Yes, this is exactly the experience I'm going through right now. My "I'm only as good as what I do" mindset got me pretty far and does materially help me have a successful career which in turn helps me take care of my family well. But right around mid-life crisis time, many of those low-self-worth chickens came home to roost. Parenting meant I no longer had enough free time to constantly make and do things to pump up my self-worth through actions. My self-esteem dropped and I took that resentment out on my wife and kids.
Thanks to a very good therapist, I'm making a lot of progress now.
> Perfectionism is a lot more insidious than most folks realize.
Like most personality attributes I think it has functional and disfunctional characteristics. My perfectionism helps me be a hard worker and create things that help other people like books and open source stuff. It provides real value to my life and the lives of others.
But it also makes me feel like what I do is never enough and by extension I an never enough. And it makes it very hard for me to explore new activities because I dislike the feeling of not being good at something. Figuring out how to manage the unhealthy aspects while still retaining some of the healthy parts is a challenge.
I feel for you, what a horrible philosophy to be raised under.
The idea that, somehow, your actions do not define your value is so fundamentally broken that it isn’t found elsewhere in nature. There isn’t a single creature in nature that gets to be valuable in the eyes of the very objective and unrelenting judge that is evolution.
We are fortunate that the younger generation, filled with potential, is almost here to replace the vast void.
? I never said that.
_Being_ a person is inherently valuable, _making more people_ is not necessarily an inherent value. This inherent value is from the internalized perspective of the person doing the existing. The external recognition of this value is in - at minimum - recognition of inalienable human rights, as conveyed by documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Perhaps I am unfairly reading your questions above, but notice they seem to carry an implicit (to me) or (to you) at the end of each one. The idea of inalienable rights and corresponding inherent human value is that people do not have justify their worth (to me) or (to you).
This doesn't people can't or shouldn't strive to provide interpersonal, tangible or social goods beyond their inherent human value. It means that the encouraged interpretation of "existential original sin" is "As I develop as a person, I perceive more I could have done or could do better." BUT NOT "I started out worthless and must continually prove my value to person or group X until I earn value."
At least it's inherently valuable to feel that way, a sense of worth in yourself and others.
> does that mean my stupid or malicious acts are also valuable?
Even if you do something criminally stupid there's value for people working in prison sector /s
> if I have as many kids as possible, am I creating value with each one?
Plenty of value for your genes to maximize them in evolutionary terms
Believing yourself to be inherently capable of living a life you find worth living is how you pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
No matter what you do, for anything you put effort into, you are probably above average at it, when you include not just everyone who tries it but also everyone who hasn't even tried.
You can be the worst person at your job and still do a job worth getting paid for.
The only noobs people care about are the perpetual ones who need to be instructed on how to do things again and again.
I've found the trick to getting over this is realizing no matter how good you are at something, there's always someone better and when you find yourself as the noob, you get to ask all the questions and learn and everbody will be ok with this. You also get to make mistakes, and everybody will be ok with this.
I've recently found myself going from being the expert to bottom of the barrel noob again and honestly it's refreshing, there's no pressure on you, somebody else makes the decisions, you just kinda do what you're told and absorb knowledge, and when something goes wrong you don't need to figure it out. It does make a nice change, though it can be frustrating, especially when it's a situation when you know what to do, but nobody listens because you're the noob.
You just have to remember, at some point you won't be the noob again and someone else will be, might as well enjoy it while you can.
It's also kind of an interesting situation, I started my new job just after a younger guy who's only had one or two other jobs before. There's a big difference between the way the two of us learn and work just because of our gap in life experience. It made me realize there's different levels between even noobs based on a bunch of different factors.
In the end though, i've found it best when you're the noob to just learn whatever you can as fast as you can, bring whatever knowledge and experience you can, but do it unspokenly through actions rather than words and eventually, without realizing it, you're not the noob any more.
I can anecdotally agree with this. In general, I don’t care at all what people think about me (I still care if people think I’ve wronged them, it’s more what they judgementally think of me), and I have never felt bad about being a noob, or being seen as a noob.
I’ve learnt two languages through immersion, and I’ve been told I pick them up very quickly. Learning languages like that is basically repeating things you’ve heard, and then figuring out what everything really means through asking questions and a huge amount of trial and error... with lots and lots of error. Really I’m not any better at learning things than anybody else is, but because I didn’t ever feel bad about making those errors, I’d wake up in the morning, and spend the whole day happily making “embarrassing” language mistakes. Which over time quickly became less and less common.
Along similar lines, it's not just that you can't offer expertise. It's also that you're participating in a community defined by knowledge of a particular topic. And relative to that community, you're an outsider since you don't have that knowledge. So all of your primate fears about approaching a community as an outsider kick in.
There's also generally the uncomfortable feeling of confronting your ignorance when being informed, or skilled, or intelligent is a major part of your self image.
I feel like this is often more helpful than simply giving an answer, and I sometimes feign ignorance on a topic as an excuse to show how I would go about searching for an answer without seeming like an asshole who's going on an unrelated tangent.
At some point it becomes easier for me to just go back to my computer and find the answer and come back but then I'm doing their work for them.
Maybe I'm projecting from my own social anxiety, but I believe most of the negative sensation of feeling like a noob is being seen to not know something.
People want to come across as valuable to others and one way we do that is by offerring expertise. If we are seen to be noobs, it implies we may be less valuable to others because we don't know a thing.
Unfortunately, being a noob is a necessary precondition to actually learning a thing. It's very hard to learn without putting yourself out there in some way and trying. So there is this tension between wanting to be comfortable with looking like an amateur so that you can immerse yourself in the kind of environments where rapid learning happens, while also wanting to come across as an expert at other times.