Who, if anyone, should I trust to inform my self-worth?
My initial thought is that it is pretty risky/tricky/dangerous to depend on external things for a sense of self-worth? I know that I certainly am very far away from an Epictetus-like extreme, but I try to not depend on the perspectives of other people for my self-worth. (This is aspirational, of course. A breakup or a job loss or a person I like telling me they don’t like me will hurt and I’ll feel bad for a while.)
A simplistic little thought experiment I’ve fiddled with: if I went to a new place where I didn’t know anyone and just started over, then what? Nobody knows you, and you social circle starts from scratch. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have a worth as a human being (although it might mean that you don’t have any worth in the ‘economic’ sense of other people wanting you, which is very different).
There might also be an intrinsic/extrinsic angle to this. If you evaluate yourself based on accomplishments, outputs, achievements, and so on, that has a very different feeling than the deep contentment of being okay as you are.
In another comment Austin mentions revenue and funding, but that seems to be a measure of things VERY different from a sense of self-worth (although I recognize that there are influential parts of society in which wealth or career success is seen as the proxies for worth). In favorable market conditions I have high self worth?
I would roughly agree with your idea of “trying not to tie my emotional state to my track record.”
My initial thought is that it is pretty risky/tricky/dangerous to depend on external things for a sense of self-worth? I know that I certainly am very far away from an Epictetus-like extreme, but I try to not depend on the perspectives of other people for my self-worth. (This is aspirational, of course. A breakup or a job loss or a person I like telling me they don’t like me will hurt and I’ll feel bad for a while.)
A simplistic little thought experiment I’ve fiddled with: if I went to a new place where I didn’t know anyone and just started over, then what? Nobody knows you, and you social circle starts from scratch. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have a worth as a human being (although it might mean that you don’t have any worth in the ‘economic’ sense of other people wanting you, which is very different).
There might also be an intrinsic/extrinsic angle to this. If you evaluate yourself based on accomplishments, outputs, achievements, and so on, that has a very different feeling than the deep contentment of being okay as you are.
In another comment Austin mentions revenue and funding, but that seems to be a measure of things VERY different from a sense of self-worth (although I recognize that there are influential parts of society in which wealth or career success is seen as the proxies for worth). In favorable market conditions I have high self worth?
I would roughly agree with your idea of “trying not to tie my emotional state to my track record.”