Don't Mock Yourself
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When self-deprecating humor works, it's often a form of counter signaling. To review:
- Moderately wealthy people often attempt to show off their wealth. This might be expensive cars or heavy gold neck chains, depending on culture. This is "signaling."
- But the really rich are often content to downplay their visible wealth. I know of a billionaire who drives an ordinary pickup. Steve Jobs famously wore jeans and a turtleneck everywhere. The message this sends is "I'm not one of those unfortunate folks who need to around flashing their wealth like some kind of drug dealer. You can read about my wealth in the newspapers." This is "counter signaling", and the premise is that nobody would ever mistake a billionaire for a poor person, but they might (horrors) mistake a billionaire for one of those ordinary nouveau riche multimillionaires. If you have to flash your wealth around constantly, you're poor.
Self-deprecating humor works reasonably well as a form of counter signaling, when it's used in the sense that "I'm so confident and secure that I can make jokes at my own expense." It's the billionaire driving around town in a pickup, or Arnold Schwarzenegger making jokes at the expense of his masculinity, or even the peacock's tail.
But like a lot of counter signaling, when it goes wrong, it goes badly wrong. Two friends can tease each other savagely if they both know they're ride-or-die. But two near-friends can accidentally hurt each badly with teasing. I could tease my former startup boss in front of the entire company, but we'd all been through some shit together, and my boss and I were good friends. If you do that to a regular boss? You're in deep shit.
So if your self-deprecating humor is actually hurting your self worth, stop. You shouldn't talk yourself down if you actually secretly believe that it matters. Self-deprecating humor works for people who secretly believe that they are awesome. For everyone else with ordinary levels of self-regard? Don't go tearing yourself down.
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1Reminds me of how 'pick-up artists' have that idea of 'negging'. Normal friendly people really do often flirt by saying negative things to each other, but they're never things that they think will actually hurt; most of the time they're not even really true, it's more likely sarcastic. It also needs to go both ways. Just straight-up insulting someone in the hope they'll try to prove themselves to you is a very different thing.
I have a sticker on both my laptop and my car. They're the same and say "talk to yourself like someone you love." This is the only bumper sticker I've ever put on anything. It's the only thing I've seen that's pretty clearly worth trying to shove into people's minds.
I think we live in a very competitive society. Not everyone thinks too little of themselves, but it's pretty common and pretty tragic that so many people do.
I was raised in a Quaker tradition that holds that all human beings have inherent worth. Then I studied some Buddhism that says that all humans have Buddha nature, making them inherently worthy (And maybe dogs too, still not sure about that one;).
I might be more successful if I didn't have such an easy time going easy on myself. But I think the world would be a happier place, if not moving faster, if everyone just quit knocking themselves and extended the same kindness to themselves that they would extend to a loved one.
Come to think of it, the few people who think far too much of themselves and as a result are very harsh to others could follow the same rule and speak to themselves like they would someone close to them, and that might make the world a better place too by bringing them down a notch.
Anyway, I think this is worth a try for anyone, at least to just try to become conscious of how often you're knocking yourself.
3This is a great post and I have nothing to add except that I know some people who are like this often don't realize that not everyone does this, so I'll say it outright that it's possible to think negative thoughts about yourself approximately never. And you can still do the "I failed to solve it" stuff without any "I'm a failure" stuff.
1Sometimes people make a mistake because they desperately try to avoid making a different mistake. That's what sometimes locks them in the bad place: "but if I stop doing X... wouldn't that make me Y?"
There is another group of people who approximately never think a negative though about themselves, and it's narcissists. They know that it's everyone else who sucks and is responsible for everything bad.[1]
That could be an (unspoken) obstacle against getting rid of the self-negativity: "but won't that make me a narcissist?" or "but won't that make my parents/friends believe that I am a narcissist?".
Ironically, this behavior could have started in the past as an attempt to appease some narcissist in the victim's environment. "If I keep acknowledging that I suck, maybe they will stop attacking me so much?"
But there is a third option, which is simply to abandon the negative thoughts, without redirecting them.
- ^
Some people insist that actually, deep down, the narcissists are deeply insecure, and their outward behavior is merely their desperate attempt to push that internal negativity away. Unless I get some data to support this, I am going to assume that this is just another case of the typical mind fallacy: someone who has negative thoughts about themselves failing to imagine that someone else might simply not have them. If it is possible for a healthy person to have no negative feelings about themselves, why wouldn't it be also possible for the right kind of unhealthy person?
