Self-esteem tends to seesaw. Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, equated it with conditional self-acceptance. He maintained that as long as it’s based on ranking, your self-concept is bound to remain unstable. When fixated on comparisons, we may feel beautiful, capable, and intelligent in one setting and less so in another. Essentially, Ellis highlighted the relativity of self-esteem, emphasizing its inability to shed light on anyone’s essential nature (i.e., liking or disliking yourself at some point in time, by itself, says little about who you are or what you have to offer).
Living in a world governed by self-comparison, then, feels impossible. Your moods, decisions, and values all depend on your ranking in that moment, which somehow always leaves you wanting more. Fundamentally, it’s a life simply organized around improving one’s social standing. Ellis argued, “As a fallible human, you can’t help failing at work and at love, so your self-esteem is at best temporary. Even when it is high, you are in real danger of failing next time and of plummeting down again. Worse yet, since you know this after awhile, and you know that your worth as a person depends on your success, you make yourself anxious about important achievements—and, very likely, your anxiety interferes with your performances and makes you more likely to fail.” So, self-esteem is a trap, offering little more than temporary relief, which fades when “good enough” is discounted by internal or external sources, in the presence of “better” or by recalling its existence.
The preoccupation with self, and its pitfalls, is evident in Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere, a Netflix documentary about status-driven heterosexual and hypersexual men in their 20s. They find themselves competing with apparitions, the purported beta-men whom they’re apparently superior to yet chronically feel threatened by. Arguably, for them, there is no sense of self outside of status. Repeatedly, their ideologies betray contradictions. For example, they may view pornography with disdain while profiting from it. And there’s no sense of how or why clout makes them respect themselves in any meaningful way, especially when considering that their perpetual rage makes the opposite seem true. The incoherent narratives about what’s worth pursuing reveal unstable identities, reminiscent of Ellis’ perspective on self-esteem—ranking one’s self can’t seem to reveal anything true about it, anything that makes any sense. The men in the documentary act erratically, in large part, it seems, because there are no stable, guiding principles. Because they are chronically adapting to internet trends, the underlying feeling across the board seems to be confusion.
How can one expect to live that way? You’re admired for having a family one day and admired for promiscuity the next. Admired for splurging and also admired for being fiscally responsible. Admired for savviness and recklessness, too. Admired for freedom of movement and for your obsession with work. Admired for your ability to attract followers while being your own man. None of this makes any sense. Thinking about it feels overwhelming. If your self-esteem is based on a ranking that symbolizes how well you juggle each of these extreme elements, Ellis may have surmised that you aren’t much of a self at all, hence the confusion. He wrote, “Our self or personhood was too complex to be given a global rating. We could say, for practical reasons, it was “good”—meaning it helped us to live and enjoy. Or we could say that it just didn’t have to be rated at all.”
Being dependent on rankings, we’re then unable to access the inner resolve that stems from a deep knowledge of self, to the extent that it’s possible. Imagine being placed in a scenario where you have limited or no access to praise and can’t rely on your ranking to make you feel good. What would you do? What traits and experiences would you recall? Would you consider yourself resilient, independent, conscientious, and strong? Or would you grasp for more likes and follows? Would you need more validation? At bottom, one ends the documentary feeling deep sympathy for the men in it, but, if we’re honest, there’s also pity—you feel for children with unstable identities in need of a never-ending stream of affirmations. These men didn’t know who they were, despite trying, but failing, to make sense of their natures, at least for the camera.
In arguing against self-esteem, Ellis was arguing against perfectionism, which implies a hierarchical system. In wanting to be admired for being everything considered masculine, the individuals in Theroux’s documentary sought perfection, attempting, maybe heroically but certainly narcissistically, to cultivate harmony between conflicting extremes. And this is the nature of ranking. The tyrant out there is a mere reflection of the tyrant inside, who makes excessive but, more importantly, unreasonable demands. It doesn’t care who you are, what you like, or what you value for its own sake. Everything is a means to an end, aiding one while relentlessly reaching for more.
Ellis’ grand revelation was that we can choose to unconditionally accept ourselves. So, if our base is accepting ourselves simply for being us, then we can, in turn, learn who we are, without the added pressure of fitting some absurd model. Unconditional self-acceptance is the key to risk-taking because outcomes do not affect our inner ranking—we choose to forgo them. Our decisions, our queries (no longer suffocated by our defensiveness), our willingness to use our values and preferences to continue exploring, and our drive for self-insight combine to create a fuller understanding of who we are while bringing us closer to a more coherent and more authentic person. With that said, if you’re terrified of what you would discover, fixating on ranking would then make sense. But know that the obsession is little more than a ploy, precluding you from facing your fears.
