Everyone wants to be told they’re doing something right with their lives — we all want validation. We’re always looking for a good grade to show we’re doing well in school (whatever that means), a good job offer to prove that we are making something of our careers, Facebook likes and messages to remind us that we have friends, compliments to show us that other people think we’re desirable, and so on. Nothing wrong with wanting a pat on the back every so often, right?
I think there’s something sinister here — something really damaging to your self-esteem and all too prevalent in the minds of college students and young people trying to make a name for themselves. I struggled with this “something sinister” a lot in my first year at college, as did a lot of my friends, but I could never really put my finger on what it was. Toward the end of the year, my good friend — who’s been an incredible mentor — explained why this happens and what we can do about it. I’ll do my best to recount and dig into that here.
So first, these validations I mentioned — grades, job offers, compliments, etc. — are called “affirmations:” external, tangible, measurable indicators of success that grant you temporary emotional support and “affirm” your value to you. In a nutshell, affirmations remind you that you’re good at something, which makes you feel better about yourself.
That’s all well and good, but problems arise once you start relying on affirmations. If you feel better about yourself when you get an affirmation, then you’ll inevitably feel worse when you don’t get one: it’s like when you start feeling unpopular or unwanted when you can’t find any friends to sit with at lunch, for instance, even though you know perfectly well that you do have friends. Building off that, you need a constant stream of affirmations to feel good: no matter how many good grades you’ve gotten, one bad one might still crush your belief that you’re a good student. And, worst of all, they’re largely out of your control: if someone’s not interested in you, it could be for a thousand reasons, none of which include that you aren’t desirable. Tethering your happiness to affirmations is ultimately destructive to your self-esteem.
So why is this mindset everywhere, especially in college? Why don’t we just abandon it if it causes us unhappiness? And, most vitally for our own lives, what do we do about it?
What causes this mindset?
People in college can get obsessed with affirmations, and I think that’s because you had to have that mindset to get into college in the first place. Getting into college — especially a prestigious one — is your primary goal during high school. And, like with most all-consuming goals, you start tying your notion of self-worth to how close you are to achieving that goal. As important as being a curious, intelligent person is, you still achieve that goal of getting into college in large part by hitting concrete, easily-measured checkpoints: what was your GPA? what was your SAT score? did you become president of that club? did you win that award? and so on. So these concrete checkpoints become affirmations for you; each time you hit one, you feel better about yourself because you know you’re moving one step closer to the goal you’ve tethered your self-worth to. Win the award? You’re a champion, you’ll get in anywhere. Miss out on the presidency? You can’t do this leadership thing. This mindset, damaging as it is, carries over into college.
Zooming out, if you grow up in this American society, it’s hard to avoid becoming addicted to affirmations even if college isn’t always on the forefront of your mind. American society, especially the media, tends to push this “success = self-worth” mantra. We’re always busy turning the people who achieved something flashy into the hero of the day: the kid who got into all eight Ivy League schools, that entrepreneur who just earned millions, or that movie star who just became a role model for millions by inking a deal to a new film. That mentality creeps into schools, too. The charismatic presidents of clubs are hailed as great people, while those who don’t get the best grades or don’t have people flocking around them are called losers. Our society is so centered on trying to be better than other people that everyone tries to find ways to measure themselves that everyone else can see (how attractive they are, how prestigious their job is, what expensive stuff they own, etc.) and starts feeling that their personal self-worth is tied to how high they stand on these various scales. You can see this in our unhealthy obsession with status symbols or problems with body image — they’re just more examples of people relying on praise from others to validate their self-worth.
If we zoom out even further, desiring affirmations is a human thing. Everyone wants to feel successful, and the reasonable way to convince our order-loving brains is to measure everything and start comparing yourself to others. Attach a number or a yes/no to something (how many likes or friends you have, whether you got the job you wanted) and it’s easy to measure.
So take a situation where people are concerned about measuring, comparing, and achieving, and they’ll inevitably start tying their self-worth to affirmations.
Another way out
Waiting for other people to judge you and then using those judgments to make hasty, ill-founded snap decisions on your character is hardly a good way to build self-esteem. Surely there’s another way — another mindset you can adopt to develop a genuine, stable sense of self-worth.
First, the two major underlying problems with affirmations is precisely that they are external and measurable; that is, they’re largely out of your control and they measure the side effects of your character traits and not the underlying traits themselves. For example, if you’re looking to measure how desirable you are by how many people compliment or show interest in you (a reasonable affirmation to rely on), that’s misleading because people could be not showing their interest in you for a variety of reasons (or maybe you don’t even notice), plus that is at best an indirect way of measuring what you cared about in the first place. And, as a result, you start chasing these affirmations instead of focusing on developing the character traits that really matter. You get into situations where people show interest in you, but perhaps not for the right reasons, and you lose sight of becoming a better person, which would help you more toward your goal.
How do you avoid the problems that come with external and measurable sources of validation? Well, turn that on its head and use internal, unmeasurable sources of validation, aka gut feelings. This is easiest to explain with examples. If you’re smart, you shouldn’t need grades to prove that — you’ll just know that, for instance, you understand what you’re learning in school and your mind learns quickly. If you’re a good friend, you can just feel that from how you connect with others or how you’ve helped friends in their times of need; you don’t need to count how many texts you got from them. When you use gut feelings, you trust yourself and your knowledge of what really matters instead of relying on fickle, unreliable affirmations. You get a more nuanced view of yourself instead of just assigning yourself a number, and if your self-worth comes from within it’s much less likely to rise and fall randomly. That’s a recipe for a genuine, stable sense of self-worth.
This isn’t a perfect mindset, of course. First, it’s hard to trust your gut, especially when the world is telling you otherwise. And second, these criteria you use to think about yourself are necessarily vague and hard to measure, so it’s hard to know what to consider (what innate criteria can you use to measure your desirability?) or if you’re thinking about things correctly. So there’s some room for affirmations here; they provide proof for your assertions, which helps to an extent, and they keep your inner worldview in sync with the outer world. You just have to look at the average of many observations and not just the extreme cases (e.g. look at what kind of grades you consistently get instead of fixating on that one bad one.)
This mindset of building a concept of self-worth from within is a hard one to adopt, but I think it’s ultimately worth it because it helps make you a more self-reliant, more self-aware person with stronger self-esteem. I don’t think you can switch to the “gut feeling” mindset overnight, but it’s a good start to see the differences between internal and external sources of validation and to know what’s an affirmation and when you’re seeking them.
