On Self-Worth, Competition & What Aristotle Teaches us in the Age of Social Media

Social media drops the cost of broadcasting anything to near-zero. It makes it easy for anybody to contribute to a national narrative, report on what is happening outside of state-controlled avenues (i.e., the Arab Spring), and is one of the most powerful tools for equalization of both opportunity and outcome that the world has seen. There’s also no objective filter to guarantee that what people share and contribute is an accurate, whole presentation of themselves. People can pick and choose the best elements of themselves to broadcast and to make sure that others know.

Anybody who has spent 15 minutes on Facebook or twitter knows this. In fact, it is when people do present the bad parts of themselves that others descend on their timeline and profile as a way to be entertained out of a sort of Schadenfreude.

This would still happen without social media — note how much people revel in the unfortunate downfall of Elizabeth Holmes’ and her company Theranos, despite that not affecting their lives in the least — but with social media, Schadenfreude and imbalanced presentations of the individual’s happy life are common.

This has the unfortunate effect of making us more competitive (for a good look at why competition is not good in general, pick up Zero to One. For the lazy, check out this article.). After years of schooling, we best track our own progress based off of the environment in which we live and work. If that environment is largely made up of a web of carefully filtered social media and the expectations that evolve from that, then that’s the world of milestones we develop.

People present the best of the best that has happened to them and we realize that we are falling behind, even when we do the same exact thing, and start to track our progress based off of milestones set by others’ accomplishments.

The ridiculous circuity of this process is obvious. If people filter their lives to just present the best part of themselves on social media (e.g., promotions, graduations, engagements, births, winning a marathon, etc.) and this is part of the web of expectations and developments in which people naturally set their milestones, then people start setting milestones based off of milestones set by the achievements of other people, which are set by the achievements of other people, and so on.

The Role of Self-Worth

This has further implications beyond just making people chase their own tail.

The process of developing a healthy level of self-worth is derived largely from the alignment of one’s values with the pursuit of ends which reflect those values in the world. This is the core of integrity and having a sense of integrity is the core of self-worth.

Imagine somebody who knows (or has an idea of) what her values are but acts in conflict with those when given the choice. She is somebody who isn’t “true to herself” in the best sense of the phrase. Lacking the ability or resolve to actually carry out what she values in the world around her makes her impotent at best and dangerous at worst.

Now imagine somebody who never really has the opportunity to figure out what those values are in the first place. They are so caught up in reflecting the values and goals of others that they never get to experiment with which things they really want to achieve, know, or create.

Venkatesh Rao writes of the difference between people who want to do something and the people who want to be somebody. He notes that the “be somebody” type of person will probably be forgotten once they die, while the “do something” people will leave behind things that others can use and admire. Left out of this perspective, too, is that in order to “be somebody,” you have to pursue what others want to see or want the world to be.

This is obvious in the world of politics:

https://twitter.com/vgr/status/485525992459337728

How Aristotle Can Help with Perspective

Aristotle presents a useful tool for thinking about trying to live out a happy life full of self-worth while tracking growth.

Aristotle’s definition of happiness is captured in eudaimonia, a sense of flourishing not like the type of emotional joy that most people think of when they hear “happiness,” but it requires a sense of self-worth at its core. Eudaimonia is a state of being that results from one’s ability to live a virtuous life — to, by force of habit, develop a disposition that causes one to act in accordance with the virtues needed for a given context.

We need not get deep into the weeds of Virtue Ethics in order to understand how Aristotle helps us in the age of reflecting on our own achievements based on the milestones set by others’ achievements.

In The Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, he grapples with the issue of asking, “when does one achieve eudaimonia?” and offers an insightful, if not particularly useful, answer (paraphrased): you really can’t know until after the individual has died.

Only when man’s life comes to its end in prosperity can one call that man happy. — Aeschlyus

This is because the milestones that we set for ourselves when we strive to live out the good life are not really milestones, but a set of constantly increasing challenges that must be lived out in order to test our resolves to live virtuously. We can only sit back and look at whether or not those milestones were worthwhile and achieved well in the context of the whole.

Anybody who has competed in a triathlon or a similarly difficult and long athletic event can sympathize with this. You do not stop at each step of the way and ask yourself, “am I doing this right?” or “am I winning?” That’s a recipe for disaster and overexerting yourself when you fall behind, becoming lazy when you are ahead. Instead, you focus on the task at hand and doing it well for the sake of doing it well. If you do each task at hand well, you lend yourself to winning at the event.

When people catch themselves consciously or unconsciously comparing their achievements to those of others, its best to sit back and realize that this is all to be taken in the context of the whole, not in who posted about a promotion or an engagement first on Facebook.