Delphic Maxim 129: Respect yourself
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
129. Respect yourself
If ever there was a maxim that we think we live by today, it’s that we respect ourselves. I say that because we live in individualised times: post-80’s consumerism pushes us towards conspicuous consumption, the happiness and positive psychology industries encourage us to think about ‘self care’. We work to make money to make life more comfortable to deal with the drudgery of work — alienated and alienating.
Superficially, of course, I think it’s important for people to respect themselves. Self respect in this sense includes taking care of our physical and mental health (translation: getting plenty of exercise, sleep, eating healthy and drinking lots of water). Getting up early in the morning to make the most out of the day helps. Getting some sunshine and fresh air. Taking some time to pursue hobbies or personal goals. Reading books. That sort of thing.
But the other side to self respect is two-fold: there’s the dimension of care-of-self that comes from our social interactions, and there’s the thing that is neglected when we allow ourselves to become alienated by systems and processes that are essentially inhuman.
The reason I call these ‘the other side’ is that people often think that self respect doesn’t have a social dimension, that it’s all about our relationship with ourselves. This simply isn’t true. Many of these maxims have hinged on the idea of our sociality, and I’ve mentioned on many occasions how important the ancients regarded friendship. Healthy respect for self also involves spending time with people that make you happy, and who have a healthy respect for you as well (and for whom you have a healthy respect).
This comes down to the idea of leisure time. Leisure is the dying virtue in late Capitalist societies. Productivity is the go-to metric for the quality of a society. Productivity as an input into GDP that is — a society only works well when there is economic growth, and something as ephemeral and unquantifiable as ‘leisure time’ doesn’t factor into those economies.
But leisure time is important, it’s where we have our best ideas, where our brains are able to relax and play, and it’s that kind of indolence that has stirred the minds of philosophers like Socrates through to writers and poets like Austen and Keats. We work to afford time for leisure, and the gradual encroachment of work into our private lives is a very, very big problem. It is, fundamentally, a problem of a lack of self respect.
I enjoy my job — I’m lucky like that — but I very rarely, if ever, allow it to encroach on my private time. I’m also very lucky to work for a good employer that respects those boundaries and provides appropriate measures for ensuring work-life balance. I also recognise that a lot of that comes from the strength of the unions in my workplace (quick ad here: join your union). It’s another way in which respect for self is a social quality, I further my care of self by engaging in collective enterprises that ensure care of all.
I hear about friends who are on call from their work, whose bosses contact them at insane times like midnight, who are compelled to check emails and reply to them, or who continue to work long hours at home (teachers cop this notoriously, there was a great investigate article out about this in Crikey two days ago). It drives me insane, because people feel compelled to live like this — they are alienated from the ability to respect their time and leisure and self care — in order to make a buck. And they need this cash in order to get any leisure time at all (which is then interrupted by the ceaseless demands of work).
Today’s maxim is a reminder that leisure and friendship are just as important to a healthy and balanced life as exercise and work. At some point, this is something we’ve got to push back towards as a community, and our communal life needs to be restored. Leisure matters, so support each other towards achieving that end — that’s the best way to respect yourself!
