Smart Ass Take:
Turns out the 3 a.m. doomscroll isn’t just a bad habit — it might be a low-grade moral failure. Philosophers have argued for centuries about whether we owe anything to ourselves, and most regular humans (85% in this study) apparently answered the question before the philosophers even sharpened their pencils: yes, obviously, and could you please go to bed. I like this because it lines up neatly with LIVE — the whole idea that taking care of the meat-suit and the mind riding around inside it isn’t self-indulgence, it’s the baseline. Skip it long enough and you’re not just letting yourself down; you’re stiffing the people who love you, the work you said mattered, and the person you keep promising to become on January 1st. Kant thought cutting your hair to sell it was morally suspect, which is a bit much. But the underlying instinct — that you are not a disposable resource for your own ambitions — holds up.
Article Summary:
Philosopher Laura K. Soter and psychologist Fan Yang tackle a question most people never bother to ask out loud: do we actually have moral obligations to ourselves, or is self-care just a preference dressed up in Sunday clothes? The philosophical camp is split. Some argue morality only exists to referee interactions between people, so how you treat yourself is your own business. Others — including Kant, who apparently had opinions about haircuts — insisted self-respect is foundational to being a moral creature at all.
Soter and Yang asked US adults across a huge age range whether they believed they had obligations to themselves, even in cases affecting no one else. More than 85% said yes. The examples clustered around mental and physical health, moral character, and religious commitments — the stuff of actually living a life rather than merely surviving one.
The authors argue this matters because a felt sense of obligation drives behavior in a way mere preference doesn’t. If ordinary people experience self-neglect as a moral failure, then any theory of morality that ignores the self is missing a load-bearing wall.