Cephei Mordred said:
I suppose the difference between you and me is:
You think that "You have a duty to provide value to others" and "You should be valuable because you want to be, but everyone has a right to look down on you if you fail to do so" are two different things.
I don't. Or at least, I think that it's impossible to differentiate between the two meaningfully.
I didn't state that they should "look down on you". I said they just wouldn't care about you. There is a difference between looking down on someone and simply not giving a sh*t.
Also, i never said you have a "duty". In fact, i clearly stated that it's entirely up to you if you want to work towards people being able to appreciate you more easily.
It's perfectly reasonable to differentiate between the two meaningfully by the simple fact that it's a FREE CHOICE, just like taking an education. But being a free choice doesn't exclude it for being a requirement if you want to obtain something, but if you don't want to obtain something, then you don't have to do it.
Everyone has different motivations. Some people want to be awesome to be liked. Some people want to be awesome because it's awesome being awesome.
Cephei Mordred said:
As I said in my first post on the thread, don't love me because I'm beautiful. If a woman doesn't love me when I'm weak and worthless, why should I believe her feelings are sincere when I do become more valuable and productive?
Love with conditions is not really love, is it?
No one loves another person unconditionally (because of 'fate' or some other arbitrary explanation). By that logic, would you still love your girlfriend/wife even if she cheated on you a hundred times? Would you love her if she suddenly decided to have a gender reassignment surgery? Would you love her if she some day showed up at a family dinner with a shotgun and shot your mom?
Don't fool yourself please. Love ALWAYS has conditions. And by conditions, I'm not just talking on the conscious level (as in having certain expectations of your (potential) partner), I'm also talking deep down on the chemical level and how your brain works. When you fall in love with someone, it is ALWAYS because something in that person (a combination of their looks, personality, events you experienced with them etc.) triggered the attraction, which means that the attraction had a condition. Unconditional love is like a unicorn: it only exists in fantasies.
And bottom line is that when it comes to attraction, personality is and will always be the biggest deciding factor. So to answer your question about why you should believe that a her feelings are sincere for you:
Because if you were once weak and worthless, but got over it, then you changed your personality and are (essentially) a different person to her than when she met you the first time.
She might not have loved your old personality, but that doesn't exclude her being able to sincerely love your new one. And let me point out that i never used the word "productive", and never would use it in this context. Simply being an awesome person to be around is enough to provide people with value. It's an attribute, not a job.
And I'd like to point out that I'm speaking from personal experience on this once. I once met a girl through a friend at a time where i was a heavy drinker when i was out partying. It quickly became apparent after some interactions over the course of a few weeks with her that she resented my personality massively, even when i was only semi-drunk or sober.
Fast forward 9 months where i met her again after i stopped drinking and started partying sober, as well as having drastically managed to improve my personality. Watching a woman who was previously stone-cold to you suddenly turn warm (to the point of us even making out) because you simply changed your behavior is a real eye-opener, but most importantly,
she is only ONE out of literally 50-100 examples of people who changed their attitude towards me because i managed to improve my behavior. I didn't do anything for them to buy their affection. I simply just started being a cool guy to hang out with instead of a mostly-drunken insecure adult who was still mentally a teenager. Not only did it cost me nothing except commitment, but i gained a lot in return from it, and it also improved my life in other areas (like the ability to handle exams and job interviews better).
I don't know if your religious or something, but I'm just going to give you an advice: Get out of your fantasy land. You'll be doing yourself a favor. This is a hard cruel world, and if you want to achieve something (emphasis on 'IF', no one is forcing you) then you have to work for it.
If i were to transfer your logic to a video game analogy (we're on the Escapist after all), your logic is essentially equal to having a piece of software that you never patch. No-one is perfect out of the box, but that doesn't mean you can't strive to be better, and just like video game developers release patches to improve their game and fix faults, you can patch yourself to and become more awesome. If you patch your video games, why wouldn't you patch yourself?
