What does it really mean to love yourself? I don’t think it’s as simple or easy as it’s made out to be. I think yet again, we’re being sold the capitalistic version of self love.

We are a society that encourages individualism; we consider multigenerational households failures and roommateless 20 year olds successful. We are socialized to center ourselves. You’d think that would mean loving ourselves would be a part of the deal, that radical self love would, at the least, be easily attainable; especially considering the self serving traits we all seem to display. But the structures that created an individualistic society did not happen for the people, but for the system. Capitalism thrives on an overly individualist society because if you are living in a mindset to serve only yourself, you are not worried or willing to change, let alone fight, for your neighbors, communities, or humans as a whole. Your worth as a human is reflected in material items and money, therefore your fight will always be grounded in things, in capital, in power.

The idea of loving yourself comes with so many stipulations; stipulations that you don’t even realize exist and were put in place by the socialization you received under capitalism. There’s the physical, of course, the most obvious and oftentimes the only layer people can connect with. People attempting to break through to true self love typically start with the physical, because it’s what we can see. It’s what makes sense. And many people succeed at least in part breaking down the norms and preconceived notions forced upon them. But there is so much more to it than that and it grows more and more complex as technology expands. Our wants, our needs, our desires to be successful – just starting there, define and trace the wants, needs, and the desire to be successful. Where did it all stem from? What drives your wants? What created your needs? What gave you the definition of success? Answer: your socialization under the current system, patriarchal capitalism. That also means your wants, needs, aspirations, expectations, and measures of success are constrained and limited by these systems. It’s a box. I’m trying to tell you that you’re in a box. A box within a box. Probably within another box and another one after that, maybe another one after that, I don’t know your life. And breaking out of one, doesn’t mean you’re free, it just means you’re in another one, but closer. 

The first box, as noted, is the physical. Our society’s beauty standards are based on Eurocentric patriarchal norms. This means pedophilic ideals. A woman is at her best, most attractive, before her frontal lobe is even fully formed. And that ideal, the expectation of what a woman should look like, remains constant within the male gaze for men of all ages; the age that a woman is found attractive by a man remains in her teenage years or early 20’s regardless of the man’s age. Therefore, the look of a girl is expected to be pursued and attained by women of all ages, at any cost. This is where ideals of body hair originate, where the ideals for size, frame, and weight originate, where the ideals of porcelain smooth skin originate, etc. These ideals and norms are so deeply ingrained in us from our socialization that people often reject the notion that their preferences are likely controlled by somebody, something, other than them. It’s like admitting that something is stronger than you, that something as “insignificant” as socialization, something we can’t even see and isn’t explicitly stated or discussed, could possibly be the root bases for your thoughts, beliefs, and ideals. Admitting that your preference for getting a brazilian wax might not because you actually prefer to be hairless, but because society has taught you that hair (on a woman) is unclean and not feminine. Admitting that your preference for a smaller woman might not be because that’s simply your “type”, but because society socialized you to believe that women should be small, fragile, and weak – they should never grow into a woman, but remain a child who can be controlled. Admitting that your preference for a tall, big man might not just be your “type”, but because you’ve been taught that men should protect women, women should be small and fragile, therefore a taller, bigger man makes you fit the ideal for a woman, at least by comparison. A person can break out of this box, reject these norms, and realize that their preferences were not there to support them or aid them in any way, but to uphold a system that actually hurts them. A person may break out of this box, reject every norm, go against every expectation, and feel fully confident in their decisions because they can see the box clearly, see the strings attached to all of their thoughts and opinions, like puppets. A person who has broken out of this box may still subscribe to some or parts of these ideals, out of realized actual preference, out of fear of discomfort, or out of the inability and unwillingness to go against the grain of societal pressures. A person may be fully aware that they remain in this box, unable to break out at all. This might look like a person continually falling into the trap of thinking that changing their appearance to better fit the standards – losing weight, getting plastic surgery, building muscle – will fix their self image issues, but end up feeling the exact same way or worse. Because those standards, those values, do not reflect the person and their true self, it reflects society. Therefore, continuing to pursue these ideals, if not your true preference (without lying to yourself), will never bring you closer to self love. The only way to break out of the physical box is to surrender yourself to the notion that your ideals are not yours at all. It does not mean you’re weak, it means the system did its job, everybody experienced this socialization and that is why the standard exists as it does, so intensely and so “naturally”. Whether a person breaks out of the box or not, awareness of this box will only get you as far as the walls of the next box. 

