Don't Mock Yourself
Published on 2025-10-12
About half a year ago, I decided to stop insulting myself for two weeks. No more self-deprecating humour, calling myself a fool, or thinking I'm pathetic. Why? Because it felt corrosive. Let me tell you how it went. Spoiler: it went well.
The first thing I noticed was how often I insulted myself. It happened multiple times an hour. For instance, I would lay in bed at night, failing to solve a maths puzzle, and think "you moro- wait, I can't insult myself, I've still got 11 days to go. Dagnabbit." The negative space sent a glaring message: I insulted myself a lot. Like, way more than I realized.
The next thing I noticed was that I was the butt of half of my jokes. I'd keep thinking of zingers which made me out to be a loser, a moron, a scrub in some way. Sometimes, I could re-work the joke to not insult myself. Often I couldn't. Self-mockery served as a crutch for me.
So I had to change my repertoire of repartees, which took a while. Now I don't need to mock myself to be funny. ~I mock my friends~. See? Another joke where I'm the villain. Self-hatred is subtle like that. I do mock my friends. But like most folks, I already did that before. I think I've shifted more towards absurdism. If schadenfreude is half of humour, then surely suprise is the other half.
What suprised me is that I began to find negativity in media distasteful. I would open up some work I used to enjoy, or at least tolerate, and go "hey, there's a lot of negativity here. This doesn't feel good. Why am I reading this?" Then I'd drop it.
Also, I think I am more confident. I'd kind of have to be, given that my self-worth used to be 9 parts negativity to 1 part positivity. Clearing out the negativity did wonders to that ratio.
And I learnt just how useless all that negativity was. For instance, "I'm a failure." What works does that do? How does that lead to better actions? If I don't succeed at a maths problem, does reciting "I'm a failure" tell me anything about what error I made? It doesn't even add any info over a phrase that doesn't do violence to myself, like "I failed to solve it".
All it does is reinforce the part of my identity as a "failure". Why on earth do I want that to be part of my identity? To make people feel sorry for me? What for? Perhaps it might help with begging. But I don't want to beg. So why call myself a failure when I didn't solve an exercise in a textbook? There was no need for it, other than as an excuse not to try.
Likewise, why mock myself so much in front of others? Yes, it can be funny. But was I doing it because it's the best joke I could come up with? No. I did it to make myself smaller. To say, again and again, "hey, I think I suck, but can you give me points for acknowledging that? Can't you laugh and let me extract some value from this waste of space I call my self?"
How sad when I put it that way. How corrosive. How glad I am to have realized that.
So, what did I think of this self-experiment?
10/10, would recommend.