We've all heard this late 20th century cliche - you have to love yourself, possibly before you love anybody else, in order to be happy.
Now how do you do that exactly? I don't want to start on one of my lectures on the meaning of words like "love" and "hate" (TL;DR: they don't have a single coherent meaning). Basically, with many words, you look at the various way the words are being used and figure out what they're referring to in each case. If we look at a few uses of "love":
- "I love my wife" means I have a unique bond that comes from having been in love, years of shared experience & goals, knowing each other better than anyone else does, and lots of sex...and a few other things...this is a different bond from:
- "I love my friend". Meaning that I enjoy their company, have fun with them, may have known them for years etc, but the feelings involved are significantly different from those for the person I've shared a bed with for 20 years
- "I love Salt and Pepper fish from my favourite Chinese restaurant" - I get intense pleasure from putting that food in my mouth, I get an explosion of endorphins from so doing that.. almost.. rivals the pleasure the person in the first example has given me in many of our nights together. Obviously the dead fish doesn't give me support in the other ways she does. I hope that's obvious
So which of these ways can one be said to "love oneself"? Well you can't give yourself the support, fun & affection that wife and friends do, or you wouldn't need them. And one can't enjoy oneself in the way one enjoys a curry/pasta dish etc - not really. Or at least I don't think that's what the pretty young things on Instagram mean when they repeat this hashtag...
In actual fact I don't think I love myself at all, especially when I'm happy. In those times - fortunately they are frequent - I would rather say that I love my life. Matt Walsh jokingly says* on his show that he hates himself, but he seems happy enough, after a fashion.
So what do people mean by the phrase? I'd hazard a guess that they really mean "look after yourself", maybe? Or "stop internalising other people's criticisms of you, real and imagined". Instead one should internalise the uniformly positive things some people might say about you. Does that sound right? It is at least a little bit more specific & therefore meaningful.
I'd further assert that this is something only women would say - it means very little, emotionally, for a very masculine person (am I allowed to say this any more?). So I can only guess at what they're going on about. It's another indicator of the emotional & intellectual differences between men and women
Though I wonder if actually loving others & loving one's life would indeed be more satisfying to these folks than thinking about themselves at all. Letting go of one's ego & cravings being a good rule of thumb...which I've nicked from the Buddhists. But what do I know?
* if you can find it, among the 2000+ videos he's made
