What do you stake your ego on?

Gelzo

I figure most people have something that they hold themselves to higher standards about. For everything else about them, receiving compliments or insults is less of a big deal, but for that one thing it has potential to touch a nerve. It could be skills, looks, morality, or brains... If you're lucky, you can feel pride in meeting your own high standards, and if you're not, you just end up overly-judgemental about something you have a hard-to-impossible time fixing about yourself. Of course, at either side this sometimes just looks like delusion to people who see you as better or worse in that regard than you do.

I guess for me it'd be intelligence or social skills. I can accept being called awkward and I often am, but whenever I do something I feel is stupid or fall for a social miscue, that's something that's a blow to my ego that takes me a bit to get over.

Manly McMacho

For me it always changes. One minute it's intelligence, the next beauty, then having high standards (and paradoxically sometime having low standards), grades, $$$, mad cooking skills, superior taste in 90s girl power bands, hot foreign GF, being a nerd, not being a nerd, etc.

Which is just a fancy way of saying I really don't know.

Beholder

My intelligence (which I have high doubts about, so that doesn't help much with ego-stroking) and my honesty (which seems to hold so far. If I'll break that, my self-esteem would plummet)

All Nines

"I guess for me it'd be intelligence or social skills. I can accept being called awkward and I often am, but whenever I do something I feel is stupid or fall for a social miscue, that's something that's a blow to my ego that takes me a bit to get over."

I think I'm very much the same (assuming it's something I even get over; I'm pretty good at remembering my own mistakes and holding grudges, so I still remember some of my worse screw-ups (and some that should, by all rights, be inconsequential) a little too well).

Imipolex G

Writing. Which, since I haven't written anything good yet, makes for a pretty fragile foundation.

I might also say intelligence, but like Beholder I have high doubts about that. Perhaps my willingness to learn and think about things, at the least.

Unknown

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All Nines

^^ Ah, yes, writing. I'm sort of similar; I feel that I can write better than a lot of what I've seen, but the keyword there is can; I don't really have anything on paper sufficient to back that up (as I'm saving my better ideas for college, so as not to become immediately disheartened as I can't write them as well as I know I can), and it could be borne of personal preference anyway.

Gelzo

Y'know, it's kind of gratifying to be able to confirm that people have something along the lines of the same insecurities you do. Makes one feel like less of a head case for having them and that being able to overcome them is a bit more of an accomplishment.

Viani

I have no idea really. I have the attention span of corn and can't understand the paragraph above.

Tachyon

Kind of writing, I guess.  Not so much now because now I'm at uni it's pretty obvious I'm not as good as I thought I was, and certainly not in relation to everyone else over here.  Outside classes, I've pretty much given up writing poetry until I feel like I know what I'm doing.  As for prose... I dunno, it depresses me how I can never finish a story or even complete an essay before the deadline, but I can shit out massive long rantposts on a forum, with citations and footnotes, basically whenever I like.

I dunno.  I never get complimented for jack shit IRL so I guess if I'm expected to "stake my ego" in something, it ought to be not being a completely shit moderator?  But fuck that.

Gelzo

I just got handed back a quiz in a subject I like that's part of my major. Class average was around B and I got a C on it.

I'm just... feeling pretty embarrassed about it. For some reason I'm hesitating to even look at what I got wrong.

LW

Gelzo,
Yeah, I kind of am with Viani on this, I am afraid I do not totally understand what you mean by staking your ego on something. Are you talking about what kinds of things you are most sensitive to praise/insults about?

If so, then I guess that topic reminds me of a coach I heard of who was pretty good at picking up on those weak spots and exploiting them. For example, one person he was coaching really disliked it when people underestimated her intelligence, so the coach would belittle what she said. Another person on that team did not like it when people called her by a certain name. Predictably, the coach consistently referred to her by that name.

Pushing buttons like that does seem kind of mean to me, but I guess the idea was that it actually encouraged people to work on those flaws and not become arrogant.

Gelzo

That's more or less what I mean, but it's not just about what people say to you. I have my own standards for what actions that I can feel pride or shame for.

LW

Thanks for clarifying. I agree that it makes sense to care more about certain actions you take than others in terms of pride or shame.

Anyway, I cannot say I really care for priding yourself on any traits, but I think having high standards makes sense to the extent that you keep working and trying to improve yourself. I feel like there is a lot to be said for not settling and taking the criticism you get as motivation.

To mention one good example of that attitude, Aaron Rodgers got a lot of flak for not being athletic coming into the NFL draft and as a result was drafted lower than he would have liked. Before that, some of his college professors scoffed at his belief that he would ever make it as a pro football player. He took both of those criticisms and used them as motivation to become an incredibly good player (and reigning MVP) and he continues to use slights to encourage him to prove doubters wrong (e.g., the idea that the team should have had team workouts during the lockout).

Now, obviously Rodge-Podge is a rather extreme case. Not everyone is going to have that kind of athletic talent. However, I think the point is that people do typically have their own talents and that one way of improving is to be fully exposed to legitimate criticism, acknowledge it, and use it as fuel for self-improvement. I suppose this is obvious, but I feel like living in your own little bubble, surrounded by gushing and such is only going to make you complacent and that your standards soon continue to rise as much as is feasible.

Gelzo

At the same time, I think it's going to be very hard to feel contentment about the person that you are if you don't allow yourself some degree of pride. No one can be perfect, and if that's the bar that you set for yourself, you're going to be seeing your life as the attempt to minimize the extent of your failure rather than an alternating series of successes and failures. Not that I mean to say I view things with such a clear cut distinction between good and bad.

I think people should try to be happy about the sort of person that they are without letting that get in the way of admitting fallibility and trying to make efforts to improve.

LW

Sure, focusing on perfection does seem pretty unreasonable and what you said about seeing life as minimizing failure versus seeing it as an alternating series of successes and failures seems valid to me.

Still, I guess I would tend to reply that while you should recognize some of your successes, that acknowledgement should mainly be a personal thing and ought to be rather short-lived. That might just be a personal preference though.

I think not hating yourself is pretty necessary too and self-hate is a problem that is depressingly common. However, I believe that culturally the opposite phenomenon is more of an issue as people retreat into their own bubbles to avoid criticism and/or focus on asserting why they are important rather than why the stuff they do is worthwhile.

Take political blogs for example. I feel like the trend towards getting your news and analysis just from the sites that fit your views tends to make people closed-minded and causes their argumentation skills to atrophy. When there actually are political arguments between opposing sides, it seems to me like they tend to boil down to shouting matches or name calling most of the time.