I illuminate the distinctive concern for our own worth by analyzing what is at the core of humiliation. Prevailing theories tie humiliation to dignity and respect. I contend that this is mistaken. Consider the person humiliated by their unattractive looks, dating unpopularity, cheap outfit, or poor performance in dodgeball. Their pain is not about being denied respect, but about being seen as deficient in worth—as marked by their apparent failure or disvalue in the evaluative gaze of others. A concern with our respectability is a concern with what we are due, but the concern for humiliation is one for who we are. When humiliated, we are gripped not by our entitlement, but by our worth.
My account allows for a first-personal ethical intervention. Prevailing theories imply that we are simply defenseless in the face of humiliation, and we have all the normative reasons to be hurt and concerned by humiliation, since our respectability normatively matters. In contrast, I argue that humiliation hinges on a normatively and motivationally problematic evaluative concern—an intrinsic concern with our personal worth. This is a concern we can and should eliminate. By renouncing this evaluative concern, we relieve ourselves from the grip of humiliation. To stop the pain of humiliation, we need not change others’ actions or attitudes; we need only dissolve this distortive concern of ourselves.
For those preoccupied with personal worth, activities no longer appear as activities alone; they become tests of value. As Carol Dweck observes, “[e]very situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character.” This outlook fosters familiar pitfalls: fear of failure, avoidance of challenge, reluctance to try new things, fear of appearing incompetent, and consequent perfectionism. Psychologists, following Dweck, have aimed to address these pitfalls by advocating for a “growth” rather than a “fixed” mindset. The issue is thought to lie in a person’s beliefs about the nature of intelligence and ability—whether they are malleable or fixed. However, I argue that to account for these pitfalls we must give a key role to the obsession with personal excellence, success, and the personal worth they signify. One can believe in growth while still treating every setback as a humiliating indictment of present low worth. Life remains a continual audit.
This intervention matters for two reasons. First, it opens up new directions for growth mindset research, which has encountered serious replication failures. Second, it reveals a deeper ethical problem: however growth-minded we are, we can still be trapped in the tortured struggle for higher worth. Liberation, therefore, cannot come from believing our worth is malleable, but from abandoning the worth perspective altogether. Only then can growth be pursued for its own sake, or for the good life it enables, rather than as a means to validate the self.
Human beings have long been preoccupied with comparison and competition. In contemporary society, these forces are more pervasive than ever: grade point averages, diplomas, awards, salaries, social success, dating popularity, likes on social media… Recent philosophical discussions have critiqued these dynamics under the notions of gamification and value capture. The institutional gamification of education, work, dating, and social interaction reshapes our motivations and goals into game-internal ones. Instead of seeking romance or meaningful connections, for example, we find ourselves merely chasing higher match counts or more likes. This leads to value capture: our genuine values are simplified and reconfigured into external metrics provided by institutions and technology.
Yet, I argue, this diagnosis does not reach the root of the problem: it fails to ask why we are so vulnerable to these external scoreboards. The external metrics of institutions and technologies only broaden and intensify a pre-existing vulnerability: our preoccupation with proving and realizing personal worth. We are not passive victims of gamification and value capture; we readily jump into the rat race. Even without institutionalized metrics, the same dynamic plays out in our obsession with praise, popularity, wealth, or power—each serving as a distinctive arena where our personal worth is rendered salient and tangible. The real trap isn’t any specific scoring, but our desperate desire to see ourselves, and be seen, as high-worth on whatever scoreboard is available. The only way out is to remove our own motivational pathology. Again, we can and should reject the psychological investment in personal worth that makes the score feel meaningful in the first place.
Our social world is filled with archetypes of distorted agency: the student defensively obsessed with being right, the leader needing to be seen as a “winner,” the individual compulsively curating a social media image. Conventional wisdom diagnoses this as insecurity rooted in “low self-esteem,” but this misses the structural nature of the problem. I argue these mentalities are not simply symptoms of a psychological deficit, but the active manifestation of a distorted agency that I term “performative striving.” Here, an individual’s energy and actions are co-opted by the concern for personal worth, redirected from genuine goals toward the overarching game of proving their worth. The anxiety we call “insecurity” is the lived experience of this capture—the feeling of a self perpetually on trial. This reframing transforms the ethical imperative. The goal is not to repair a fragile self-esteem, which merely seeks to succeed within the same capturing game. The true aim is liberation: to break the frame of performative striving and reclaim an agency oriented toward value-creation—pursuing genuine goods and contributions, rather than the phantom good of personal worth.
Critiques of social hierarchy typically focus on material injustice and power imbalances, yet this fails to capture the raw distress of simply being ranked low. My account provides the missing explanation: social hierarchy institutionalizes a public, seemingly objective judgment of personal worth. In this system, one’s rank reflects not just what one has, but what one is—where the bottom rung appears to be an official certification of low worth. This constitutes a psychological “double injury”: the immediate pain of being deemed low-worth, compounded by the reinforcement of the very evaluative framework that creates this pain. Consequently, the ethical goal must expand beyond creating fairer hierarchies or providing social esteem, which merely satisfy the pathological desire for worth and reinforce the system. True liberation requires creating social conditions that allow us to see hierarchies for what they are—contingent distributions of resources and power, not existential verdicts on personal worth.
