If you would like to increase your confidence, you have two options:
1) Change your thinking, independent of the environmental feedback
2) Change the environmental feedback in order to change your thinking.
Number 1 is closely associated with narcissism. Narcissisists are not able to maintain long term relationships, because other people eventrually re-evaluate their esteem of the person. They see through the lies and bluster, then move on.
There is nothing shameful about persuing validation. Validation is good. Being respected is good. Being wanted is good. Blow jobs are good.
Ego is our self assessment of what we think OTHER people are thinking about us. It is how confident we are to stand out and have an opposing opinion, because we realize we can afford the temporary loss to communal esteem. We all need a strong, capable, cohesive, accurate and constantly adjusting ego.
And to complicate things ego is also an evaluation of how wrong other people are about us. It’s not one or the other. Others can be wrong and we are not just basing our self-(evaluation)-esteem on fickle feedback from the plebes. Still, esteem is fundamentally about others; If we are incredible and nobody knows it, then we must learn how to be incredible in others eyes, not learn how to be incredible in our own. The whole purpose of esteem is a social purpose.
The esteem system was evolved and is therefore hard wired as instinctual neuronal brain pathways. The purpose of it is to jostle for social position, and to receive pleasurable feedback for climbing the social ladder.
There are hacks and short cuts to higher self esteem, but there is no escaping that esteem is fundamentally about how OTHERS perceive us, and long term esteem is a long term social negotiation. Pump and dump bluster among gangs of thieves and whores who swipe left or right on Tinder requires completely different esteem systems than does long term high value community interaction along with a devoted mate.
You can’t fake it until you make it in a nightclub, to any degree of skill, in order to gain the type of esteem required to maintain an LTR with a girl you want an LTR with.
To complicate things further, esteem is a zero sum game, as our positions on the ladder determine the fitness and resources of our mates. Therefore we fight esteem wars, and try to put each other down. So there is a sea of esteem disinformation that we swim in; signal to noise ratio is not good.
We all go up and down in social status – it’s not merely because other people are fickle. Sometimes it’s because we go up and down in finances, appearance, social status, mental acuity, and whatever else humans value.
It’s a very high level cognitive process to make sense of it all. If national newspapers publish fake attack articles against you, will your self esteem drop? If you lose your job and get burns on your face and all your girlfriends leave you will your self esteem drop?
Self esteem should rise and fall. Don’t try to maintain it artificially. Once again; the definition of self esteem is a mental map of how OTHERS perceive you, and your strategy to jostle your position. Self esteem is NOT a form of feel good masturbation. It’s as social as sex.
Make your esteem an accurate mental map, and be ambitious and greedy for more. Esteem is good, and if you deserve it, then good for you!
Whether you are deeply emotionally and neurotically invested, or if you take it as a funny impersonal game to play, it’s still the same game. Your relationship to the esteem game won’t change the fundamental nature of the esteem game.
I’ve always advocated to have an ACCURATE self esteem mental map. Even though none of our maps could ever be accurate.
Once again: if you are not working to improve your social position, you are passively accepting a social decrease. Never blame the bitches for being hypergamous. Blame your lazy ass for not getting the esteem job done. It’s a job as serious as any other, and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
If you appreciate this post, please share it all over the place. It’s common for me to get over-excited about a post, but I think this is my standout most valuable post ever, and that it has deep repercussions into many popular memes and community ideals. It’s nearly original insight; you may have read the same things elsewhere, but this is the first time that the ideas are clear enough to ring the bells of recognition. “Oh ya! I knew that, but just didn’t have words yet for that knowledge!”
Random Xpat Rantings 
It’s a very good post, and you are right: This is how people should think of self-esteem. It’s a real thing that you have to work for, not something you can dream up. It is closely connected to the social environment, because if it wasn’t it would be nothing. (We are talking about social self-esteem here. I believe you could hold your skills at some task in high regard and it would make you proud of yourself, but that means self-esteem comes in different categories, doesn’t it? So here the subject is social self-esteem.)
“Fake it til you make it” – the belief that people can’t see through your bullshit. Because attractive women aren’t used to it by now, right?
People should know they can only get real self-esteem by real skill and accomplishment in the social sphere. Puffing up your chest will lead to deflation after you’ve been shot down a dozen times with no improvement, and then you’ll abandon the guy who told you online that you’d get the chicks that way. (Or you’ll stay and hang on to his PUA blog anyway because you’re actually just roleplaying online, not meeting women in real life. You see this in the “veterans” posting comments to PUA/manosphere blogs.)
Honestly, I don’t understand why self-esteem is such a big topic in manosphere blogs anyway. Maybe because it’s easy to write about, easy to make the readers feel good about. Anyone can tell himself that he’s taken a step forward by puffing up his chest. But if a manosphere blogger writes only practical tips, then the roleplayers have nothing to feel good about when reading it, because they will never try the tips in real life. And they have nothing to contribute to the practical stuff.
But when you learn to drive a car, you learn how to drive it. Self-esteem as a driver comes from knowing that you can drive, having proven it on the road. Telling yourself before you sit behind the wheel that you’re the world’s best driver will only make you crash and burn.
Realism, determination, learning and hard work. Those should be the focus.
It’s possible to be objectively high-value while not being adapted at all to the esteem climate of one’s nation. I know that comes off as sour grapes, but if you look beyond the superficial bitterness, I think you’ll agree that such a juxtaposition IS possible.
Ie the tall, good-looking successful guy who still doesn’t get laid because the bitches are completely degenerate and crazy where he lives. Not wanting to become a tatto’d sociopathig drug-dealer, he doesn’t get the esteem he is “due”.
