Pseudo Self-Esteem: The Seductive Imposter That Undermines Happiness
Like a scam website, pseudo-self-esteem imitates the real thing but provides none of the actual benefits.
Healthy self-esteem—which is the evidence-based knowledge that you are deserving of happiness and capable of achieving your values—is vital for living a happy and successful life.
If you don’t believe that you have earned happiness by living virtuously, you won’t feel motivated to pursue it—in fact, you will likely subvert your own efforts. If you don’t believe that you are capable of being virtuous or of achieving your goals in action, you won’t seriously try—in fact, you will probably accept that such success is impossible for you, even when there’s clear evidence that it isn’t.
One of the main ways we hamper our ability to form healthy self-esteem is by seeking sources of pseudo-self-esteem. Like a scam website, pseudo-self-esteem imitates the real thing but provides none of the actual benefits. Below are a few common ways that people obtain pseudo-self-esteem, each of which demonstrate how it can harm our lives and prevent us from achieving real, evidence-based self-esteem.
Uncritically Accepting Others’ Approval or Validation
It is natural to want others to hold you in high regard. Others’ respect can be a sign that you’re living well. If you succeed in business and others admire you for it, that admiration can be evidence of your success. Likewise, if you commit an act of injustice and others condemn you for it, their condemnation can be evidence of your immorality.
But other’s opinions are just that—people’s opinions. On their own, they’re not evidence of anything—all they tell us is what those people think. If you’ve ever stood up for something you believe in, whether in speech or action, you’ll know that it earns you both admirers and critics. How do you decide who is right? Whose approval should you accept and whose should you disregard?
It’s impossible to gain everybody’s good opinion, and those who try to typically do so by abandoning any firm principles and doing or saying whatever they think will please whomever they meet.
The only way to determine whose opinions you should care about is by making your own judgments—of yourself and of others—according to your own rational standards. That means:
Using your mind to form evidence-based rational standards of what constitutes good behavior and then living by those standards;
Evaluating others to determine if they also use rational standards in making their judgments;
Recognizing that others’ praise can only be a source of true self-esteem when you can be sure that their judgments are objective and that their praise is therefore evidence that you have lived by and achieved your own rational standards and values.
Even those who admire you for your choices and successes don’t necessarily do so because they hold the same values as you or use rational standards of judgment. Some may simply be trying to please you, perhaps out of insecurity or the desire to gain some benefit from you. Some may also approve of your achievements because those actions appear good in the context of their irrational value system. For example, achieving wealth can be a life-serving goal to pursue in service of deeper rational values, and a rational person will admire you for doing so in a productive way, but a hedonist may also approve of you achieving wealth because he regards pleasure as an end in itself.
The positive feeling you may get from the good opinion of others can only support the cultivation of real self-esteem if you know that their opinions are evidence that you are living by your own rational standards. The rest of the time, it can only provide you with pseudo-self-esteem. That can distract you from achieving your own rational values (and thereby earning the respect of the only people whose opinions you ought to value—rational, virtuous people). Worse, it can even tempt you to make decisions that work counter to your success and flourishing, such as spending money on things to impress others instead of things that will help you achieve your long-term rational goals.
Vicariously Enjoying Other People’s Achievements
Another form of pseudo-self-esteem can come from emotionally investing in others’ achievements at the expense of our own. As with the previous example, it is perfectly normal to feel happy about other people succeeding in their lives—the important difference lies in why we feel happy when others succeed.
Rational people hold human life and achievement as supreme values. Seeing other people succeed at life-serving endeavors through industriousness, skill, and generally virtuous behavior accordingly fills us with joy. Such success inspires us to succeed in our own lives, reinforces our belief in the goodness and efficacy of human beings, and provides us with exemplars of the virtues of rationality, justice, productivity, and much more. Furthermore, we recognize that other rational people are a value to us—we do not feel jealous of their hard-earned successes in rational endeavors; rather, we look forward to the ways in which they will enhance the world we live in. All of these things make us more confident in our own ability to succeed and the rightness of our own values. They all boost our self-esteem.
So when is enjoying others’ achievements not good for our self-esteem? In three main cases:
When the achievements are not rational values;
When they were achieved in a way inconsistent with rational values;
When they act as a substitute for your achievement of rational values.
