Essay on Definition of Self-Love

Self-love is the idea of appreciating oneself, and it develops from activities that support our spiritual, psychological, and physical development. It means possessing high self-esteem for your own well-being and joy by ensuring you take good care of your own desires without sacrificing your comfort at the expense of pleasing other people. Part of improving how to exercise self-love involves learning how to prioritize, trust, setting healthy boundaries, being nice to oneself, and giving oneself a break from self-judgment. However, people have different ways of taking care of their needs. This means self-love can be defined differently on an individual level.

Reckoning out what self-love looks like for you as an individual is an essential part of mental health. When rationalizing the habits of everyday conversations, there is a lot of engagement in projects entailing self-love. This is not because we want to report the mental state directly; we are in and try to eloquent the reasons for being in that state (Bransen, 2015). In the context of self-indulgence, many people love doing what pleases them hence easily confusing love with indulgence. Choosing and taking part in things that indulge our needs instead of improving our wellbeing and growth means we are educating ourselves on how unworthy we are on a certain level of care. Self-love and self-indulgence can easily be confusing, but they give very different outcomes. The differences are; self-love creates space for oneself while self-indulgence creates distraction, self-love sustains joy, while self-indulgence sustains momentary happiness. Unlike self-indulgence which contains addiction and dependence, self-love contains freedom and power.

Several philosophers are certain that happiness deceits exclusively within our control despite the undesirable external events happening to us (Kato 2020). There are two philosophical works of literature on happiness. Hence, happiness corresponds in different terms. One uses happiness as roughly identical to well-being or flourishing, while the other describes it as depression or tranquility (Haybron & Dan, 2020). Constantly comparing oneself to other people and viewing oneself negatively hinders the chance of flourishing in life, just as stated in the second philosophical view of happiness. Although happiness can be hindered, it can also be aided by investing in experiences and spending a lot of time with friends and family.

Taking some time to examine oneself on desires, skills, and motivations is important because it helps one understand the kind of life they live (Bransen, 2015). Asking oneself life questions facilitates this a lot. Some of the questions to ask oneself are; how do I define success, what is the most important thing in my life, who are the most important people in my life, what type of a person do I want to be, what type of friends do need, what kind of things do I value in myself, what do I value in life, what makes me happy, what type of a worker am I.

Happiness can be such a delicate thing, particularly during dark times of tragedy; for instance, during a major car accident, we can still live happy and flourishing lives because our minds can focus on happiness and stay optimistic. Having a nonviolent and steady surrounding and upholding good health is absolute evidence of living a happy life. When assessing one’s level of happiness, it is prudent to have a checklist for reference. It is usually easy to refer to one’s goals or metrics to happiness and check if they are being met or achieved.

References

Bransen, J. (2015). Self-knowledge and self-love. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 18(2), 309-321.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9578-4

Haybron. D. (2020, May 28). Happiness. Stanford. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/happiness/

Kato, L. (2020). Passing the Threshold to Achieve Happiness. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=0&article=1316&context=honors-research-and-exhibition&type=additional