Again, I realize this sounds bitter and sour-grapes. I just don’t know exactly how to extricate oneself from the conundrum. Moving abroad, yes. Other than that, I don’t know.
Your ideas might require of me a re-visioning.
First thoughts: I think I addressed some of what you mentioned in my post. Esteem comes from others. No matter how highly one thinks one deserves it, that doesn’t change how much others think you deserve it.
My unique insight into psychology (point me to sources if I’m wrong) is that social-esteem and self-esteem are intimately bound. It’s been discussed before how there is a social esteem economy. I think I’m the first person to claim that this economy is inextricably bound up with our own self-esteem. My claim is that self esteem is nothing but our own evaluation of our position of social esteem.
You bring in a new idea that I hadn’t addressed though: there are many sources and types of esteem.
I did touch on it by mentioning that different crowds have different esteem values. Whores and thieves, vs high society parents, for instance.
If you want to be esteemed by someone, be esteemed in the way that particular someone will give esteem. I get the frustration of having different values. Maybe we can teach values, and maybe we can “hold frame” to use the sheer force of personality to impose values.
Or we can, as you point out, just look elsewhere and find like minded people who don’t need a Pygmalian project to be educated to have like enough minds to recognize our value.
No matter what, it’s not only about what you are, it’s about how you are perceived. We have frustratingly little control over what others value.
Esteem is social and contextual, and therefore so is self-esteem. You might get esteem from video player geeks. But show up at a billionairs cocktail party and you would no longer feel so proud of your gaming ability.
Esteem is measured out to place us on social hierarchies, of which there are an infinite many.
Self esteem is an active and changing self evaluation that also happens within context. I say that there is no reason to fight it, but instead we can work with that evolved system. We don’t need the defenses of the narcissist in order to hold our own in situations where we are outclassed.
We don’t need to get angry and irritable at others for being too blind to see our value. (Peter-Parker-underwear-hero-syndrome)
We can instead work on the externals, for situations that affect our life in ways that we want. Play the game. Craft our self, such that we appear more estimable, to whom and when that helps us.
Doing so is not merely Machiavelian, it is the essence of growing genuine and deserved personal pride.
Be seen as excellent (in as many varied ways as benefit you) in order to FEEL excellent, in as many varied contexts as possible.
This is very different than be excellent to feel excellent. Without others seeing you as excellent is just doesn’t work.
Esteem, pride, self esteem, self evaluation – all of this is social. Interpersonal. It is not masturbation. It doesn’t count or mean anything without external validation.
External validation is good!
Spoken like someone who doesn’t see the crab bucket for what it is. Most humans are soft and clingy. Most humans will cut off part of their or their infants’ bodies to fit in, will work themselves into another person’s frame, with capitulate and beg and drag themselves through the dirt. In extreme cases, you end up with people like the highly empathic, highly intelligent teenage boy who killed himself because he believed he would serve the world better by sustaining the lives of others through organ donation than he ever could through his intellect.
On the other hand, if you supply your own self-esteem and accept that other humans do not want to be free, that they are choosing to surrender and to be used, then you will be happier. You do not need to make sacrifices for them. They love and respect you more when you put them to task than when you cooperate. They are more useful to you when you address them as tools. The proof is in the pudding. When you can get everything you want and need without having to make sacrifices, then you are doing well.
A few soft connections may help, after all you never access the highest ability to destroy people without giving them your own detonation button, and mutually assured destruction is the strongest basis for helping each other. You will never get someone to hide a body for you if you do not also know where their skeletons are buried.
But you don’t need more than a few such people. Ultimately if you work around what others think of you, you would end up fat, ill, married to someone “appropriate”, with a useless degree in a painful cog-turning job, surrounded by people who are there to stroke your ego in exchange for your stroking theirs. You need to feel deep-set pride in yourself, regardless of validation, to rise above them. People are soft and clingy. When you are better than them, their world shakes. So the crabs try and pull you back in. They need you to fail at what they excel at, to focus wholly on one thing so they can call you a one-trick-pony, to fall behind them in some way, so their lives are justified. They will only validate you as long as you are useful to them, without challenging them. You have to separate yourself from that in order to find true fulfillment.
One of the relatives I last mentioned is becoming a prime example. He needs a talk with me, so as to make me understand how I made him feel. Because by severing myself from his life, I have hurt him and left him feeling powerless. He needs to reframe everything so he can feel powerful again. He needs to find a flaw in me, to bring me to his level, to reassure himself that I did not mean to hurt him and at once that I, and not his own softness, am solely to blame for his pain. A failure to do that can only result in him despising me or him harming himself. Why? Because he was too soft. Because he built his life assuming I wanted to help him. Because his ego depends on me liking and respecting him. That is not good or healthy. He is not happy. And he can’t be.
I will need to sober up, reread your thoughts, chew on them, slowly drink, write slightly and then more drunk, and then edit my thoughts as I once again sober up.
I can’t see any other way to delve into this.
I’m unsure whether you have a problem or a finely balanced coping mechanism.
Neither of us have enough information to figure that out. We’ll just have to make our judgments on the final output.
Why judge the process?
None of my readers know which posts were written in that fashion.
And which readers would care?
I’ve had years of posting sober, years of posting drunk, and quite a few posts were influenced by pot.
The different approaches have their different merits.
We’re all aware of musicians being on heroin. It helps to be musical, apparently. We all know of writers being drunks. It helps to be creative, apparently. We all know of advertising creatives smoking pot. It helps to lubricate ideas, from what we hear.
Your particular post would require me to go in and out of several different mental states. I can’t approach that just as a square. I’d never understand you.