The next box is invisible, it is the emotional. It contains wants, needs, desires, success – anything and everything that makes life, life. The socialization we receive does vary greatly from person to person based on culture, socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, and so many other tiny factors including things like geography, down to the block you grew up on. This means that the definition of success and the description of wants and needs looks different for each person. However, there are core themes or aspects that carry through: money = success, & praise and attention = success. There are aspects of this box that are somewhat intermixed with the physical box, more for some than others; this is because of how much emphasis we put on appearance in our society and how that is tied in with success. A 2023 study shows that over half of gen z wants to be influencers. This field is heavily reliant on appearance, with extreme pressures to not maintain, but change and improve, oftentimes through plastic surgery. Success, the socialized version that means money and attention, in our modern day could mean plastic surgery, diet pills or shots, eating disorders, and early death – but at least you died rich, popular, and pretty (by Eurocentric pedophilic patriarchal standards anyway). To escape this box you must become a child again (this genuinely might be lost on anybody born after 2000, again, I don’t know your life). Before you were exposed to technology or too many secondary socialization agents (people and places outside of your family or primary care givers). Back then we were always asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” (hint, this is a perfect example of how we’re socialized without even knowing it’s happening or that we’re doing it). Personally, I said some weird shit, pediatric neurosurgeon? Hello? Anyway, your answer back then was likely already an answer that had been socialized into you. I want you to think about that child though, what would that child want? What would that child be excited about? I know when I think back on really any time in my life, I see myself as a different person, disconnected entirely. We are no longer our past selves, and we are definitely no longer our child selves. For so many reasons, including the way we are socialized, we lose contact with the child within, and that is a detriment to our ability to get in touch with our true selves. Even out of touch with that child I know we were not born with an innate desire to be skinny and rich. We were born with the innate desire to survive, and as we became little humans, it was socialized into us that the way to survive in the current society is with wealth, looks, and attention. If your answer as a child was “Actor”, well, the glamorous Hollywood certainly played its part. Disentangling the natural survival instincts that have been hijacked with this society’s version of success is not an easy task. But your nervous system, your entire body, is out of line with your real wants and needs, and I think you know that. Ignoring the existence of this box? That’s why people numb themselves; why people drink, smoke, scroll, why people are constantly shutting out the feelings and voices begging them to make a change. Find your child, find what success would look like to them. 

The final box is more of a cage with bars that allow you to see outside of it, and the outside looks exactly the same as the inside. You imagine the life you’d have on the outside. The person you could be. The things that would be different, easier, better. But there is no evidence of this life’s existence. In some ways, it feels like an inverted Schrodinger‘s cat. You don’t know that the world you think exists on the outside actually exists until you break out of the cage, so while you remain inside, it both exists and doesn’t exist. This box is the fear of being seen, the fear of people perceiving you as you experience true radical self love. Most people will never see the outside of this box. Most people won’t even realize that life outside of this box exists. Because life inside this box, life inside all of these boxes, is comfortable, the material things comfort us into submission. But you broke out of the second box, you did it, you’re no longer striving for riches and fame, rather a family and a career in… woodwork? (really, I don’t know you) But nobody else in your life is there, they’re happy in their boxes. You’re not going back, you know you don’t care about those things anymore, you care about survival and what that actually means, but nothing else matters except yours and other people’s happiness. You care about living as your true self. You begin working toward it, but it doesn’t feel attainable in this life. You don’t want to tell people all of these dreams, the changes you feel, it’s embarrassing. You’re stuck. You’ve put yourself in this cage; unwilling to actually live your life going against the grain. It’s easy to talk, it’s easy to write it on a website, it’s incredibly difficult to actually exist as your true authentic self in a society that tells us so many things about who you should be, what the human experience should look like. But this box is the most important to escape, it’s the one that gives you freedom, gives you radical self love and acceptance, it allows others to see that another way of living is possible.

Unfortunately, what all of these boxes represent is our intense socialization process, and what I am describing in order to break free is essentially resocialization. The process of resocialization is not common or casual and only takes place in a few instances. To put it into perspective, one example of resocialization is the military. Resocialization takes place and is required in this institute because the people joining the military are having to abandon some of the socialization they received in regular society in order to perform their duties. In our society, part of our socialization process is being taught that killing people is bad, under all circumstances, and will result in jail or even your own death. In the military, above all else, you have to be willing to take orders regardless of what they are, including killing people; this goes directly against how we’ve been socialized. This is the point of bootcamp, to breakdown the socialization, and resocialize to create humans who take orders, have less fear, and more confidence. There are not many places in society that operate like military bootcamp, nor does society require or want many people to be resocialized. And just while we’re here, this specific resocialization has some serious blank spots; we create little monsters and then let them loose – miss me with the “not all men”, I know. But the irresponsibility of resocializing people to think certain ways and act certain ways and not think anything of how that might affect them in the society they were deprogrammed from? The marines go through the most intense bootcamp, and therefore resocialization, so it’s not a surprise that they have the highest number of sexual assaults of all of the branches. Women in the military are also over two times more likely to be raped than civilian women – 20% for the general population compared to 41% for military women. The resocialization in military bootcamps creates people who think they are powerful enough, important enough to go overseas and kill other humans, why would they stop at killing? So you can see the potential effects of resocialization, not always positive, but definitely impactful. The idea of resocializing yourself may seem insurmountable, and maybe even pointless while you remain in your boxes, but I guarantee living your life for a system is much harder and even more pointless.

take a shot every time i say socialization or resocialization