What are your thoughts about the area/topic/issue?

I tend to be an optimist and a bit of a risk-taker, so my frame of reference is going to trend positive. The topic makes me wonder how many of the decisions I have considered rational were actually self-protective measures. Sometimes our reasoning is readily available to us, and other times, it seems we have to really dig and dig to see how it is that we arrived at some choice. When the stakes associated with decision-making are high, the anguish we experience over our decisions can be also be high. I think it would be interesting -- perhaps even fun -- to review many of my life choices to see if I can reconstruct the reasoning (or lack thereof) that let to each decision. I'd like to better understand how high esteem people and low esteem people respond to job loss. This is a particularly timely inquiry and I'd like to know how far conventional wisdom misses the mark in this area.

The social construction of privilege has tremendous impact on the way people sort themselves out, establish and maintain social status, and effectively marginalize large groups of people. The connection between social stratification, self-esteem, and identity seems to be a very close one. I suppose self-esteem can be loosely coupled to most human experiences, but it does seem that self-esteem is both a driver and a consequence of cultural violence.
References

Buss, a.H. (2012). Self I - Self-consciousness.

Buss, a.H. (2012). Self II - Self-esteem and identity.

Hoyle, R.H. (2006). Personality and self-regulation: Trait and information-professing perspectives. Journal of Personality, 74(6),