I wonder this sometimes, seeing what others think. Any thoughts, ideas, experiences etc on the subject?

I think there's definitely a difference between hating your life and hating yourself although they can go hand in hand.

Of course. It's sometimes one way or the other for me, but usually both together or they at least tie in somehow. How often is this for you? Anything going on? Praying for you.

I guess if you don't love yourself, you cant love your life, funny thing is we can change ourselves and our perception of ourselves so therefore can change our lives.

Trace

For sure there is a difference. It would be possible to hate your life without hating yourself, indeed i am sure there are many people who hate or at least dislike their lives, at the very least they would cherish a change.

Hating yourself is entirely different and a lot more self-destructive. A lot of people who suffer from depression will have wrangled with this one at some point in time.

Mental illness, including depression, can always be mistaken for being generally lazy and pessimistic. It is the nature of the beast that our motivation and inner happiness is ruptured, this makes us question ourselves, our lives and the future. It is easy to fall prey to hating yourself as the spiral of negative thought proccesses inevitably leads to a low self-esteem with little or no self-worth.

So anyone can hate their lives, it takes the addition of depression to hate yourself as well.

Of course, hating your life could spiral into depression and thereby end with hating yourself as well. A double whammy again, that depression serves up to most of us.......

The target is different, but the energy is the same. Hating the world is directed outward, and hating yourself is directed inward. Either way, it feels like crap, and takes a tremendous toll on your well-being.

I believes so, yes. There are times when they are both stick together and wont let go; I sometimes feel like hating this world and myself at the same level, there are days when I feel more at peace and days I am filled with deep dislike for the world I am live in and hate myself less. The hating-myself part is allways there, anywhere. Never really changes drastically.

For me they are usually linked. When I hate my life around me, this leads to me hating myself for being too cowardly to change it.

For me, I used to think that there was a fundamental difference. It crystallized for me in a different way during my last severe dark period.

Hatred is as personal and singular a thing as love, it is its polar opposite. For me, I find it nearly impossible to love or hate anything that I don't have some sort of deep kinship with. I don't have that with 'the world.' The world for me is not something that really exists outside of several billion faces and names that I don't ever plan on meeting. So, I can't really hate 'the world' any more than I can truly 'love it.'

Looked at from that point of view, I found that the hatred I directed outward (at the world) was just my own self-hatred re-directed. The things in the world I hate could just as easily be found in me, in actuality or potentially.

So, for me, the two are at best two sides of the same coin. They are the same.

you nailed it. amazing post. i completely agree with you.

There's definately a distinction between the two. I don't hate the person that i am, i just hate what's happened to me in recent events.

I've been depressed since my teens and I used to go through periods of really hating myself. I never felt good enough, always thought that there was something wrong with me because I felt different to other people and was quite the loner, etc. Also, being bullied at school didn't do much for my confidence. Now that I'm older (I'm in my early 40s), I do actually quite like myself and know that if people don't like me that's their problem. It doesn't mean that they are better then me. However, I do absolutely detest my life. I hate the way it's turned out and sometimes feel that it's too late for things to change. This is what is making me so depressed right now.

Yep.. it can go hand in hand and like someone mentioned, you may hate your life but you don't hate yourself.
Sometimes I hate myself and I do hate my life right now but I started recently to gain a bit of hope.

There's definitely a difference for me. These days my life isn't that bad any more, but because I've spent so many years hating myself I can't get past it and just enjoy my life.