I felt this was an important topic to write on because I've noticed many people my age have this thing of depreciating themselves constantly and making too many (not funny) jokes like "haha i'm trash".

I'm going to write down a sort of guideline on why the self esteem factor might be low, how to go about building your self esteem and then just a few additional thoughts.

The next contains one factor of why could people have low self esteem, there can be multiple other factors. I've used the example of school because it's easier to understand as most people who read this will be in college or school.

Why do people not value themselves:

Here's something interesting: your brain keeps record of your history and based on any task that you pick up, it kind of already predicts if you'll finish the task or not.

How is that relevant though? Let's understand.

When we were growing up, the one place we spent the most time was school.

End of the day, in school we would have a test and based on how we write in that test, we get some marks.

There's toppers, there's the average kids and then the ones who fail in the test. Pretty simple.

Now because not everyone can be toppers, most of the kids get average marks or fails and when a kid gets average marks, they go home and get the "Sharma ji ka bacha" talk (in general).

This is your typical action, outcome and response loop.

For example, if a kid studied (action), the outcome generally would be good marks (outcome) and the response is compliments mostly (which in this case acts as a reward).

The flip side of the above example is if a kid did not study (which is action again), the outcome is not getting good marks and the response is a lecture or beating (response in this case acts as punishment).