It feels good to feel good

I think all we want is to feel good about ourselves and in front of others; everything else is just the manifestation of these two desires.

As we try to be like non-conformists, we start turning our attention to how to feel good about ourselves. Traditional social preference is weakened. Money, status, and career achievement comes later, as long as they do not stop us from fulfilling basic physical needs. Traditional values are not nearly as important as being able to confidently say that "I like who I am." The lifestyle of a bum can be praised if he can show that he likes who he is. How you feel is the bottom line. One wouldn't be considered successful if he doesn't feel good about who he is and what he has achieved in his life. Even for someone who devotes his life in making the world a better place, he wouldn't be truely successful if he doesn't enjoy his life.

While how others feel about you have a significant impact on how you feel about yourself, we are encouraged to break away from this type of social constraint. The tagline is that you shouldn't let others decide how you feel. So we start to shift the focus from how others think to how we actually feel. Traditional terms of success deteriorates. Instead, we are in charge of defining success in our very own terms.

But does this really work? Maybe it's simply unnatural to resist our desire to seek approval from others. At the end, maybe we are just playing the same old game of meeting those social values. When the society as a whole thinks the definition of success should be uniquely defined, our motivation for setting those targets and meeting these goals remains unchanged.

traditionally: social approval => feel good
now: feel good => social approval => feel good

So to feel good, first you must feel good. Kinda like one of those self reinforcing cycles. But how does this start? Maybe we simply need to look harder in our lives to discover it. Surely there are things in our lives to feel good about. Well, if that doesn't help, go shopping.