mills:

FIg. 1: James’ equation, and me learning it the hard way.

In Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety, I read that William James proposed the very simple equation above to describe self-esteem: it is the value of your success divided by your pretensions. It is easy enough to see how the values of the factors in this equation affect one another, from our childhoods, when we are pleased with ourselves for tying our shoelaces, to our adulthoods, when we are sure no one will love us in our relative obscurity, mediocrity, invisibility.

Incidentally, this is why immersion in celebrity culture is not harmless, at least not totally: it amplifies your pretensions, perniciously. In addition to body dysmorphia, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and a tendency to self-exploit for attention, we derive from mass media the notion that unless one is famous, a glittering object in the gaze of cameras whose acquaintances far-exceed Dunbar’s number, we are nothing.

Success -for us and for the famous- is at least partly of the world, so while the numerator is only somewhat in your control the denominator is yours to adjust. It is difficult and humiliating to do so, because you must deprogram your socialized standards and refuse to interiorize the expectations of others, all while confronting your own endless vanity.

And even if you succeed, nefarious zones of weird arithmetical subversion exist in which the denominator will suddenly increase to nearly infinity: family gatherings and class reunions, for example.

But increasing the numerator through additional success is not only more contingent on luck, but it is also merely temporary, as any achievement you master simply becomes the new plateau from which you judge yourself (or worse: the peak you bitterly recall climbing before your descent into the present valley).

Whatever course of action we pursue, it is sobering always to reflect on how much the successes we enjoy would mean to those less-fortunate than we are, and how loathsome our pretensions thus become: they rob us of proper contentment and gratitude for what others can only envy.

Your interpretation of this little equation depends on your aims.  Mills’ analysis applies well to anyone whose ultimate goal is healthy self-esteem, in which case “success” and “pretension” are means subordinated to that end.  But such a worldview might depend on a certain minimal amount of self-esteem in the first place.

On the other hand, if I’m starting from a place where I’ve internalized the values of the success-driven upper-middle class society around me, I might rearrange the equation, switching around means and ends:

Success = Self-esteem * Pretensions

Then, using a similar analysis to Mills’, I would conclude that while self-esteem is quite difficult to change, my pretensions are mine to control.  Thus, the route to success is to collect the pretensions that help me get ahead.