Self-Esteem in the Age of Entitlement

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Nowadays people have pretty high self-esteem right? We've set up our society to raise people's sense of self-esteem, set up our culture to make people feel better about themselves. We've made it taboo to criticise people for their weight or their achievements or their appearance or their marital status so there'll be no hurt feelings. Naturally, people feel pretty good about themselves in the Me Generation, or do they?

Lots and lots of people still have low self-esteem. I do, they do, maybe you do. How can this happen in the Me Generation? How can people still have hurt feelings in the Age of No Hurt Feelings?

The older generations may accuse us of narcissism but I see the opposite. I look out upon a sea of self-loathing.

Why do so many feel undeserving in the so called Age of Entitlement?

It seems that being shielded from criticism has not shielded us from self-criticism. Quite the opposite in fact. When no one criticise us out loud we imagine them saying the most awful things about us. We exaggerate their negativity in our minds. When no one voices criticism we can never be certain what they think about us so we imagine the worst case scenario.

All this self-esteem stuff is unhealthy. All the things designed to raise our self-esteem have a good chance of lowering it.

Part of the problem of people living without criticism is they never develop the skill to determine the difference between insults and constructive criticism. You offer someone some advice about how to avoid some mistake they made and they lash out at you for insulting them. The next day you see someone make a similar mistake but you don't offer any helpful advice. Once bitten twice shy.

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this means people experience even less criticism
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All this is making a toxic environment inside people's minds. This means that the most vehement insults come from within. We put harsh words in to people's mouths they would never dream of saying because we've never heard them criticise us for real. The remedy is for them to criticise us openly so then we'll see their criticisms are smaller than we thought they were.

We should work to foster an environment of diversity. Ironically, PC culture, which claims to promote diversity actually promotes homogeny. We should tolerate diversity of thought and opinion yet PC culture erases that.

When you make more words taboo you limit your own ability to express yourself. As this goes on you experience frustration as you can't even articulate your own thoughts. The English language is already flawed as it is, why make it even more restricted?

People are becoming more isolated from each other. Our culture of building self-esteem is having the opposite effect. Even for young kids, if you tell them they're all awesome, they'll smell BS. The same for adults. If you tell them they're all awesome, they'll either think those words are hollow or even if they believe you, they'll think they're awesome without ever experiencing the feeling of accomplishment. That only comes after dedicating some time to achieving a goal.

If you remove praise from achievement, you diminish the value of praise. If you tell people they don't need to achieve anything, this may even lead to cases were people try to overcompensate their feeling of emptiness by becoming overachievers or hyper-competitive. They may obsess over every little mistake instead of thinking about how to move forward from the last mistake. They may develop the unhealthy habit of choosing goals based on outdoing their peers instead of choosing goals based on practical benefit.

How do you feel the modern age has helped or hindered your psyche? How has it shaped those around you?

Well, I remember reading that US psychologists have been tracking self confidence over a large number of years - I'm sorry, I can't remember the actual source - and until recently they thought self confidence was growing, but it turned out it was narcissism that was growing.

And narcissism is not just having an inflated self-image. It's a bottomless pit of insecurity that sucks in praise and sees any sort of criticism as a personal threat.

I hang out in two cultures that are extremely different when it comes to building self-esteem in children. The children in one country are significantly more confident. They grow up in more stable communities with strong social bonds and a lot of focus on family. School is pretty authoritarian, and there is not a lot of praise going round. Yet I know a lot of people who are perhaps not very accomplished, but don't hate themselves for it - they believe they are good enough without being extraordinary.

This is both interesting and frightning. I agree that narcicists are highly insecure because they can't live up to their own inflated standards they set for themselves.Interesting. I would hypothesise that in the second culture you mentioned, the average kids think it's ok to be average. They think it's ok to not be in the top 10% because the majority are not in the top 10% anyway.

In the first culture you mentioned, perhaps praise is overused. e.g. Perhaps if the average kids get told they're amazingly smart it creates an expectation they know they can never live up to or perhaps if the above average kids get praised frequently it creates the impression for the other kids that a majority of kids are getting praise (but not them).

It's like people fearing an imaginary crime wave because the TV news sensationalises a small number of crimes. Of course all this is speculation on my part so feel free to tell me what actually happens?

Which two cultures do you hang with? You didn't say much about the first culture, what sort of teaching style do they have and are the results positive or negative?

I don't believe in handing out trophies just for participating.

Me neither.

Even young kids know that's BS.

I have a bunch of trophies and certificates for coming in first.

Track and field?

Once, my team came in third in a bowling tournament. I was a sucky contributor to that team. I got a trophy anyway. It meant nothing to me.

I think it's kind of frustrating because when I ask for feedback some people seem to take it that I want validation so instead of giving me honest advice they feel like they need to reassure me and sugarcoat. I know they might mean well, but I don't really feel like I learn much that way.

I also feel like it's harder to trust people because a lot of them are so power hungry and manipulative they do anything they can to step on someone else. A lot of people also seem to like messing with others just to have power over them so I usually try to keep my distance from most people so that it would be harder for them to use whatever it is against me.

Last edited by slw1990 on 18 Oct 2016, 10:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

I gave you an honest assessment of your voice

I felt like it was nice, but that you were probably tired that day.

^ I appreciate your honesty.

The author Nathaniel Branden (to my way of thinking) does not understand trauma or recognize non-verbal expressions of live as being valid however

aside from those things

I recommend his books on self-esteem. He addresses many of the things you have talked about in your post. He also has a program in the back of many of his books (complete the sentences) which gave me specific things to do to raise my self-esteem in healthy real ways.

Just a thought.

All I can say is this....

Parents with confident and capable kids (all things being equal) DID NOT shower them with UNMERITED praise. They let the kids take risks, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. They were supportive but didn't stroke their egos to make them feel good about themselves.

Through challenging themselves, learning their limits and often how to get past many of them, the kids grow up with a solid sense of "self" with confidence that is justly earned, not pumped up to make them feel special.

So many kids today are running on an overinflated sense of self, and life is going to bitch-slap them hard before they know it.

Who is "we" and which society is "our society"? Are you talking about Australia?

The Anglosphere

I'm not sure that the cultures of the English-speaking regions are similar enough to be meaningfully lumped together for the purpose of this topic (especially the United States), and I'm not sure what you mean by "PC culture."

Anyhow, I don't see any evidence that society is set up to make people feel good about themselves, nor do I see modern people as more entitled than their antecedents. If anything, our Anglophone forebears were more entitled—entitled to own slaves, to rule over peasants, to kill natives, colonize their lands, and take their natural resources, to control womyn and various other groups. I suppose it depends on what people of the "Age of Entitlement" supposedly feel entitled to.