If I Leave Things Alone, My Sense of Self-Worth Erodes

Overview

I’m going to talk about myself for once. I was chatting with a friend, and I had a chance to put what was inside me into words, so I felt a little refreshed.

If I Leave Things Alone, My Sense of Self-Worth Erodes

I do a lot of things. Exercise, studying, investing, book reports, playing, talking with friends, programming, and so on.

But I don’t think I do them because I like them. I do them because I have to.

Why do I have to do them? Because if I don’t, I’ll go bad.

What will go bad? My own value.

Even if I don’t exercise, study, invest, or write book reports, it doesn’t mean I’m bad, right? My friends tell me that too, right? That’s true. But this time, I realized that maybe deep inside, I do think that way.

Even when I do many things, I don’t feel like they are adding something positive. It feels more like, if I leave things alone, I will slip into the negative, so I work hard to bring myself back to zero. Exercise might be a good example. If you leave your body alone, it gets loose, right? Keeping it toned feels close to bringing a negative back to zero.

Sometimes I post on X, “I ran 10 km!” What I feel at that moment is something like, “Ah, it’s been a while since my last 10 km post... My value has eroded during that time, but with this 10 km post, I’ve recovered again!”

Well, I’m not usually very aware of the “my value” part, but I definitely always have that feeling of “I’ve recovered!”

I don’t really know why, but it seems like I believe that “if I leave things alone, my sense of self-worth erodes.” ¹

What happens when my sense of self-worth erodes? You don’t know? My self-esteem ends, and that leads to worse mental health.

Because of my experiences during adolescence, I live with a policy of not letting my mental health get worse. So I always have to take action and keep adding value to myself.

I often say that I want to invest and achieve FIRE, but isn’t that aiming for something positive? No. Actually, the reason I invest is that I don’t want to become foolish. In this time, and in an environment where I have friends who share knowledge about investing with me, not investing is, inside me, classified as “not doing things properly,” “foolish,” and “if I don’t do it, I’ll go bad.”

I do it because it’s fun, but more precisely, I do it because it has to be fun.

My personal theory is this: “People cannot easily work hard to become the person they want to be, but they can easily work hard to run away from the person they don’t want to become.” For example, people who succeed in losing weight are people who strongly don’t want to become overweight.

I have a strong feeling of rejection toward going bad, so I exercise, study, invest, write book reports, play, talk with friends, and program.

It’s tiring.

Maybe I should try stopping everything once. But during that time, my sense of self-worth would erode, right? Then, it would be good if something happened that still allowed me to recognize my own value. But it isn’t so easy to highly value “a state where I’m doing nothing,” is it? Maybe my friends would value me. But as you can probably guess from everything so far, I’m probably not satisfied with evaluation from others, and my own absolute evaluation is strong, so that seems difficult.

So, that is the inner self I put into words this time. It feels like the sense of resignation I feel every day has become deeper, but I think making the current situation clear is also an important step.

...See! I’m trying to take another “proper” step again! Infinite loop! The end.