Dignity for yourself

A super ruch quote I encountered upony readings of a book by Gregory Hays of stoic philosophers was so profound I had a couple of minutes to ponder over it

It was his translation of Seneca's words:

Yes, keep on degrading yourself, soul. But soon your chance at dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up, and instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your own happiness to the souls of others.

Self dignity is a very important thing to have and not having that will eventually cause others to lose that for you. You may think you could degrade yourself and then one day, start acting right and bounce back to being honourable but it gets to a point where you lose your chances at dignity.

It's natural that we end up being a little too hard kn ourselves, and I feel like this mostly comes from our comparison to people that seem better or have accomplished more than we have. We put ourselves down and eventually forget just how important or valuable wr really are. It's no just your mentality this affects, it also affects your soul. And one effect of that is you end up losing hope that there's ever a chance of betterment. If you loe hope, you lost live, metaphorically and soon literally.

How many lives does a cat have, nine? That's not exactly true and it's same for us. Life gives everyone one chance to live it, that chance is so rare that wasting it in itself not only makes us look like idiots to the universe but if the entire universe responsible for life has emotions, it would be it's biggest disappointment for just about anyone not using life properly.

I guess one of the biggest mistakes we make is too much reliance on the validation of others. It's a problem from our social construct. We tend to let others decide when we're happy or not. Do what we all want and you'll be happy, you follow the script they gave you, did as they said and yet alone on your room, you notice a void, something you should wanted to do for yourself which your heart says would make you happy but you denied yourself of all that because of what people will say.

The way to solve it is to always be mindful of where the source of your happiness really lies. It should come from within not without. Not from other's approval but from your own approval. You can't please em all, you can try to be as valuable to the as possible but don't lose yourself while you're at it.

Don't lose the chance of dignity and pride just because you want to please everyone. Love yourself, that's the first person you learn how to love from, yourself. Be good to you. It's always applauded when people do good to others and it gives them that sense of fulfillment but they need highlight that you're to seek good for you and get that fulfillment too, they usually tag it as selfishness. Selflove, self development and self respect is not selfishness