About half a year ago, I decided to try stop insulting myself for two weeks. No more self-deprecating humour, calling myself a fool, or thinking I'm pathetic. Why? Because it felt vaguely corrosive. Let me tell you how it went. Spoiler: it went well. 

The first thing I noticed was how often I caught myself about to insult myself. It happened like multiple times an hour. I would lay in bed at night thinking, "you mor- wait, I can't insult myself, I've still got 11 days to go. Dagnabbit." The negative space sent a glaring message: I insulted myself a lot. Like, way more than I realized. 

The next thing I noticed was that I was the butt of half of my jokes. I'd keep thinking of zingers which made me out to be a loser, a moron, a scrub in some way. Sometimes, I could re-work the joke to not insult myself. Often I couldn't. Self-mockery served as a crutch for me. 

So I had to change my repertoire of repartees, which took a while. And I think I'm as funny as I used to be. Perhaps more, though it's hard to say for sure. But I don't need to mock myself any longer. Now, I mock my friends. See? Another joke where I'm the villain. Yes, I do mock my friends. But like most folks, I already did that before. I think I've shifted more towards ... absurd humour? Shocking humour? You know,  "everyone gets AI psychosis but one guy who starts jailbreaking everyone." That sort of thing. 

A surprising result was that I started to react with distaste to negative media. I would open up some work I used to enjoy, or at least tolerate, and go "hey, there's a lot of negativity here. This doesn't feel good. Why am I reading this?" Then I'd drop it. 

Also, I think I became more confident. I mean, I'd kind of have to, given that my self-worth used to be 9 parts negativity to 1 part positivity. Clearing out the negativity did wonders to that ratio. 

Certainly, it helped to emphasize just how useless all the negativity was. For instance, "I'm a failure." What works is that doing? How does that lead to better actions? For instance, if I didn't succeed at a maths problem, does reciting "I'm a failure" tell me anything about what error I made? It doesn't even add any info over a phrase that doesn't do violence to myself, like "I failed to solve it". 

All it does it reinforce the part of my identity that says "failure". Why on earth do I want that to be part of my identity? To make people feel sorry for me? Well, maybe that's a strategy that sometimes gets you some stuff. Perhaps it might help a beggar. But I don't want to be a beggar. So why call myself a failure when I didn't solve some random exercise in a textbook? There was no need for it. It was an excuse not to try.  

Likewise, why mock myself so much in front of others? Yes, it can be funny. But was I doing it because it's the best joke I could come up with? No. I did it to make myself smaller. To say, again and again, "hey, I think I suck, but can you give me points for acknowledging that? Can't you laugh and let me extract some value from this waste of space I call my self?"

How sad when I put it that way. How corrosive. How glad I am to have realized that. 

10/10, would recommend.