Sometimes, I don’t feel very proud of myself. What then?
If I slice my week into ten slices, three go to sleep, two go to work, and the remaining five, I get to do whatever I want. One to two go to my hobbies – writing, philosophy, and psychology. Another one for socializing.
Another to TV, reading and social media. The last one or two might go to exercise, the gym, and time spent outdoors, such as swimming, walking, or cycling. But what makes me really happy? What activities give me a genuine sense of pride? What makes me fall asleep with a smile on my face every night?
This is Molly, my neighbor’s dog. We go on walks once or twice a month! That gives me joy.
Time puzzles are generally one of the most challenging to work on. That’s where you see your genuine priorities in life, face to face. If I continue like this, for the rest of my life, I’ll spend 4/10 of it in front of a screen. And right now, I’m not sure if that’s the right call.
Sunny days will come and go, while I’m here, typing on my computer, while telling myself I’m doing something meaningful – I’m engaged in my favorite hobby, I’m laughing at a funny clip, I’m scrolling through interesting news articles to learn about the world. But it doesn’t make me feel good about myself. It doesn’t make me feel happy. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m making a difference in the world. I know I’d like to donate more to charity. I know I’d like to spend more time making the world a better place.
There can be guilt at times, in knowing you’ve done the wrong thing – or that you did it in the wrong way. Positive affirmations might tell you not to feel this guilt. You should feel proud of yourself at all times. You should focus on what makes you feel positive, and you shouldn’t be hard on yourself. I gently disagree. I think there is nothing wrong with feeling guilty about bad things you have done in life; it’s just about not letting them define you or your worth as a human being. Recognizing bad choices – wrong priorities – and mistakes, it can help you adjust and make better choices in the future.
How can I make a difference in the world? The question is big. How can I make a difference for myself and those that I love? Much more manageable.
To understand what makes me feel satisfied, I think about the times that I smiled or felt genuinely happy with myself.
Over in the distance, in the top right, you’ll see the fire of the Swedish majbrasa – a big bonfire to burn away the remnants of winter and to welcome the spring.
Showing up at the gym, walking and cycling to work instead of taking an electric scooter, and working through my lunch break make me feel better about myself. It makes me feel like I’m a functional adult, someone who takes care of their own health and body, and it makes me feel more positive about my future. I want to be able to imagine myself in good health and with a happy body, many years later in my life. I don’t want myself or my body to suffer from chronic pain and weak muscles.
Work, it does give me some satisfaction. But there is a limit to how much satisfaction you can get from work — you can’t derive your entire value as a human being from your 9-to-5. I know I’m entering life as a future parent, and that soon there will be something else that is very important to me, so I know I can’t expect to perform at this level professionally. I will have to start prioritizing things differently. I want to be an active and available parent. Someone who brings joy and happiness to my children.
My creative hobbies? I think creativity is a genuine human need; I need it just as I need to breathe. Without time for my creative hobbies, my mind would dwindle. I would feel like a less happy, less alive person. But I want to make it possible for myself to spend more time writing outside – I want my hobbies to involve less screentime. I don’t want the time I spend writing to feel like passive, indoor time. I want it to feel like a vibrant, rich, and dynamic time.
My hierarchy of needs
This all makes me think about my own hierarchy of needs. What are the things that give me a genuine sense of satisfaction? I think, starting with physical presence, and having good health, which I think is the most foundational, then it is the work and service that I do for the world, the creative work that I do, the connections that I have, and the authenticity that needs to permeate it all. It’s almost like this should be a spiral or a wheel – not a staircase, it’s like the things in the top give me my why or sense of purpose, and the things in the bottom are foundational to my own functioning… Hmm. How do you think it works?
Sometimes, I make my hobby so hard on myself. My hobbies don’t have to be on a computer. I can use my external keyboard and voice-to-text to type. I think pride is found not just in what you do, but in how you do it. I think many people engage in their hobbies in ways that leave them exhausted, tired, and heavy. You don’t have to suffer for your art. You should make your artistic expression a pleasurable, freeing activity.
Through the gift and curse of self-consciousness, I get the chance to watch myself every day, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I can still see myself, a ten-year-old kid, lying to my mom about where I had been, and I can still feel the guilt burning through my cheeks. So shame is a real thing. So is pride. I can see myself boasting to others about successful projects at work.
I can see myself fishing for compliments and praise for something I’ve done. I can feel elated over a video I recorded or a blog post I wrote. There are times when I feel I’ve done something great, but when I simultaneously feel invisible. Nobody knows I’ve done it. And even if they saw me do it, they said nothing about it. Can I still feel proud of an accomplishment even if nobody else cares about it?
I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about shame, pride, and everything in between, and I’ve come to realize a few things:
Sometimes, like when I’ve done a good thing, I can still feel bad about it. I feel bad about it because I made a good choice for the wrong reason. There is a genuine dissonance between the motivation and the action. Something was off there. Like I did a good thing, but only by accident.
Other times, like this week, I completed a big delivery at work, and everyone said I did a good job, but I felt too tired afterward to be happy about it. The work had been mentally challenging and draining. It reminds me that we don’t always feel good when we climb that big hill. We just feel exhausted.
Finally, sometimes we may feel proud of something, not because it was the right thing to do, in fact, it could have been the wrong thing to do, but it made us look strong, it made us look good, it made other people notice us. We weren’t trying to do the right thing – we tried to be impressive. There’s a difference between impressing people and doing the right thing.
So the bigger question is: what is genuine, authentic pride? What does it mean to actually be a good person? Let me nail it down for you like it was a mathematical formula:
You can feel genuinely proud of something you did if:
Your motivation, your reason for doing it, was good
You did it in a human way.
And I think people really struggle with the second part.
The outcome doesn’t even have to be positive. You can feel genuinely proud of doing the right thing – even if you failed, or even if there were unexpected negative consequences from doing it. You just have to have good reasons for doing it. You just have to feel like it is right.
But genuine pride also requires you to stay honest throughout the process. You have to be vulnerable with others. You have to open up, throughout, about how it makes you feel, where you get stuck, and when you feel tired. You can’t find genuine pride by being inauthentic. Stay real throughout the process. Don’t try to be superhuman – be human all the way to the bones.
Pride can give you deep satisfaction, even when the world doesn’t agree with your choices; it can keep your back straight. Pride, so that you can look yourself in the eyes at the end of the day. Find pride in being human, and find it in doing things for the right reason. Don’t look for external rewards – praise – or compliments for the things that you do. Ask yourself:
Did I do the right thing?
And did I go about it in an honest, human way?
Loading discussion…