Third hand anecdote re: your footnote: a good friend of mine has a mother who she says is a narcissist, and the behaviour she describes is "can't stand the thought she might have flaws, evidence of a flaw is brutally suppressed, reacted to with anger, blame, denial, gaslighting and displacement, and if a thought like 'I am not perfect, specifically this is a way that I am not the best/someone else is better than me' does get through the defenses, it results in a mental collapse and period of weeks filled with only negative thoughts, expressed to others to try and build back up her sense of self worth by getting people to say she's wrong about the negative thoughts". It's like this person can't occupy the mental territory "I'm OK, mostly good" it's either "I am fantastic" or "I am terrible".
I would be unsurprised if different people exhibiting narcissistic behaviour had different reasons for doing so, and some just straight up think unreasonably highly of themselves and are resistant to evidence to the contrary, without it being a defense mechanism, while others were like the anecdote above.
It's true. People who hate themselves worry they'll become narcissists if they don't, just like how workaholics fear becoming lazy if they relax a bit, or the overly-guilty fear becoming selfish. People must be over-estimating how much influence they can really have over their own personality. A workaholic will approximately never become a layabout. But you can change habits of thought much more easily.
In psychology it seems to be the case that some narcissists (grandiose narcissists) are internally confident, and other narcissists (vulnerable narcissists) are insecure. This seems to correlate with extroversion, with the more extroverted narcissists being the grandiose narcissists. Here is a study: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01600/full
Ooh, good idea. I'll try that out today.
Update: It's been a week of no complaining. Really, it's more like "complain less" as I haven't managed to fully stop myself from complaining out of habit. I think I've learnt a bit more about how much I complain, and how to re-channel the need to complain into something productive. But it hasn't been as useful as not mocking myself. I think I'll see if more dakka changes things.
I recall a comment here on LessWrong where this worked successfully.
I used to have really strong emotions that could be triggered by trivial things, which caused both me and the people I was around a lot of suffering.
I managed to permanently stop this, reducing my emotional suffering by about 90%! I did this by resolving to completely own and deal with my emotions myself, and told relevant people about this commitment. Then I was just pretty miserable and lonely feeling for about 3 months, and then these emotional reactions just stopped completely without any additional effort. I think I permanently lowered my level of neuroticism by doing this.
- Comment by user Adele Lopez, May 2020
The reason I really remember that comment is mainly the follow-up comment by user Alex_Shleizer, which suggests why it might work, and wonders whether this could be even a groundbreaking treatment.
There is research that claims that suffering might serve as an honest signal to get help from your group and that humans suffer more than other animals due to this reason.
You might have taught your system 1 that emotional suffering is useless for signaling purposes and it stopped using it.
If it's true it could be an extremely impactful and even groundbreaking intervention.
I have noticed you posting daily and I appreciate this post along with several others. I has encouraged me to try more new things. While I am only slowly doing that, this is on the list now.
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.
Well-meaning note to people who do this a lot: what you think of as a 'zinger' is frequently not very funny and is just a self-insult. This post calls them a "crutch", but crutches trade off atrophy in your legs for letting you move around. For many people self-deprecating humor is more like digging a hole and lying in it: your normal humor atrophies and you're not funny while you're using these.
Props to OP for getting off this thin humor and onto the good stuff :)
1If I had to guess you were just ready for it and likely couldn't've done it sooner.
My guess is that this isn't true. Having dealt with several people who say bad things about themselves, it often just seems to actually be just a bad habit that pops like a bubble upon being noticed.
I agree with the kind of thing you're talking about for many other issues, just not this one in most cases.
I agree. I’d add that many people act this way because of negative experiences in childhood. I know someone who often made self-deprecating jokes because, as a child, every good thing they did was followed by criticism from their caregivers — and I’m talking about unconstructive criticism. So, the brain mistakenly used that as a kind of self-improvement method, where nothing was ever good enough and the person always had to try harder. But in reality, self-improvement is often more about conviction and determination to change for the better than about metaphorically slapping yourself in the face with red marks of “I’m useless.” Ironically, excessive self-demand just makes you worse and worse — and what looks like “healthy discipline” to someone overly demanding can seem like carelessness, while to a truly careless person, those who focus on self-improvement seem insane.
Why?
I agree the self-mockery is probably doing some work. But what it was ultimately doing for me, I could acquire elsewhere. Is the issue that you need to be able to come up with a replacement before you stop the self-mockery?