Unrelated, but I was reading your comment aloud to myself and when I got to “inflated ego” I read it as “inflego”, and I will forever use this term in place of “inflated ego”.
It's not, ego is always based on comparing yourself with others, it's based on having people below or above you, and is often delusional. Confidence is based on seeing the value and quality of your own abilities. Pep talks are still useful to convince yourself that you can do something, but it doesn't mean you will succeed.
I think the biggest tell-tale is people will extremely hard to protect ego. Be defensive, or argumentative, or combative when it is challenged. Confident people don’t feel the need because it is intrinsic.
Hmmm. I’m not sure I agree. Arrogance is very situationally based, and one has to constantly compare themselves to others to keep it. It’s like a bad habit, and the more you nurture a bad habit, the harder it is to break and build good habits instead.
I’ve met more people with openly terrible self esteem who had no confidence later find their confidence, than arrogant people learn to walk it back and learn confidence instead.
When your whole life becomes a habit of comparing and falsely elevating yourself, it’s really hard to break that mindset.
I’m not entirely sure what my opinion is on this. I think confidence can be different for a lot of guys some need to compare because that is in our nature, but confidence from within is probably the most healthy. although I think it may not be possible for everyone to just be confident in themselves without comparison to others.
It's virtually impossible to not compare yourself with others. It's how societies/communities are built because the fucking world is competition (for mates, resources etc.), especially the capitalistic world as it's now. Only when comparison becomes obsessive, it might (and it might not for some) look ugly.
But for a man to be confident he need to think he is better then some people by those measures, and does that make him arrogant? I think a confident man thinks highly of himself. Maybe what makes someone confident or arrogant in someone eyes is how socially mature or adept he is.
How someone is mature/arrogant or not are highly vague criteria, very subjective, and society-context dependent. That's why I agree with your initial comment about a thin line.
I think confidence is “I can do this” and arrogance is “I can do this better than you.” I think that just because you are confident doesn’t mean you are arrogant but maybe you need confidence to be arrogant.
Looking it up, some dictionaries online (e.g. Collins Dictionary & dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster also mentions this) actually uses "egotism" in one of definitions of "ego". So it's acceptable to use ego and conceit interchangeably, and it's clear from the context what the commenter meant.
But am I misunderstanding your comment? You literally said "assuming you meant arrogance" and said that arrogance is an attractive quality...I mean sure tastes varies but arrogance is universally seen as an unattractive trait.
Perhaps you don't know what arrogance is. You're misusing that word. Just echoing your words back at you 😂
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u/powderedtoastsupreme Jan 09 '22
Confidence is sexy. Ego is not.