteem and value. This is something which by definition the majority of us will forever remain locked out of. The ordinary and mundane start to feel cheap and mucky in comparison – meaningless and valueless.
One of the inevitable psychological outcomes of this is a proliferation of depression and anxiety, of ‘not good enough’ self-beliefs and feelings of failure and disappointment. When our lives turn out not to be exceptional, and don’t meet the expectations set down for us by a culture that valorises a particular idea of success, we crash back down into what psychotherapist and meditation teacher Tara Brach calls ‘the trance of unworthiness’.
Mourning Lost Futures
The writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher described this loss of a sense of meaning from our lives as a form of melancholia in which we are haunted by the dreams and fantasies of our past selves. He described this as a kind of ‘failed mourning’, as our dreams and desires remain ‘attached to what has disappeared’.
The mid-life crisis is a particular manifestation of this process. At this time of life, if the dreams of youth have not been fulfilled, but also not properly mourned, we can be left haunted by the spectre of a life un-lived. The hero’s journey we were promised never materialised, leaving us with an almost aggressive melancholy that gets acted out in dramatic attempts to recover a lost future. Divesting ourselves of the myth of exceptionalism often necessitates a kind of grieving for the loss of the futures we felt like we were promised.
This process involves letting go of the dream of status and a particular kind of ‘special-ness’, and coming back down to earth, to the land of the ordinary and mundane. Whist this can be painful (as any grieving process is), it eventually opens us up to a world rich in meaning, value and fulfilment.
The irony is that we’ve been living in this world all along, but the myth of exceptionalism has prevented us from being able to see and appreciate it properly.
Discounting
So what is it that prevents us from recognising the meaning and value in our lives?
Discounting is one of the psychological mechanisms that keeps us from appreciating our value. It refers to ways of thinking which focus on what we lack and what’s missing, on self-criticism and perceived negative qualities in ourselves, rather than acknowledging the positive value we bring to the world on a daily basis. If you’ve ever dismissed or downplayed a compliment (as many of us have), then you know what discounting looks and feels like.
In his novel ‘The City and the City’, China Mielville imagines a city of the future in which two societies live separately from each other but occupy the same territory. Each are trained and conditioned to not see the people and infrastructure of the other. One poor and the other rich, the premise seeks to demonstrate our cultural and social blindness to the suffering of others with whom we share space.
But it can also be used as an analogy for what we see and don’t see in ourselves, blocking out through conditioning all the positives that might support our self-esteem, and only seeing the negatives. The tragedy of this situation is that, just as in Mielville’s twin-cities, the other world is right in front of us, if only we were able to see it.
The reality is that what we might otherwise discount and dismiss as unimportant and mundane in our everyday lives is in fact rich in meaning, impact, and value. The myth of exceptionalism and cultural stories which focus on individual greatness condition us not to see it, and to presume ourselves less-than in comparison.
Finding Meaning through Art
Art is often the place where we can find and discover meaning where elsewhere it might feel lacking. Folk music is one such art-form which has a long tradition of finding beauty and meaning in the ordinary day-to-dayness of life. A contemporary artist who provides a modern example of this is the British folk musician Richard Dawson.
The characters in Dawson’s songs are by no means exceptional in the conventional sense, and the stories he tells about them often involve them engaging in the kind of daily activities that we would normally pass over as unremarkable.
Dawson’s telling of these stories, however, are imbued with a poignancy, meaning, richness, and beauty that you can’t help but be moved by. Whether it’s a child playing football as their Dad watches from the sidelines, a disgruntled job centre employee feeling depressed and demoralised, or a UFO enthusiast’s relationship problems, Dawson finds deep meaning and humanity in the day-to-day lives of ordinary folk.
The Rippling Effect
So how might we learn to appreciate the meaning in our own lives?
The psychotherapist and writer Irv Yalom has given a lot of attention in his work to existential questions of meaning. He has dedicated much time and effort to helping others find sources of meaning they might otherwise disregard. One of the ways he does this is to encourage us to recognise what he calls the ‘rippling effect’.
