Welcome to the Lounge

From chapter 4 of the book

Building the Wrong Kind of Confidence
“Nice. Kind. Good friend. Fast runner. Penguin lover.” Hanging on the side of my parents’ fridge for the past thirty years, this sliver of laminated paper is a reminder of what my classmates thought of nine-year-old Steve. For my parents, it was a trinket, a sign that they were raising a “good” kid, whose peers thought highly of him.

When I was nine, I remember feeling a bit strange about this activity. There were a few students in the class who weren’t the kindest, who I had to search hard to find something nice about, and I generally left some sort of generic platitude as my response, like, “enjoys kickball.”

As a child growing up in the 1990s, I encountered a deluge of similar exercises aimed at enhancing my self-esteem. There were school-wide assemblies and classroom activities all aimed at making us feel better about ourselves.
In 1986, California governor George Deukmejian signed legislation creating a task force that promised to change how we dealt with society’s issues.

The architect of the task force was John Vasconcellos, a California politician with a knack for the extravagant.

After undergoing self-esteem-focused therapy to help his own mental health, Vasconcellos transformed into an evangelist, proselytizing the benefits of self-esteem to all who would listen.

Two years into their mission, Neil Smelser, the sociologist Vasconcellos had recruited to research the impact of self-esteem, gave a preliminary report informing the task force that “these correlational findings are really pretty positive, pretty compelling.”

Vasconcellos had found his proof—and sound bite. He plastered it across news stations far and wide, appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Today.

In 1990, Vasconcellos produced his magnum opus, titled Toward a State of Esteem. In the executive summary, low self-esteem was declared a contributing factor to a slew of maladies, including drug and alcohol abuse, crime and violence, poverty and welfare dependency, and family and workplace problems.

The 161-page report reads as if the group had found the key to fixing society. In fact, it states just that on page 21: “Self-esteem is the likeliest candidate for a social vaccine, something that empowers us to live responsibly and that inoculates us against the lures of crime, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, chronic welfare dependency, and educational failure.” There was one little problem. The conclusions were a lie, based on opinion, not what the research actually found.

According to the data, the lone scientist, Smelser, concluded, “Self-esteem remains elusive because it is difficult to pinpoint scientifically. . . . The associations between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant, or absent.” The scientific validation was not there. And that glowing sound bite by Smelser that landed the group on Oprah? It was taken out of context.

Politicians and the media alike grabbed hold of the self-esteem movement and catapulted it into the stratosphere.

Schools implemented the self-esteem interventions I and millions of others experienced as children. Even the way we talked to our kids changed.

According to psychologist Jean Twenge, the frequency of slogans like “Believe in yourself and anything is possible" skyrocketed in the 80s & 90s.

Posters with positive sayings adorned school classrooms throughout the nation.

With the self-esteem movement, we flipped the script, trying to give self-esteem without the accompanying action and work to validate it.

Even worse, we shifted the focus away from the joy of actually doing the work and toward external praise and rewards. We were creating an artificial kind of self-esteem, a fragile one based on a delusion.

We built self-esteem that was contingent and focused on the external

When our self-worth is dependent on outside factors, we have what researchers call a contingent self-worth. We derive our sense of self from what people think and how we are judged.

raddevus wrote:

people need intrinsic motivation

Slacker007 wrote:

You can't cure stupid.

David O'Neil wrote:

All of this 'young people are ...' should be replaced by 'we have become...,' or another phrase that makes us reflect on the bigger picture. Take responsibility.

Daniel Pfeffer wrote:

I reject the idea that I am somehow responsible for the failures of people

Daniel Pfeffer wrote:

I am willing to take responsibility for are my own children.

Richard MacCutchan wrote:

It is really odd that they think posting the question here is a better idea than going straight to Google

David O'Neil wrote:

Google is becoming pretty crappy!