For the male population, receiving a kick in the nuts is universally regarded as a negative thing. It is like a worldwide lingua franca to refer to a negative experience.

And yet, there are people that genuinely like that. Not just that, there are people who pay to receive kicks in the nuts! There are entire communities, like /r/ballbusting, devoted to it. 1

When I hear my single friends say that they will never find reciprocated love, I always think about /r/ballbusting and I reject their conclusion. The pool of human taste is so much wider than what we assume that declaring yourself unlovable is a huge red flag. No matter how ugly or boring you think you are. I am ready to bet that the real problem is not in being ugly or boring, but negative self-belief.

Negative self-beliefs are not limited to our love lives. A popular concept lately is Financial Fatalism.

A fatalist thinks that regardless of the choices or paths she takes, the final destination will ultimately be the same. In other words, she thinks that she is not in control of her financial outcome. A Financial Fatalist is someone who thinks that her financial situation cannot improve and will likely be worse in the future.

I could not find direct measures of Financial Fatalism. A behaviour that is related to it, however, is Doom Spending and a surprisingly high number of people indulge in it: in US, 37% of Gen Z and 39% of millennials doom spend. This, to me, suggests that behaviours in this class are more widespread than most people might assume.

If we assume a fully rational agent who expects that her economic situation is going to be worse in the future, she would spend less, not more, than a counterpart who expects to be richer in the future.

But, in fact: “those who are most pessimistic about their personal financial situations or the future prospects of the economy are more likely to realize their need to save, but are less likely to actually be saving”. Even after taking into account their current economic situation, people who believe the future will be worse save less than those who believe it will be better.

An explanation is that people that have negative beliefs with regards to the financial future save less because they also believe that they have less control over it so they will be in a negative financial situation REGARDLESS of the choices they will take and there is nothing they can do to improve their situation and future outcome.

I used personal finance as an example because the literature on the topic is richer and because beliefs and decisions can be more easily correlated with a numeric outcome. The same is not true with more abstract things like finding love. But the point I am trying to make is: a negative self-belief is fatalism about the self and it can attach to any area of life.

Within reasonable limits, believing that something is outside of our reach is a self-fulfilling prophecy at worst and at best is a true but not useful belief.

Most of us have negative self-beliefs and at the same time we underestimate how much they steer our decisions. If you are struggling to achieve something or if you think that something is entirely out of your reach, take a step back and think whether your beliefs, rather than your condition, are limiting you.

  1. I want to make this unreasonably clear: this is not kink shaming. From my PoV this is just a testament to individual preferences. It takes all kinds to make a world 🌍 ↩