Using the metaphor of a stone dropped into a still body of water and the ripples it creates, Yalom invites us to acknowledge and take account of all of the varied ways our being in the world, the choices, decisions and actions we take, meaningfully affect and impact the world around us. These effects then go on to influence how others behave and act, which in turn affects and influences the people around them, and so on.
Application
We can use this as an exercise to help us take into account that which we normally discount. This includes the rich and diverse ways in which our existence and participation in the world brings value to those we come into contact with.
These effects are easy to discount because most of them we don’t witness directly. They point to ways we exist in other people’s inner worlds and the small, everyday actions that count for more than we realise. The small acts of kindness; the thoughtful conversation that someone remembers when times are tough; the compliment we gave to the nervous teenager working their first shift; the smile we shared with a neighbour as we crossed them on the street; the flower’s on Mother’s Day; the song we showed a friend in school which introduced them to their next favourite band; the jokes we share with a co-worker that make them feel that little bit better about going to work that day.
A Philosophy of Community
The dominance of the hero myth and emphasis on individual exceptionalism are not universal to all human cultures. There are plenty of other examples of cultural norms and philosophies that instead emphasise our inter-dependence and inter-connectedness with each other and the rest of the non-human world.
Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism have found such fertile ground for growth in Western countries over the past half century in no small part because of their emphasis on community rather than on the individual. They have provided sustenance for people who have been starved of a sense of meaning and are suffering from feelings of separation and alienation.
In her essay on classical Chinese philosophy, Mercedes Valmisa explains how within this tradition we are seen as ‘interwoven beings’, part of a rich and complex web of inter-dependent relationships:
‘We are co-constituted, co-acted and co-dependent on others – from the air we breathe to the ground that affords our walking. If we start seeing the world like this, it has the potential to make things much better for the many life forms that inhabit this planet.’
In many indigenous philosophies, there is a greater emphasis on the connection of all beings, human and non-human, organic and in-organic, as ‘components of a greater whole’. From this perspective, individuality is respected and celebrated, but not elevated or conceived as separate from the community of relationships within which it belongs.
In Africana philosophy, particularly in southern African cultures, there is the concept of Ubuntu. This idea proposes
‘a relational form of personhood, basically meaning that you are because of the others. In other words, as a human being—your humanity, your personhood—you are fostered in relation to other people.’
Unconditional Self-worth
The quote attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov at the beginning of this post invites us to consider that we are an essential part of God’s creation. It is an encouragement, albeit from a religious point of view, to recognise ourselves as holding innate value. A value that is not conditional on our achievements or successes, but which comes from the fact of our existence in the world.
Yet one does not need to subscribe to any religious beliefs to recognise a similar truth. Namely that we are inescapably connected with all that is. We participate as a node in an infinitely complex web of relationships. And this participation renders our life meaningful whether we recognise it or not.
A significant flaw in Western cultures is the failure to properly account for this inter-connectedness in its conception of the self and of where value and meaning can be found. The dominance of the myth of the hero in our defining cultural stories leads to a focus of attention on the isolated individual. It promotes a standard of exceptional achievement and success as the means to acquire esteem and status. This is something most of us by definition are unlikely ever to achieve.
Recognising Marginalised Communities
Addressing this imbalance does not necessitate a denigrating of individual achievements. Defenders of Western cultural ideals often fear the fostering of a resentment for those who do succeed. But a greater recognition of the the complex web of community and history that creates the exceptional individual just highlights and acknowledges the unseen labour of others that makes the exceptional possible.
This shift in perspective allows for recognition of the contribution of otherwise marginalised communities of people. This includes the unseen domestic labour of women that has historically made possible the public achievements of men, as well as the rich and varied contributions of people otherwise excluded from recognition along lines of race, class, sexual orientation and other forms of discrimination.
Conclusion
Maintaining positive self-esteem can be difficult in a culture that places so many conditions on our worth. It is all too easy to buy into the idea that we have to be exceptional in our success, talent, or achievement to be worthy of praise and be considered a valuable member of society.
But we can learn to appreciate the meaning in our everyday lives that we may otherwise discount. And we can come to recognise that there is value in the fact of our existence in the world. This innate value is not something we have to earn through success or status, but is always already there.