My dissertation argues that our tendency to treat life as a “rat race” originates in the very concern for personal worth. This project builds on that diagnosis by examining the structures of contemporary society that systematically activate and intensify this vulnerability. I suggest that the contemporary self is caught in a globalized system of evaluation, where institutions and technologies have radically amplified the scale and psychological potency of perceived judgments of personal worth. First, hierarchical structures have intensified beyond broad social class into a web of hyper-specific, quantified rankings—from corporate ladder to institutional prestige. Second, on top of our relatively stable positions in hierarchies, we face a relentless, pervasive, and data-saturated stream of metrics that assesses our performance and delivers a live verdict on our worth: GPAs, KPIs, social media engagement, fitness data... Moreover, globalization and information technology place us in a global stadium, massively expanding the pool of individuals against whom we are compared. At the same time, self-embellishment tools enable radically idealized displays, universally raising the benchmark for everyone. This fusion of precise positioning, unceasing performance review, global benchmarking and idealized self-presentation makes the crisis of self-worth more invasive than ever.
This reveals a limitation in prevailing critiques of technology and institutional design, which focus on a system’s accuracy or fairness while overlooking its structural role. These systems are the very infrastructure of an economy of personal worth, creating a state of perpetual and pervasive audit unique to contemporary life. This demands a new criterion for evaluation: the “psychological footprint” of our institutions and technologies. We should consequently shift the design paradigm from quantification and ranking to cultivation and contribution, thereby building a world that liberates rather than confines the self.
This project examines the emotional architecture of personal worth, revealing how feelings like envy and pride are its functional components. Standard analyses treat emotions like envy, contempt, pride and humiliation as discrete psychological kinds. This compartmentalized approach fails to capture a potent, unified configuration within a single “economy of the self.” In this mode, envy is not merely a desire for a rival’s goods, but an agonistic response that treats another’s advantage as a foil for one’s own disvalue; contempt assigns a low worth to another, thereby propping up one’s own standing; and pride seeks not a quiet satisfaction in merit, but a favorable verdict on one’s worth. In this configuration, these emotions are interconnected movements organized around the axis of personal worth. Correspondingly, we should not manage them in isolation—to become “more enviable” and “less contemptible,” or to become “less envious” and “more proud.” The true goal is to exit the entire economy of personal worth, fostering social engagement liberated from this perpetual self-assessment.
Rousseau identified amour-propre as modern society’s central ailment—a non-pragmatic drive I analyze as the very concern for personal worth. He diagnoses it as a socially elicited, self-inflaming potentiality that creates a cycle of misery. Yet, contemporary readings systematically misdiagnose it through two flawed approaches. The first moralizes the drive as the need for respect, thereby confusing a struggle for worth with a demand for entitlement. The second imposes a Fichtean and Hegelian framework of recognition and treats amour-propre as a healthy need for social recognition, advocating for its satisfaction. This ignores Rousseau’s core insight: amour-propre is insatiable, perpetually paining us for not being the best. Crucially, these interpretations share two fundamental limitations. First, they fail to adequately theorize the pathological interaction between self and society that Rousseau described, either by ignoring it or by misconstruing its nature. Second, by seeking to satisfy rather than question amour-propre, they preclude liberation from it. I argue Rousseau’s diagnosis reveals amour-propre as the engine of a futile quest for worth—one where we are active participants, not mere victims. Contrary to his own pessimism, this very insight points toward radical cure: abandoning the concern for personal worth altogether, a path the dominant interpretations systematically foreclose.
The prevailing framework on emotional rationality assumes a dichotomy between reasons bearing on “fittingness” (e.g., reasons against amusement because the joke isn’t funny)—and the “wrong kind” of reasons (e.g., moral reasons against amusement at racist jokes). I argue that this framework creates a false choice: a reason for an emotion either concerns fittingness, or is extraneous, like a moral or prudential bribe. I introduce a distinct class of reasons that are neither. My argument is based on my view that emotions are practical stances with internal aims. From this stance-based view, I identify three new sources of reasons that also provide avenues for emotional self-regulation. First, an emotion can be self-defeating when the very orientation it consists in (e.g., fear’s defensiveness) actively undermines its own aim (e.g., protection). Second, an emotion can be parochial qua stance by locking one into a single, narrow mode of orientation, thereby precluding other stances that the situation calls for. Third, an emotion can lose its normative force following an agential transformation, wherein its practical aim is taken over and fulfilled by one’s action, thus dissolving the normative push for the emotion. Crucially, in any of these cases, an emotion can be irrational even if it remains fitting—the threatening or frightening object might still be present. These reasons are also not external bribes from prudential or moral considerations; instead, they are internal rational constraints generated by the emotion’s own structure and aims. By developing this expanded toolkit for emotional introspection, my aim is to provide new, practical avenues for emotional self-regulation.