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Notes -
How can self worth not be a self defeating concept?
The human being is a social animal, and interacting with others is very important to them. A person's happiness, access to resources and even physical safety is determined by both their belonging to a group and their social position within that group. When a person feels that they have little worth and are downbad because of it, others around them will respond with platitudes such as "you need to improve your self worth" or "you to be confident!" Yet often, a person has low self worth or confidence because others assign low worth to them. This treatment need not come in the form outright abuse - if a person is repeatedly ignored or passed over then they end up attaining a low level of worth simply because they can see that others are recieving positive affirmations when they themselves are not.
Most things people do beyond fulfilling their immediate biological needs, such as eating and urinating, is to work to increase their social standing, which may happen immediately or over a long period of time. A person aware of their low worth must convince themselves into believing that if they perform certain actions they can accquire greater worth from the positive reinforcement provided by others. For example, that they dress in a way that will be more accepted by others, or that they act in a happy and upbeat manner even when they are not feeling so. A person must not act as though they have a high worth when this is not valued by others - you cannot for example go to a job interview and say that you are worth some 6 digit salary if this is transparently not the case. This is the fastest way to decrease the view of oneself in the eyes of others.
Hence, a person's motivations cannot ever concern themselves alone, unless you have the strength to withstand spending large parts of your life alone in very bad places. What good is prefixing self to worth if, for a healthy, adjusted human being, worth comes from places other than the self?
A lot of complexity here. IMO: there are contexts where high confidence is beneficial even if it is not externally-administered, for instance in making friends and finding partners where people gravitate to confidence. Similarly, you can have high external valuation and yet have a low assessment of yourself, causing a shyness that is unwarranted and unbecoming, which leads to problems in social life.
There’s also the question of proportionality: you can be confident and have reasonably high self-worth and yet still feel pain at social defeat and feel pleasure at social victory. The default self-worth can buffer against unwarranted catastrophizing. If you’re a chess player and go into hysterics at every loss you will probably not play chess for long. Self-confidence is also (counter-intuitively?) judged as good by others, for instance when a defeated opponent keeps a stiff upper lip and praises the winner.
The ideal is a reasonable amount of sensitivity regarding your external persona, which is guided by a reasonable amount of self-respect and self-judgment that filters and optimizes longterm social sensitivity. You don’t want to commit sepukku every time you fail at an obligation. Neither is it necessarily advantageous to primarily judge yourself by some narrow and fleeting social obligation.
Religious language can offer some insight here. God judges every deed, while both loving and disciplining as a father. This is an archetypally correct mode of social feedback because nothing is more optimized for behavioral shaping (the psychological term of art) than how a loving Father/mentor teaches his Son/student. This is how evolution has guided the best possible identity-formation / behavioral-shaping, through love and loving chastisement (which is very cool actually). So we see for instance that a child who feels socially secure is most adaptive to learning in school. That’s the correct balance of self-worth [forever loved by the Eternal Father] and reasonable social sensitivity [humility, growth mindset, interest in others].
Frankly I do not find the term self-[worth / judgment / assessment] ideal. How can I be the one negatively evaluate what I myself am doing? Why would the problematic me negatively evaluate the exact same problematic me, and why would problematic me listen to problematic me when evaluated? In what sense can I be disappointed in myself when I am the same person through and through? I am disappointed in myself being disappointed? What’s really happening in any self-judgment is that we imagine a hypothetically reasonable and perfect Judge and how that Judge would feel about us. We then internalize this judgment and measure our action against it. It is at least quasi-religious. It is more healthy to admit that I myself suck, and that there is instead an independent, omnipresent judge who I answer to. In ages of old, when a person felt the watchful eye of their deity over them, what they are really doing is what we would call “self-judgment” today. This is very optimal, because we have a built-in instinct of external administration that can be sublimated in the imagination, whereas there is no “self-judgment” instinct so it gets confusing and paradoxical and unhelpful.
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