Metablog

I’ve played chess for a long time. I first learned from a cousin when visiting my grandmother’s house around the age of 8 or so. When I was about 15 I started getting quite interested in the game, and got some books to really start practicing it. This was about the same time that I started playing it daily in class with other bored classmates. (We had several classes that were sufficiently devoid of actual work to make this possible.)

I never could get my mom to learn how to play, or really my brothers either. And even I was reluctant to play in certain circumstances. I purchased Chessmaster 6000 (or some other iteration) and rather than playing the computer, I preferred to watch it play itself. When I started playing chess online, I got tired of the actual playing and started cheating using Chessmaster to make my moves for me.

So why didn’t I actually play? Because I lost. And losing in chess seems to be oddly different than losing in other games. For instance, I’ve recently been playing computer pool, and I don’t have any (psychological) problems losing half my games. Well, not as severe, anyway. For some reason, losing in chess feels a lot more like taking a beating than losing in other games. That’s probably what makes it so compelling for competitive people, and what makes it so repelling, yet no less fascinating, for people who avoid hard competition.

I’ve been trying in the past few days to get back into chess. I think it could do me good to regularly play several games a week. But when I sit down and try to get psyched up for a game, I find myself approaching the moment with trepidation. It’s almost as if I’m putting my intelligence, my ability, my very worth as a person, on the line in the game. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that chess ratings are an accurate description of your skill at the game, as opposed to a reward for winning, it’s impossible to look at them without a twinge of shame, or pride.

Why must playing a game of chess be such a harrowing experience? Exactly how common is that experience? Feeling like that could be connected to certain attitudes towards self-worth in general—if you’re very self confident, then you don’t have any problems with fierce competition like chess. You just don’t think about that aspect of it. And then, if you aren’t completely self-assured, then the ability to compartmentalize the outcome of a game from your overall sense of competence would be necessary to compete without the emotional rollercoaster. The same thing probably applies to blog discussions. I know that until I was about 17 or 18, I was unable to participate in any contentious online discussions without extreme emotional reactions. Desensitizing myself to those reactions took a lot of effort. I think that people who are already desensitized would do very well to keep in mind that not everyone is like that. It can be hard to remember in online interactions, since so many of the cues that your opponents are becoming emotional don’t come through text very well.

So maybe those without perfect self-confidence have to compartmentalize competitive things to be able to do them. Or maybe all self-confidence is, is the the state of having compartmentalized lots of different things. But if the former is true, then you’d expect that self-confident people would not have to go through that desensitization over and over again in different contexts, but that others would. So if there aren’t any people who don’t have to get over their competitive trepidation in new contexts, then there’s really no such thing as self-confidence as a global attribute, or character trait. Instead self-confidence is always context specific, and has to be addressed separately in each context.

But no, that’s a false dichotomy. Everyone forms self-confidence separately for different skills, but some people are simply more prone to exaggerating their own skills, and inflating their confidence in them, and others to more realistic (or, more rarely, conservative*) evaluations. So a person who finds it easier to get over their initial insecurity in new areas will be more confident overall, without there needing to be any single, global trait of self-confidence.

* It’s been well established that people, on average, overestimate their competence in many, many different areas. This is a cognitive bias. Depressed people tend to have the most accurate self-assessments.

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