The first two examples undermine your self-esteem because you will be aware on some level that what you’re enjoying is not consistent with your values or the requirements of human life and happiness in general. For example, I love railroads, but I do not experience much enjoyment when I see construction progress on the California High Speed Rail project because of the huge amount of waste, forced appropriation of property, and other irrationality involved in it. If I evaded this knowledge and tried to enjoy it as a rail fan regardless, it would hurt my self-esteem.
The third kind is sometimes harder to identify. To consider one example, it can be perfectly rational to enjoy seeing a sports team win a game; it can embody rational values including athleticism, determination, and teamwork, and it can act as proof that people are capable of achieving high levels of sportsmanship and proficiency in general. If you are interested and emotionally invested in a particular team, these benefits will be stronger because of your knowledge of the team’s journey. If enjoyed in this way, seeing the team win enhances your self-esteem by exemplifying your values and virtues in action.
But for many people, seeing a sports team win a game masquerades as an achievement of their own. In my experience, football/soccer fans often speak of the teams they support in collective language—“We did well last night”—as though they were on the field themselves. This kind of personal investment in the team’s fortunes can bring you euphoric highs and crushing lows over which you have no control. Moreover, if you satisfy your need for a sense of personal achievement with something you actually had no part in, that can sap your motivation to pursue and achieve your own goals. It can even lead you to put pressure on others to succeed for you, such as a parent who pushes his or her child down a particular path in order to derive pseudo-self-esteem from the child’s achievements.
It is perfectly rational—indeed, it is proper and just—to enjoy other people’s successes when those successes embody and support your rational values. It is not healthy or just to let those successes substitute your own.
Collecting Unproductive Achievements
A similar problem occurs when we let minor or inconsequential achievements stand in place of the important things we need to achieve in order to live flourishing lives. Once more, the sources of this kind of pseudo-self-esteem can be rational values when appreciated properly. Common examples include doing minor organizational or administrative tasks and winning or completing games.
Many, if not most, of us naturally look for the easiest ways to obtain a sense of having done something important or useful. Perhaps you wake up one morning knowing your taxes are due soon, go to work on them, and get a sense that you’ve done something important once they’re done. Then, perhaps wanting to feel a little more productive, you tidy your home a bit, do some cleaning, and send some long-overdue emails. After all that, you may feel like you’ve satisfied your need to be productive for the day. You may even feel justly proud at getting these tasks done—they are things that need doing, after all.
The problem is that these kinds of mundane tasks often stand in the way of our longer-term and more meaningful goals. As Stephen Covey notes in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, we tend to prioritise less important but more urgent tasks over more important but less urgent ones. If you’re a budding writer, for example, and you let taxes, tidying, and emails satisfy your desire to be productive instead of progressing your next book, you’re not going to achieve that more fundamental value. The self-esteem spike from doing those tasks is getting in the way of the deep, long-lasting self-esteem you’ll earn by writing and selling the book. Your awareness (conscious or subconscious) that you’re putting off the more important task will also hurt your self-esteem.
Likewise, games can be rational values in moderation but can subvert our self-esteem in excess. Although it varies hugely depending on the game in question, playing and winning a game (including card, board, and video games) can exercise your mind, teach you about all sorts of topics from strategy to history, and give you the chance to pit your skills against others, as well as simply being a pleasurable and ideally restful activity. But when the sensation of beating a game replaces the self-esteem we should be getting from producing rational values and enhancing our lives, then it becomes a source of pseudo-self-esteem and ultimately leaves us lacking the fulfillment and sense of meaning that come from achieving our deepest values.
***
These are just some of the ways that pseudo-self-esteem can replace the true self-esteem that your life depends on. If you want to succeed, it’s vital to identify when you’re experiencing pseudo-self-esteem and work to limit and eventually disarm its ability to hold back your progress. Equally, it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater by avoiding all the particular sources of pseudo-self-esteem that can be rational values when pursued properly. Ultimately, if you want to live a flourishing life:
Use your own mind to identify what values you need to pursue in order to maximize your success and happiness;
Pursue those values in a manner mindful of your physical and psychological abilities, needs, and limitations—including the need to rest and relax;
Evaluate others’ opinions and ideas according to your own rational standards, accepting their praise and criticism (and adjusting your behavior accordingly) only when it accords with your rational evaluation, based on all the available evidence.
By living like this, you can build strong self-esteem that will supercharge your motivation and ability to achieve ever greater things.